Q Toon: Healther Skelter

Faced with such a blizzard of wanton destruction from the Corrupt Trump Regime, it’s easy to miss the individual losses as they continually pile up. Today’s cartoon highlights the deep cuts in federal funding for health and safety programs under the reckless authority of one Mr. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Kennedy came to the Cabinet of Total Incompetence by virtue of his embrace of anti-vaccine quackery (although faced with a thoroughly predictable epidemic of measles out of Texas, he has reluctantly come out in favor of letting parents who haven't succumbed to anti-vax hysteria get their children vaccinated, while leaving the anti-vaxxers free to spread the disease far and wide).

Of particular concern to the LGBTQ+ community are cuts already made to HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment programs.

The “reductions in force” last week at the CDC gutted branches responsible for a slew of prevention services: Expert guidance on preventing infant infections, a national at-home testing program, long-running surveys to follow people living with and at risk for HIV, statistical analysis to estimate national HIV incidence, and guidelines on how to use HIV prevention drugs or PrEP, including a powerful new medicine likely to be approved this summer.

STAT has also learned that funds have been suspended for the HIV Prevention Trials Network and the HIV Vaccine Trials Network, the two most prominent networks for testing prevention drugs and vaccines. Funds have also been suspended for the AIDS Clinical Trial Group, a nearly 40-year-old system that has been responsible for key breakthroughs dating back to the first effective AIDS drug, AZT. All three have been waiting on money that were supposed to be sent out in February. 

Another AIDS Clinical Trial Group study testing four interventions to prevent HIV in Black men who have sex with men in the South, a particularly vulnerable group, was also slashed. The ACTG announced that for lack of funds, it has paused enrollment for all of its studies but one.

HHS cuts are negatively affecting plenty of other department responsibilities as well, from Alzheimer's, to child welfare, Meals on Wheels, mental health, lead abatement, and more. My Dad serves on the local Board of Health here, which is one of many having to deal with deep cuts to COVID response funding.

When Kennedy was interviewed by CBS News's chief medical correspondent, Dr. Jonathan LaPook, this week, the HHS Secretary pleaded ignorance of specific cuts he had theoretically overseen.

LaPook provided Kennedy with an example of a $750,000 University of Michigan grant focused on adolescent diabetes, which was eliminated.
"I didn't know that, and that's something that we'll look at," Kennedy said. He added that he could not speak to if it should be considered a DOGE cut.

It's therefore hard to put any stock in any claims that Medicaid and Medicare will be spared debilitating cuts to workforce and services. Republicans from top to bottom dislike any program that does not directly benefit people who aren't their billionaire sugar daddies.

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I'm still working on how to capture RFK Jr. in caricature. For now, I trust that the little brain worm sticking out of his ear suffices in lieu of a text label.

Q Toon: An Aaron Judgment

In an episode of a podcast called "Look Into It" hosted by conspiracy fabulist Eddie Bravo, NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers claimed that Dr. Anthony Fauci, in cahoots with the Center for Disease Control and the federal government, was responsible for exacerbating the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980's and repeated their strategy with COVID-19.

I don't care to link to the February 23 podcast itself, which is behind a paywall anyway; but this little germ from the three-hour episode escaped the lab last week and went viral on Xitter:

"The blueprint was created in the '80's: create a pandemic, you know, with a virus that's goin' wild. Right? Only — he was given — Fauci was given, like, over $350 million dollars to research this, come up with drug that was new or repurposed to handle the AIDS pandemic, and all they came up with was AZT. And if you do any smidge of research — and I know, I'm not an epidemiologist, I'm not a doctor, I'm not an immunologist, whatever the fuck — I can read, though, right? — right — I can look things up and I can learn just like any normal person, you know, I can do my own research, which is so vilified, you know, to even question authority — but that was the game plan back then: create an environment where only one thing works. Back then, AZT. Now, rembisivir, remdesivir, until we get a vaccine. Which, by the way, Anthony Fauci had stake in rembirvi vaccine."

Rodgers was repeating false claims by independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. that the CDC suppressed all sorts of supposed cures in order that favored yet fatal medical treatments would hold a monopoly on the HIV/AIDS/COVID market. These claims have been debunked by PolitiFact (and if you're into doing your own research, there are dozens of sources cited at the end of that post).

