This moving and beautiful book offers unprecedented insight into the astounding strength of the human spirit when confronted with illness, pain, loss, and death. Features 75 black-and-white photographs. Carolyn Jones's vivid and life-affirming portraits capture people from all backgrounds—children and grandmothers, men and women of all races—living with HIV and AIDS. It is estimated that over one million people in the United States would test positive for the Human Immune Virus, and many others are already suffering from Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. A common-and harmful-misconception holds that AIDS is an instant death sentence but, in fact, testing positive for HIV does not mean immediate illness. Carolyn Jones has collaborated with George DeSipio, Jr., and Michael Liberatore (co-founders of the project), and the seventy-three people who volunteered to pose for these photographs in an inspiring effort to change the way we think about AIDS. Jones's compelling portraits have the power to profoundly alter perceptions about this disease, and about the way we all live and die. AIDS poses challenging questions that we must each grapple with, whether healthy or not. These captivating pictures illustrate the self-confidence and wisdom of ordinary people coping with an extraordinary fate, facing their mortality, questioning their priorities, and living life to the fullest. Their energy, courage, and dignity in the face of such adversity offer a vital lesson in how to embrace life, day by day. Their faces and their stories are proof that AIDS doesn't look like anyone—it looks like, and ultimately is, all of us. Design Industries Foundation for AIDS (DIFFA) is the sole recipient of the royalties from the sale of Living Proof. For additional information regarding Living Proof and the Design Industries Foundation for AIDS, please call DIFFA: (212) 727-3100.

AIDS and Africa are indelibly linked in popular consciousness, but despite widespread awareness of the epidemic, much of the story remains hidden beneath a superficial focus on condoms, sex workers, and antiretrovirals. Africa gets lost in this equation, Daniel Jordan Smith argues, transformed into a mere vehicle to explain AIDS, and in AIDS Doesn’t Show Its Face, he offers a powerful reversal, using AIDS as a lens through which to view Africa. Drawing on twenty years of fieldwork in Nigeria, Smith tells a story of dramatic social changes, ones implicated in the same inequalities that also factor into local perceptions about AIDS—inequalities of gender, generation, and social class. Nigerians, he shows, view both social inequality and the presence of AIDS in moral terms, as kinds of ethical failure. Mixing ethnographies that describe everyday life with pointed analyses of public health interventions, he demonstrates just how powerful these paired anxieties—medical and social—are, and how the world might better alleviate them through a more sensitive understanding of their relationship.

Facing up to AIDS is a novel and incisive study of a global plague which continues to threaten to engulf South Africa at this crucial moment in its history. Economists, demographers and health planners present a range of new methods of understanding the likely course of the disease, drawn from the most recent research and thinking by social scientists on the relationship between epidemic disease, economic growth and human resources. South Africa presents a unique opportunity for understanding AIDS, combining as it does Third World problems with a sophisticated infrastructure: the models of demographic projection and economic linkages which are explored here will be of major relevance for examining the socio-economic impact of AIDS in a range of countries in Asia and Latin America. Until medical science comes up with a miracle vaccine, the modification of behaviour is the only defence, and the essays in this volume make a powerful case for putting further resources into the research needed to bring this about.

Europe's "Black Death" contributed to the rise of nation states, mercantile economies, and even the Reformation. Will the AIDS epidemic have similar dramatic effects on the social and political landscape of the twenty-first century? This readable volume looks at the impact of AIDS since its emergence and suggests its effects in the next decade, when a million or more Americans will likely die of the disease. The Social Impact of AIDS in the United States addresses some of the most sensitive and controversial issues in the public debate over AIDS. This landmark book explores how AIDS has affected fundamental policies and practices in our major institutions, examining: How America's major religious organizations have dealt with sometimes conflicting values: the imperative of care for the sick versus traditional views of homosexuality and drug use. Hotly debated public health measures, such as HIV antibody testing and screening, tracing of sexual contacts, and quarantine. The potential risk of HIV infection to and from health care workers. How AIDS activists have brought about major change in the way new drugs are brought to the marketplace. The impact of AIDS on community-based organizations, from volunteers caring for individuals to the highly political ACT-UP organization. Coping with HIV infection in prisons. Two case studies shed light on HIV and the family relationship. One reports on some efforts to gain legal recognition for nonmarital relationships, and the other examines foster care programs for newborns with the HIV virus. A case study of New York City details how selected institutions interact to give what may be a picture of AIDS in the future. This clear and comprehensive presentation will be of interest to anyone concerned about AIDS and its impact on the country: health professionals, sociologists, psychologists, advocates for at-risk populations, and interested individuals.

