HIV/AIDS

Director of Harvard's International AIDS Center Jonathan Mann is also a member of The Global AIDS Policy Coalition which has just come out with it's first annual "AIDS in the World" report. Mann will talk with Terry about the findings in the report.

AIDS researcher and pioneer Dr. Jerome Groopman. He is chief of the Division of Hematology/Oncology at the New England Deaconess Hospital, and director of an innovative AIDS program that combines clinical research and medical services to approximately 1000 HIV-infected people. As a cancer specialist, Groopman has been at the forefront of the battle against AIDS since the early 80s.

NPR correspondent and writer Frank Browning. He has a new book about gay culture, "The Culture of Desire: Paradox and Perversity in Gay Lives Today."

Paul Rudnick is an essayist, novelist, and playwright. His latest play on off-Broadway is a comedy called "Jeffrey," about a man who swears off love and sex because of his fear of AIDS. Rudnick also wrote the Broadway play, "I Hate Hamlet," about John Barrymore's ghost. He writes a column in "Premiere," called "If You Ask Me," in which he adopts the voice of a quintessential Jewish mother who critiques movie stars' personal lives.

Don Des Jarlais is an expert on AIDS and HIV infection among drug users. He's the Director of Research at the Beth Israel Medical Center's Chemical Dependency Institute in New York and the Deputy Director for AIDS Research, National Development and Research Institutes, New York. He's also a consultant on AIDS to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Centers for Disease Control, and the World Health Organization.

The film "Silverlake Life: The View From Here" was started by filmmaker and film teacher Tom Joslin to chronicle his and his lover's battles with AIDS. Joslin asked his former student Peter Freidman to complete the film after Joslin's death. We'll talk with Friedman about working on "Silverlake Life," which opens the sixth season of PBS' P.O.V. series on Tuesday, June 15.

Arnold Rampersad, professor of Literature at Princeton, biographer of Langston Hughes, is coauthor of tennis star Arthur Ashe's memoir, "Days of Grace." Ashe died this year at age 49 from AIDS he contracted during open heart surgery. He was the first African American tennis champion, winning the United States Open in 1968, and going on to capture three Grand Slam titles. He has remained a vital presence in the sport, and his autobiography features portraits of the great celebrities of tennis.

Betsy Lieberman, Executive Director of AIDS Housing of Washington which has built the country's first nursing home designed for people dying of AIDS. It's called the Bailey-Boushay House. The House also offers adult day-care services and activities for people with AIDS. The House has been in operation for a little over a year now. Since then more than 130 people have died there. A new book about the project has been published, "Breaking New Ground: Developing Innovative AIDS Care Residences." (published by AIDS Housing of Washington, Original Trade Paperback).

Today's first half is about children who are orphaned after losing their parents to AIDS. Studies estimate that by the year 2000, up to 125,000 U.S. children will be left parentless because of the fatal illness. AIDS workers are now beginning to realize their next step is to help these secondary victims by providing homes, food and counseling. We interview two people on the subject; a single mother with AIDS, and the head of a project designed to address the needs of orphaned kids:

Doctor Marcus Conant. In the early 1980's Dr. Conant was among the first doctors in San Francisco to treat AIDS cases. Now Dr. Conant heads the largest private AIDS medical practice in San Francisco. After his 1985 study on how condoms block transmission of the AIDS virus, condoms became a household word. Dr. Conant is the director of AIDS Clinical Research Center and the co-director of the Kaposi's Sarcoma Clinic at the University of California at San Francisco.

Stephen Schiff reviews the film "Philadelphia."

Mary Fisher was the face of AIDS/HIV at the Republican National Convention in 1992 where she gave a speech imploring the party to lift the "shroud of silence" about the disease. Fisher comes from a wealthy prominent Republican family. Her father, Max Fisher was Honorary Chairman of the Bush/Quayle '92 National Finance Committee. Since she went public about her HIV-positive status, Fisher has been an eloquent voice in the fight against AIDS misinformation and discrimination. She's also the founder of the Family AIDS Network, Inc.

Tribute to Randy Shilts who died of AIDS. (Rebroadcast of 07/05/1990 and 04/23/1993)

Jazz pianist Fred Hersch. His new solo album is "Fred Hersch at Maybeck." Hersch recently revealed he is HIV positive and appears on several recordings to fund raise for the disease.

A remembrance of writer John Preston who died of AIDS. We play an excerpt from a 1992 interview.

Author and physician Abraham Verghese. An Indian raised in Ethopia, Abraham Verghese arrived in the United States in 1980 as a rookie doctor. Upon completing an internship in infectious diseases, Dr. Verghese accepted a position in the rural, Appalachian town of Johnson City, Tennessee. The year was 1985 and AIDS had begun to ravage large metropolitan areas. Within the year, Dr. Verghese was treating his first case of AIDS in this rural outpost.

Dr. Mark Feinberg is the director of the Virology Research Laboratory at San Francisco General Hospital and the Associate Director of the UCSF Center for AIDS Research. He just returned from the 10th International Conference on AIDS in Japan. For the past ten years, Feinberg has been studying how the HIV virus causes AIDS; recently he has focused on people who have had the HIV virus for many years, but have not yet shown AIDS symptoms.

Jonathan Mann, M.D. talks about the connection between health and human rights. Mann is the director and one of the founders of the Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Center For Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health. He was the founding director of the World Health Organization's Global AIDS Program from 1986-1990.

We continue our interview with Laurie Garrett. Her new book about communicable diseases is called "The Coming Plague."

White is the author of seven books, including "Forgetting Elena," "States of Desire: Travels in Gay America," and "Genet: A Biography," for which he was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lamda Literary Award. He has a new collection of essays from the past 25 years, "The Burning Library," many of which focus on gay life in America.