Dan Wilson, senior associate scientist at Janssen and host of the YouTube show “Debunk the Funk with Dr. Wilson,” said Kennedy’s retelling of the AZT history was “dead wrong.”

Kennedy and Rodgers were “repeating a form of HIV/AIDS denialism, where antiretroviral drugs are said to be ineffective against progression of the virus,” Wilson said. In reality, he said, AZT “was the first time that doctors could do something to help people who (were) wasting away and dying painful deaths.”

Now, I'm all in favor of doing one's own research. It's incumbent upon any responsible editorial cartoonist to check into the veracity of things before whipping off a cartoon about whatever one just heard from a talking head on TV or read in some piece of Xeet on Xitter.

But one must be aware that the internet is programmed to give you confirmation bias. If you google "aliens built pyramids," you will get hundreds of links to articles positing that aliens built the pyramids. (Well, of course they did. Having spent decades traveling light years to visit the only flat planet in the universe, what else were they to do?)

But returning to the topic at hand: As a devoted Green Bay Packers fan, I'm saddened to see Aaron Rodgers follow the Brett Favre playbook of going to the Jets only to becoming a huge embarrassment to everyone who ever rooted for him. The guy is, or at least has been, a bright, intelligent fellow; remember how he whipped Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary's and astronaut Mark Kelly's butts on Jeopardy! in spite of getting the Final Jeopardy clue about Harley Davidson wrong? You can't credit that to clicker reflexes alone!

That was nine years ago, however; and perhaps it's true that he has been knocked to the turf a couple times since then.

But over his years with the NFL, he has gotten pretty full of himself. In his last years with the Packers, he didn't deign to pre-season practice with the rest of the team, meaning that new receivers and running backs spent half a season getting used to his habits and rhythms. And it showed.

Please, Lord, let Jordan Love model himself after Bart Starr instead.

To Your Health

It's that time of the month again! I've rummaged through my old cartoons from 40, 30, 20, and 10 years ago for today's Graphical History Tour.

UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., April 26, 1984

This 1984 cartoon starring Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Health and Human Services, Margaret Heckler, was probably the first one I drew of the AIDS crisis (not this one).

We still didn't know what was causing the terrible new disease that was apparently targeting otherwise healthy young gay men, Haitians, and patients who had received blood transfusions. Reagan had made no public comment about it, but sent out Heckler when there appeared to be some progress in identifying what would come to be known as the Human Immunodeficiency Virus.

Reagan was more occupied deflecting criticism of administration foreign policy by blaming that meddlesome Congress for reverses in the Middle East and elsewhere. Meanwhile, Secy. Heckler would later say that she had difficulty getting AIDS addressed in cabinet meetings during her tenure (1983-1985) and never discussed it with the President.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., April 18, 1994

Next stop: 1994, and I hope that leading off with that AIDS cartoon today properly set up the next one.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., March 31, 1994

Cutting down the nation's smoking habit was a major emphasis of President Bill Clinton's Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders, who served in that position over the objection of tobacco-state politicians from September of 1993 to the last day of 1994.

You young whippersnappers may be shocked to know that thirty years ago, the air in offices, bars and restaurants — even, in some locales, hospital waiting rooms — was often thick with tobacco smoke. (Or perhaps you may not. I hear that vaping is getting to be as common among Gen Z as cigarettes used to be among Gen Emphysema.)

I vividly recall meeting up for Saturday morning breakfasts with my now husband at a local diner where the "non-smoking area" consisted of the booths along the walls. The tables in the center of the room were the "smoking area," meaning that every non-smoking table was right next to a smoking table. 

Which was okay. If you liked your breakfast tasting like it was cooked on an old ashtray.

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, April 30, 2004

I found one cartoon from April of 2004 that fits more or less into today's theme of health and wellness. Hospital systems in southeast Wisconsin were (and still are) eagerly expanding into new communities, and the editorial board of the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee has often had something to say about their efforts.

In this case, there was friction between Aurora Hospitals and those of ProHealth Care as the former sought to open a facility in the city of Oconomowoc (which I won't tell you how to pronounce because that's a word we use to spot folks who ain't from around these parts) just west of Milwaukee County. ProHealth fended off Aurora's advances, more or less; Aurora instead built their new medical center in the adjacent village of Summit.

Pronounced SUM-mit.

for Q Syndicate, April 3, 2014

Leaping ten years ahead and half a world away, yet coming topically full circle, this last cartoon laments the woeful persecution in African countries of their LGBTQ+ citizens. In this case, Uganda and Nigeria.

