FEBRUARY 1999
APRIL 1998
Monica Johnson WHEN POZ VISITED MONICA Johnson in rural Columbia, Louisiana, she’d already been through a lot—HIV positive since 1985, still mourning the 1993 death of her beloved baby boy Vaurice, who’d been born with HIV, and dealing with local AIDSphobia so severe that she was pulled off her substitute-teaching position and relegated to a back office. But to her joy, she also was undetectable on combo therapy and happily raising her sister’s son, Avery. “People were so ignorant,” she recalls. “You couldn’t talk about HIV/AIDS publicly anywhere.” Johnson moved that needle when she founded her own AIDS agency, HEROES, which she still runs today, though she laments that budget cuts have weakened it. She’s also served on the National Minority AIDS Council board of directors and has been featured in the acclaimed documentary deepsouth, about the paucity of HIV resources and funding in states like Louisiana. “Sometimes I feel as if I live in a developing country when I compare the services in other parts of the United States to what we have in Louisiana,” says Johnson, 49. That’s why she’s sticking with HIV advocacy even though she’s suffered burnout. “After prayer and reflection, I decided I couldn’t abandon it.” A point of joy? She recently watched Avery graduate high school and go on to college. Now she’s ready to write a memoir—and to start running marathons! “My faith has held me together,” she says.
38 POZ JUNE 2014 poz.com
PERHAPS POZ’S MOST SENSAtional and controversial cover featured the young, HIV-positive gay activist, sex worker and porn star Tony Valenzuela naked astride a saddle-free horse, two years after he’d confessed before a crowd at a San Diego LGBT political conference that he cherished condomless sex. “The level of erotic charge and intimacy I feel when a man comes inside me is transformational,” he’d said, stressing he was speaking only for himself, not advocating barebacking for all. Nonetheless, the room exploded with angry declarations that Valenzuela was setting back the safersex movement. The blowback blacklisted him in San Diego, so he moved to Los Angeles, where he got his MFA in creative writing and became the head of the Lambda Literary Foundation, an LGBT writer’s organization. “A lot of HIV clinics wouldn’t carry that month’s issue of POZ,” he recalls. “But that cover also served as a turning o point. The topic of barebacking was out in the open, and p we created some space for gay men to speak honestly about w their desires.” Valenzuela, 45, still lives in Los Angeles with th husband Rob Ferrante and their two pit bulls, Scarlett and h Chauncey. He’s working on a memoir about his barebacking brouhaha. “A lot has improved for us” since the late ’90s, he says. “But I also think HIV-positive gay men have no agency. Our lives tend to be demonized or framed as victims in media and by public health. We still need to assert our stories on our terms, our bodies on our terms.”
(JOHNSON) COURTESY OF MONICA JOHNSON; (VALENZUELA) COURTESY OF TONY VALENZUELA
Tony Valenzuela