Yours In The Struggle

ramblings and other thoughts from Paul Kawata (pkawata@nmac.org)

Thursday, April 8

Please Join Call On Friday With The White House

Last fall, the Office of National AIDS Policy asked Americans to give us their ideas for the National HIV/AIDS Strategy, which is currently being developed and will be released in the coming months. From the beginning, ONAP recognized that community input would be important for our National HIV/AIDS Strategy development, so we hosted 14 community discussions and meetings http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/onap/events throughout the United States, launched an online portal for Americans to send us their recommendations, and held a number of meetings here at the White House concerning specific issues important to the community. We received responses from nearly every state and U.S. territory, from people affected by or living with HIV, from men, women, and transgender individuals, from young and old, and from respondents of various racial/ethnic backgrounds, and sexual orientation.

The Community Discussion Report that summarizes the public input we received will be released this Friday. We’d like to invite you to a short briefing conference call with ONAP Director Jeff Crowley and Senior Policy Director Greg Millett to provide an overview of the Community Discussion Report on FRIDAY, APRIL 9, at 2:00 PM (Eastern). The conference call number is (877) 941-2935.

Friday, April 2

What happened to silence = death?

I wanted to make sure you saw this op-ed in today’s DC Agenda by David Mixner, “What happened to silence = death?” http://tinyurl.com/yc7lbg3 (he’s also posting it on his blog, http://www.DavidMixner.com)

Earlier this month the CDC reported that gay and bisexual men are more than 44 times as likely as straight men to test positive for HIV.

David argues that it’s time for the gay community to put HIV back on the agenda and to break the silence about the disease.