The 1980s and 1990s, the height of the AIDS crisis in the United States, was decades ago now, and many of the stories from this time remain hidden: A Catholic nun from a small Midwestern town packs up her life to move to New York City, where she throws herself into a community under assault from HIV and AIDS. A young priest sees himself in the many gay men dying from AIDS and grapples with how best to respond, eventually coming out as gay and putting his own career on the line. A gay Catholic with HIV loses his partner to AIDS and then flees the church, focusing his energy on his own health rather than fight an institution seemingly rejecting him. Set against the backdrop of the HIV and AIDS epidemic of the late twentieth century and the Catholic Church's crackdown on gay and lesbian activists, journalist Michael O'Loughlin searches out the untold stories of those who didn't look away, who at great personal cost chose compassion--even as he seeks insight for LGBTQ people of faith struggling to find a home in religious communities today. This is one journalist's--gay and Catholic himself--compelling picture of those quiet heroes who responded to human suffering when so much of society--and so much of the church--told them to look away. These pure acts of compassion and mercy offer us hope and inspiration as we continue to confront existential questions about what it means to be Americans, Christians, and human beings responding to those most in need.

This is the tale of a devastating pandemic, of lives cut painfully short; it's also a love letter. Derek, a distinguished designer and J, his husband, a pioneering entrepreneur and creator of both The Embassy Club, London’s answer to Studio 54, and iconic Heaven, Europe’s largest gay discotheque, met and fell in love more than 40 years ago. Their lives were high-octane, full of adventure, fun and fearless creativity. Suddenly their friends began to get sick and die – AIDS had arrived in their lives. When they got tested, J received what was then a death sentence: he was HIV Positive. While the onset of AIDS strengthened stigma and fear globally, they confronted their personal crisis with courage, humour and an indomitable resolve to survive. J’s battle lasted six long years. Turning to spiritual reflection, yoga, nature – and always to love – Derek describes a transformation of the spirit, how compassion and empathy rose phoenix-like from the flames of sickness and death. Out of this transformation also came Aids Ark, the charity they founded, which helped to save, amongst the world’s most marginalised people, more than 1,000 HIV Positive lives. This is a story of joy and triumph; about facing universal challenges; about the great rewards that come from giving back. Derek speaks for a generation who lived through a global health crisis that many in society refused even to acknowledge. His is a powerful story chronicling this extraordinary time.

By focusing on a small town in South Carolina, this study of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the South reveals the hard truths of an ongoing and complex issue. Skerritt contends that the United States has failed to adequately address the threat of HIV and AIDS in communities of color and that taboos about love, race, and sexualitycombined with Southern conservatism, white privilege, and black oppressioncontinue to create an unacceptable death toll. The heartbreak of Americas failure comes alive through case studies of individuals such as Carolyn, a wild child whose rebellion coincided with the advent of AIDS, and Nita, a young woman searching for love and trapped in an abusive relationship. The results are most visible at the towns segregated burial ground where dozens of young black men and women who have died from AIDS are laid to rest. Not only a call to action and awareness, this is a true story of how persons of faith, enduring love, and limitless forgiveness can inspire others by serving as guides for poor communities facing a public health threat burdened with conflicting moral and social conventions.