Uganda had just passed a law that not only criminalized being gay or lesbian oneself, but also failing to report other LGBTQ+ persons to the authorities. My original blog post for this cartoon quoted a report in The Week explaining the law's effect on controlling HIV/AIDS in Africa:

"Uganda was once an AIDS success story, but that is now changing. The portion of the population that identifies as gay is tiny, but there are many more men in Uganda — and across Africa — who have sex with other men but do not identify as gay or bisexual. These men, many of them married, are now less likely to be honest with health-care providers and less likely to get the education, free condoms, and HIV testing they need. They are also more likely to contract the virus and spread it to their female and male partners. In Senegal, after several HIV prevention workers were imprisoned in 2008, the number of men seeking sexual health services in that area dropped sharply."

Likewise in Nigeria, as reported by Mother Jones, whose sources included John Adeniyi of the International Center for Advocacy on Rights to Health, an HIV intervention organization based in Abuja:

"Eight organizations that provide HIV treatment and prevention services in northern Nigeria have cut back on HIV outreach, training, and education programs, according to Dorothy Aken'Ova, executive director of Nigeria's International Center for Reproductive Health and Sexual Rights (INCRESE). 'People thought, "You know what? I don't want to be in prison because I'm providing treatment for these gay homosexual people,"' Adeniyi says. He expects more organizations will drop their programs in the coming months."

Uganda last year enacted an even more draconian "Death to Gays" law, literally mandating the death penalty for "aggravated" homosexuality. The law was upheld by the Ugandan Supreme Court earlier this month.

Nigerian military authorities continue mass arrests of LGBTQ+ citizens — 70 in one day last October. 

Just the same, it might be unfair to single out Uganda and Nigeria for criticism. Homosexual relations are illegal in 30+ of Africa's 54 countries.

And in Afghanistan, Antigua and Barbuda, Bangladesh, Barbados, Brunei, Comoros, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Indonesia, Iran, Jamaica, Malaysia, Maldives, Myanmar, Kiribati, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Pakistan, Palestine, Papua New Guinea, Qatar, Samoa, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, the Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Tuvalu, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Yemen, and, for all practical purposes, Russia and Belorus.

Q Toon: Texodus

Texas authorities are spewing hostility in all directions this year.

Where to start?

In a ruling issued September 7th, District Judge Reed O’Connor voided a mandate under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) which requires employers cover certain preventive healthcare products and services if these violate their religious beliefs. ...

In this instance, O’Connor is striking down an ACA requirement that insurers cover pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, which prevents transmission of the HIV virus, as well as contraception, the HPV vaccine (which prevents cervical cancer), and screenings and behavioral counseling for illicit drug use as well as sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). According to O’Connor’s opinion, “compulsory coverage for [these] services violates [employers’] religious beliefs by making them complicit in facilitating homosexual behavior and [illegal] drug use.”

O'Connor, a George W. Bush appointee, would no doubt approve of an employer with a religious belief in Zero Population Growth denying maternal, paternal, and family leave to its employees — to say nothing of suddenly converting to a religion that doesn't believe in modern medicine at all. Flipping off teh gays is just icing on the cake.

Moving along to panel two: 

On the morning of Aug. 30, a 13-year-old transgender boy was pulled out of class by his school’s administrators, his mother says. While his classmates continued their studies, he sat in a conference room at a Texas middle school where a Department of Family and Protective Services investigator began asking personal questions, court records state.

The reason: The state agency was probing his family following a February directive from Gov. Greg Abbott (R) to investigate the use of gender-affirming care in minors as child abuse, according to court documents.

The nearly hour-long interview touched on a range of personal topics — from the teen’s medical history to his gender dysphoria diagnosis to his suicide attempt years back, court records state. The interrogation left the boy — identified under the pseudonym Steve Koe — shaking and distressed, according to a signed declaration from his mother, named as Carol Koe.

And of course, Gov. Greg Abbott is forcibly busing immigrants to New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and elsewhere, as if immigrants had not already been coming there:

Five more busloads of migrants who crossed the border from Mexico into Texas reached New York City on Wednesday as Gov. Greg Abbott escalated his feud with the city’s mayor with a victory lap op-ed in the New York Post.

The latest group of buses is the biggest to reach the East Coast city in one day since Abbott began the policy in early August, according to Fox News.

