Quotes About AIDS

I'm in awe of the AIDS workers in Africa who teach there, year in and year out.

I was destined to work with dying patients. I had no choice when I encountered my first AIDS patient. I felt called to travel some 250,000 miles each year to hold workshops that helped people cope with the most painful aspects of life, death and the transition between the two.

The film was made in 1973. It was a golden time for people to experiment without risking, for example, AIDS. Today one has to be so much more careful and I don't think a character like that could exist now.

David is very concerned about being remembered. I'm concerned about remembering because, after all, I'm going to be left behind. People we know die all the time and there is really no way to react. What can you do? Freak out every day? David brings memory up all the time. I can see how appalled he is at how little any of us react to AIDS deaths. He's focused a lot of worry on being forgotten.

Right now, when I think of all my AIDS dead, one of the things they all have in common is about forty conversations just like the one Dave and I had, where each guy talked about death in his own way. Later, they get sick and die in very predictable patterns. Lets face it, this death itself is no longer extraordinary, emotionally, to me.

A lot of people die giving birth to their children who have AIDS and HIV and a lot of people don't survive after a time because they've been sick too.

We need men and women to sit down and talk to each other about sex honestly and openly. That would help us fight Aids so immediately. But our lack of communication is hugely problematic.

The trouble is it's very difficult to pin-point the most important thing because Aids affects everyone in different levels of society, differently and you have to respond to it differently.

I have had lots of friends who've been affected by Aids and a very good friend of mine, Oscar Moore, died of Aids and I was with him in his last year quite a bit. And of course he was a man living in a very rich culture with a wealthy family who was able to afford health care.

The term 'new queer cinema' and the films of mine that were associated with that term are from a very, very different time, one almost entirely defined by the AIDS era. It was a very different social and cultural regard for the lives, the experiences, the worth of gay people.

Early in 1986, the World Health Organization in Geneva still regarded AIDS as an ailment of the promiscuous few.

I lost relatives to AIDS, a couple of my closest cousins. I lost friends to AIDS, high-school friends who never even made it to their 21st birthdays in the '80s. When it's that close to you, you can't really deny it, and you can't run from it.

I lost relatives to AIDS. A couple of my closest cousins, favorite cousins. I lost friends to AIDS, high school friends who never even made it to their 21st birthdays in the '80s. When it's that close to you, you can't - you know, you can't really deny it, and you can't run from it.

ACT UP was trying to explain to Americans that AIDS could affect all of us: that health care that ended once your disease was expensive could affect more than gay men with HIV or AIDS. We were trying to tell them about the future - a future they didn't yet see and would be forced to accept if they failed to act.

When I started out, no one would talk to young people about HIV or AIDS. I looked around and radio looked like a powerful way to shape culture in a healthy way.

When I started the radio program in 1981, not many people were talking about sexuality. Not many people were talking about AIDS or HIV.

In the 1980s we had the huge catastrophe of AIDS and you would walk down the street and see someone who was dying. It was horrendous.

AIDS is a horrible disease, and the people who catch it deserve compassion.

When my lover Hubert Sorin was dying of AIDS, he was always trying to fix me up - posthumously, as it were - with the cute busboy at the hotel.

There are two things that I put my focus on. One is the fight against AIDS and finding a cure. The other is human rights.

The United Nations Children's Fund reports that more than 18 million children worldwide have lost both parents to the ravages of AIDS, starvation, war or natural disasters.

The part in 'Philadelphia' where I represent the law firm that's firing Tom Hanks, that was a hard part for me because I lost one of my best friends to AIDS, and it was hard for me to play a part that wasn't sympathetic to someone with AIDS.

Too many people have already lost their lives to HIV and AIDS, and the more celebrities who can bring attention to the issue, the better.

It's so self-evident that I have to live my own history, to remind people the fact that I got into radio back in the early '80s was because of AIDS and HIV. It was what motivated me - that was the topic that I felt was so important that I had to talk about it, educating young people about it.