“For many PLWAs with Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS), the shorts, tank tops and bathing suits that so many of us enjoy wearing in the hot weather are out of the question as they will reveal the violently colored lesions that are the hallmark of this often fatal AIDS-related opportunistic infection.”

-- J. Daniel Stricker, executive director, Community Research Initiative on AIDS (CRIA), in a fundraising letter. For many people, supporting Stricker’s ignorant stigmatization is “out of the question.”

“In a society that claims to value human life above all, the deliberate withholding of the means to self-protection [against HIV] is more than passive neglect. It is a measured act of premeditated murder.”

-- Elizabeth Taylor, AIDS activist diva, attacking Clinton and Congress for failing to fund needle-exchange programs, at a private reception at the 11th International AIDS Conference. Go la Liz!

“You don’t get a deadly disease to improve your public relations.”

-- Andrew Sullivan, on charges that announcing he has HIV was a stab at spin control of his very public stepping down as The New Republic’s editor, in the August 1996 Vanity Fair

“[Safe, legal abortion] is like getting a medal for AIDS. If we have done something that’s brought on an impossible situation for ourselves, we ought to know it. We shouldn’t be cozened.”

-- Norman Mailer, great American advertiser of himself, musing on the virtues of back-alley abortion in a dialogue with Patrick Buchanan in the August 1996 Esquire