According to New York officials, Abbott even hired security guards to keep passengers from getting off his buses before they reached the Big Apple (although some did so anyway).

Whatever. All things being equal, there's a good chance that Coyote Abbott was doing some of those immigrants a huge favor. A free ride out of Howdy Arabia doesn't sound like such a terrible thing.

Cheap Shots with a Ten-Foot Poll

In last Saturday's Graphical History Tour, I shared a few cartoons and illustrations I drew 40 years ago in April of 1982. I had almost included one from April of 1992, but I decided to give that month a post of its own today.

I'll start out with one that drew a couple of complaints.

in Journal Times, Racine, Wis., April 8, 1992

Religious fundamentalists were upset that the Racine Health Department had begun offering free condoms in response to the AIDS crisis. For years, health advocates had been urgently recommending that men who had sex with men must use condoms every time. Although some in the gay community reacted with the same attitude we've seen in the past two years toward face masks, the absence of any treatment for HIV/AIDS in 1992 made a lot of sense to the rest.

Antigay puritans, however, argued that condoms are less than 100% effective — and that was without guys wearing their condoms down around their nuts instead of up where they're of any use. As far as the Just Keep Saying No crowd were concerned, total abstinence was the only prophylactic that was 100% effective and therefore the only one worth considering.

Just like how abstaining from breathing is 100% effective against transmission of COVID-19.

A frequent denizen of the Journal Times's Letters to the Editor section (he had just had another letter, "Condoms Cause AIDS," in the paper two days earlier) recognized my caricature of the gentleman leading the opposition to the health department program.

in Journal Times, Racine Wis., April 17, 1992

There was another letter, very much like Mr. Brook's, sent in by parents of a friend of a friend. 

in Journal Times, Racine Wis., April 13, 1992

When I was a kid, I had occasionally subbed for their son delivering the Sunday morning Milwaukee Journal, with which there always seemed to be one supply problem or another. The worst was when the delivery truck had left 75 extra copies of the classified ad sections instead of 75 copies of the news sections. This was in the days when cell phones were the thing of science fiction, so I had to schlep a third of a mile back to my house to call the circulation department, which never answered their phone at 4:30 a.m. on a Sunday.

At any rate, I don't owe the Pfeiffers any favors.

✍

Nationally, the major story for the month (prior to the Rodney King riots 30 years ago yesterday) was the presidential primary election season grinding to a close.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, Wis., April 6, 1992

On the Democratic side, the contest had come down to two former governors: Jerry Brown of California and Bill Clinton of Arkansas. President George Bush had clinched the Republican nomination and polled ahead of either Democrat, even though fascist-wing Pat Buchanan was doggedly refusing to do the Republican thing and fall in line behind him.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., April 9, 1992

By the time the Wisconsin primary was over — well, I hesitate to say Bill Clinton was the "favorite" for the nomination, because there wasn't a great deal of enthusiasm around the former Arkansas governor. He had issues with marital infidelity (an issue that had dashed Gary Hart's presidential ambitions four years earlier) and collegiate marijuana use (still a disqualifying consideration for a sizeable chunk of the voting-age population). He had mighty lame excuses for both.

Furthermore, the central issue of his campaign, aside from personal ambition, was a mild repudiation of the Democratic Party liberal ideals. Its "third way" smörgåsbord of fiscal conservatism and social progressivism was meant to appeal to middle-of-the-road moderates — that ambiguous slice of the American electorate who famously don't really get enthusiastic about politics.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., April 27, 1992

Then, just as the news media began wondering what they were supposed to report on with the party conventions still a couple months away, along came billionaire H. Ross Perot, dropping loud hints that he might perhaps consider thinking about mulling whether to make himself available for a third-party run for the presidency.

Q Toon: Set in Boldface Hype

Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), a leader in his party's fight against the fight against global pandemics, was on Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade's podcast on World AIDS Day last week. He acknowledged the occasion by accusing Dr. Anthony Fauci, Chief Medical Advisor to President Biden, of exaggerating the danger from COVID-19 as well as from HIV/AIDS.

“Fauci did the exact same thing with AIDS. He overhyped it,” Johnson told Kilmeade.

“He created all kinds of fear, saying it could affect the entire population when it couldn’t,” Johnson said, without citing scientific evidence. “And he’s doing, he’s using the exact same playbook with COVID, ignoring therapy, pushing a vaccine.”

