Slippery Kick Off

Welcome Folks! This is my fourth personal weblog, and I'm hoping that you'll enjoy the slightly irreverent humour, the downright venomous attacks o the "established media" (and that includes quite a few widely read and influential net based magazines and blogs. No-one will be immune from criticism or applause, which you'll most definately see thrown about equally.

A bit about me, and why this column is here in time. I have not just a medical degree and a degree in journalism, but a doctorate in Psychology and thirty years experience working with the poor in a big city hospital emergency room. I've been openly gay since just two years post-Stonewall, and have fought for every right as hard as a man can in my position. Some folks who've given me help along the way include, Larry Kramer, AIDS Activist and Playwright, the Rev Troy Perry, founder of the Metropolitan Community Church in L.A., Drs. Anthony Faucci and Robert Gallo, The policy wonk for AIDS and the scientist respectively. (Yup, clearly, the former I detest, the latter I adore.) Thats just a few of the living friends.


The late Kurt Vonnegut Jr, a good friend and one of the 20th centuries finest writers. My late step dad, John Nelson Converse from the American Federation of Teachers, who introduced me to everyone who was everyone in Washington DC during the Clinton Inaugural days.
And the 130 personal friends and ex-lovers lost to that dreaded and horrible affliction called HIV-AIDS, most everyone represented on the National Memorial Aids Quilt, which just finished making a national tour following December One's AIDS Remembrance Day. They are all still missed and loved, and not forgotten.

As I mentioned, I was an E/R doc in Los Angeles, in the days before AIDS struck, I was an intern at USC Medical Center when the first reports were rumoured in the LA Times about a weird and horrible affliction which was referred to as GRID, for Gay Related Immune Defiency Disease. Boy those days WERE weird! Funeral homes weren't accepting gay cadavers, out of illogical fear. Ambulances would roll past gay bars in emergency situations. E/R docs wouldn't treat gays for so much as a cold, for illogical fear that it was something much worse. And this was MUCH earlier than the media and even the CDC would have you believe. The year was 1978. Five years before Dr Robert Gallo and his team first isolated the HIV virus in conjunction with the French Government. Seven Years before President Ronald Reagan was finally forced by the mounting death toll to go on national television and speak about the disease for the first time.
I will go into this subject at length om a later post, but wanted to jump it here to give you all an idea of where I'm headed with this log.

These documented researched stories and personally witnessed events will hopefully make you think, make you care, and make you laugh. Some will certainly make you mad as fuck. They do to me. Still. So, TheRestOfTheWaste will give you the inside story on some very well known issues, since I was there. I participated, it's documented fucking FACT. Call me on anything you like, I'll provide the references to back it up. On anything. I'm retired now, and I do not have AIDS, by some fucking MIRACLE. I by all rights should, since I was exposed several HUNDRED times, in at least four of the most virulent blood to blood transfer situations, unprotected sex with known carriers, IV drug use and surgery with unscreened blood.

I test negative to this day, nearly thirty years later. I've told Dr Faucci at the CDC that he should be studying ME, and others like me, over two decades ago, and he scoffed at the notion. And guess what? The French, as usual, the Pasteur Research Foundation, LAV and others, are now doing just that! Checking the genome structure of persons like myself, to find the key "protection gene". And word is that they may have found it already. How it be applied to a vaccine, well that's a HUGE question still. But it offers the single biggest contribution to the science of AIDS research since anti-viral medications. So I know what the fuck I'm talking about.
This log will is feature topical stuff as well. I have a healthy interest in popular culture and we'll get into that. Please, send submissions as often as you like. Anything is acceptable, except anything that promotes discrimination on any group based upon sex, creed, religion, orientation or national origin. Feel free to skewer someone's politics! Thats always fair game.

Feel free to post photos and YouTubes. I haven't selected any yet but I will, and my taste runs towards the bizarre. I'll just say that John Waters is a long long time friend, we used to cart his films around Hollywood when I was a student and show the early ones anywhere, even the side of a building in a parking lot one time, A Home Made Drive In. for Pink Flamingos!! And the Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Starwood Theatre, where they'd allow us to bring in coolers of beer and wine! Imagine. Damn that WAS fun.

So tune in, turn on, and buckle your seat belts. TheRestOfTheWaste will fill you up.