The Bay Area Reporter distributed its first edition on April 1, 1971. While publisher Bob Aaron Ross may have chosen April Fool’s Day as a light-hearted start for the gay community’s latest bar “rag,” the newspaper would go on to do serious journalism, covering the major events of the post-Stonewall era.
Health
California drugmaker’s HIV prevention pill sparks public health debate
Foster City drugmaker Gilead recently updated its application with the federal Food and Drug Administration for approval to market its HIV treatment medication Truvada as an HIV prevention pill. If the FDA approves Truvada for preventive use, it “would be the first agent indicated for uninfected individuals to reduce the risk of acquiring HIV through sex,” according to a company statement at the time of the filing in December 2011.
HIV & AIDS
“Visual Aid” offers outlet, insight into artists with AIDS
Group archives, displays works of hundreds from Bay Area
To help artists who were suffering from life-threatening illnesses, a collective of artists, art collectors and gallery owners began convening at local art spaces in the city in late 1980s. Their mission was to find a means to record the existing works of artists with AIDS and provide them with the materials they needed to create new ones. The group grew into a fullfledged nonprofit called Visual Aid in 1989, and the organization has been supporting hundreds of Bay Area artists since then.
Bay Area
HIV, AIDS gap widens between blacks and other ethnic groups in East Bay
As overall AIDS rates fall in Alameda County, the rate in the black community has hardly budged in the past 10 years, making African Americans in this part of the East Bay increasingly overrepresented among sufferers of the disease.
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Community
Report: Black, Latino young men twice as likely to suffer from poor health
A new report concerning the health of boys of different ethnicities focuses on the effect of neighborhoods and communities on physical and mental health.
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HIV & AIDS
Video quilt stitches together stories of HIV/AIDS battle
In the store it doesn’t look like much, but inside the booth on Castro Street something bigger is going on. Generations HIV, part of the HIV Story Project, aims to get conversation flowing about how HIV/AIDS have affected different generations by allowing people to record questions, answers or stories about the diseases within the booth.
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Aging
State cuts set to slam San Francisco’s seniors, poor
Already reeling from a deep recession and massive cuts to staff and services in this year’s budget, San Francisco is being hammered by a new tidal wave of state cuts — estimated at $26.5 million — which could put low-income seniors and others on the brink of homelessness and hunger, many advocates say.
HIV & AIDS
Cuts to state HIV and AIDS programs will put thousands at risk
Proposed cuts in funding to HIV and AIDS programs around the state could put thousands of lives at risk and set back years of progress fighting the disease, activists and service providers say.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s latest budget proposal would cut $80 million from the state Office of AIDS budget, reducing funding to prevention and testing programs and disease trend tracking by 80 percent. The cuts would also reduce funding for home care, cut the AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP) budget by $12.3 million, and eliminate the Therapeutic Monitoring Program, which pays for blood tests for people with HIV infection.