Update: And now, Johnson has told a "town-hall" phone call, “By the way, standard gargle, mouthwash, has been proven to kill the coronavirus. If you get it, you may reduce viral replication. Why not try all these things?” Do I really need to tell you that no medical professional or mouthwash company agrees with him?

Anti-vaxxer Johnson should, by all rights, be an embarrassment to the state of Wisconsin, except that there are vast expanses of the state where folks think that a background in business entitles one to spew bullshit at will. PolitiFact has no problem coming up with over a dozen "Mostly False" to "Pants On Fire" statements by him.

In March, he told radio host Joe "Pags" Pagliano that the Capitol rioters on January 6 "were people who love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law. Now, had the tables been turned, and Joe — this is going to get me in trouble — had the tables been turned and President Trump won the election and tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and antifa, I might have been a little concerned."

And, yes, he doesn't think January 6 was an armed insurrection, but he does want Hunter Biden investigated.

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Johnson hasn't yet announced whether he'll run for a third term next year, although his full-throated endorsement of Trumpism, conspiracy nonsense, and COVID denial has convinced other Republicans to stay out of the race. On the other side of the primary ballot, twelve Democrats to date have launched campaigns to unseat him.

Democrats think Johnson's is the one Republican Senate seat they can flip in 2022, and a group called "Opportunity Wisconsin" has been advertising heavily here all year urging us to tell him to stop doing bad things. For much of the fall, its ads starred a former employee of Hufcor blaming Johnson for a tax break that rewarded Hufcor for moving overseas. The current TV ad features a navy submarine veteran accusing Johnson of voting for tax cuts that resulted in Johnson doubling his wealth.

The Opportunity Wisconsin ad blitz started last February by telling Johnson to stop blocking COVID-19 relief checks. No wonder he thinks the pandemic has been overhyped — relief checks only encourage people not to work. Tax cuts encourage employers to lay them off.

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Meanwhile, here are the facts about HIV/AIDS and COVID-19, just in case anyone out there actually thinks they have been overhyped:

New HIV infections have been reduced by 52% since the peak in 1997. 

• In 2020, around 1.5 million [1.0 million–2.0 million] people were newly infected with HIV, compared to 3.0 million [2.1 million–4.2 million] people in 1997.
• 37.7 million [30.2 million–45.1 million] people globally were living with HIV in 2020.
• 79.3 million [55.9 million–110 million] people have become infected with HIV since the start of the epidemic.
• 36.3 million [27.2 million–47.8 million] people have died from AIDS-related illnesses since the start of the epidemic.
  

AIDS-related deaths have been reduced by 64% since the peak in 2004 and by 47% since 2010.

• In 2020, around 680,000 [480,000–1 million] people died from AIDS-related illnesses worldwide, compared to 1.9 million [1.3 million–2.7 million] people in 2004 and 1.3 million [910,000–1.9 million] people in 2010.

People living with HIV experience more severe outcomes and have higher comorbidities from COVID-19 than people not living with HIV. In mid-2021, most people living with HIV did not have access to COVID-19 vaccines.

• Studies from England and South Africa have found that the risk of dying from COVID-19 among people with HIV was double that of the general population.
• Sub-Saharan Africa is home to two thirds (67%) of people living with HIV. But the COVID-19 vaccines that can protect them are not arriving fast enough. In July 2021, less than 3% of people in Africa had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.

And here is the death toll from COVID-19, as of last night:

5,294,887 deaths worldwide; 813,904 in the U.S.

In just two years. 

 

Q Toon: Into the Spiderverse

In the early months of the Corrupt Trump Administration, six members of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA) resigned in protest of Donald Joffrey Trump's inaction on HIV/AIDS issues.

The following December Trump then fired the rest of the council by FedEx letter, claiming that he wanted to take PACHA "in a new direction."

For the next year, it appeared that the "new direction" was "no direction at all." PACHA sat empty and dormant, like so many of Trump's ambassadorships and sub-cabinet offices. So it was a surprise to hear Trump promise in his State of the Union message that he was submitting a budget to Congress that would somehow bring an end to new HIV infections in the United States by 2030.

That's a welcome and laudable goal, to be sure, but you have to question his methods. His lackeys claim that he fired everyone in PACHA because it was full of Obama appointees — yet another example of his knee-jerk reaction against anybody and anything with his predecessor's name attached to it. There is value in continuity and institutional memory that utterly escapes this president.

When John Kennedy promised to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960's, his first instinct was not to get rid of everybody at NASA.

Overshadowed by January's partial government shut-down, the Mueller investigation, and Adam Levine's tattoos, Trump has finally named two PACHA co-chairs: Washington State Secretary of Health John Wiesman and Deputy Executive Director of the AIDS Institute Carl Schmid.

This is, at least, somewhat encouraging. Wiesman's medical career began in 1986 as an HIV/AIDS test counselor and he is past president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. His successor, Nicole Alexander-Scott, commends him:

"Both as a clinician caring for patients with HIV and as a policymaker working to eliminate the disease, I have witnessed firsthand John's commitment, passion, and expertise when it comes to HIV. He is supremely qualified to co-chair the reconstituted Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS and will lead bold public health actions to stop HIV."

Schmid spoke out last year about issues arising from provisions hidden in insurance plans that complicate access to affordable and effective drug treatment. He is encouraged by Trump having included HIV/AIDS treatment in the address, telling reporters, “There’s a lot of distrust between the community and the administration, understandably. This could be a good opportunity to show they’re committed to this.”

Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Perhaps Wiesman and Schmid are Trump's two for today.

Toons for World AIDS Day

Seroback Saturday observes World AIDS Day with a look back at a rather limited selection of cartoons about HIV/AIDS drawn for the LGBTQ press.

This is by no means a comprehensive look at the complete selection of LGBTQ cartoonists. I'm not including the work of any of the character-driven comic strips, many of whom have introduced HIV+ characters either on a regular, occasional, or cameo appearance basis. Nor do I have any idea what was the first published cartoon about AIDS (although that might be interesting to find out someday).

I believe this cartoon from September, 1985 is the first one I ever drew about the AIDS epidemic*; it's at a point when I felt it necessary to spell it out in the first panel and to put quotation marks around the acronym afterward. This was well before I began drawing for the LGBT press, however; this appeared in the student newspaper at UW-Parkside.

(Had the Homosexual Agenda added the "T" yet in 1985? I forget. I think folks were still squabbling about what order the first three letters should be in.)

There were other cartoonists contributing to LGBTQetc. media in the early 1980's, although few were tackling political subjects. But the advent of the AIDS crisis galvanized our community like nothing before. That is not to dismiss the Mattachine Society or Stonewall, or the fundamental first step of decriminalizing our relationships. But the issues up to the 1980's were predominantly lifestyle matters; the AIDS crisis presented us with a literal life-or-death issue.

And even the gag cartoonists couldn't avoid the subject.

"The Gay Side" by Tom Rezza in Wisconsin In Step, Milwaukee WI, January 23, 1986

Within the LGBT community, there was great resentment of President Ronald Reagan for not speaking about the AIDS crisis; he was not the only one guilty of silence (=death).

"Life at the Closet Door" by David Brady (freelance), ca. February. 1987

Even though consistent condom use has been proven as the best method for sexually active persons to avoid contracting the AIDS virus, network and cable television wasted years refusing to air condom advertising on the grounds that it would offend what they call "more sensitive viewers." But when Viagra and Cialis came along, the pharmaceutical companies' deep pockets helped the networks overcome whatever squeamishness they had about discussing sex during their commercial breaks.

"I'll Only Have to Rob Small Banks" by Angela Bocage in Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco CA, February 26, 1993

Speaking of the pharmaceutical companies: once treatments were discovered for HIV and AIDS, the issue became one of cost, as expressed in this Angela Bocage cartoon featuring Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Senator David Pryor (D-AR). Pryor's interest in controlling the escalating cost of prescription drugs came as chair of the Senate Special Committee on Aging. Waxman's district included West Hollywood and parts of Los Angeles, so he had constituents vocal on the issue; his legacy includes the Orphan Drug Act of 1983, the Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act of 1984 ("Hatch-Waxman Act"), and the Ryan White CARE Act of 1990.

"AIDS: Bearing Angry Witness" by Jennifer Camper (freelance), August/September, 1993

The death toll from AIDS devastated a generation in our community — as Camper's 1993 cartoon observes, in ways large and small. LGBTQ newspapers across the country, from the serious news outlets to the "bar rags," found that they needed to add obituary notices to report the loss of so many in their 50's, 40's, 30's and 20's. These obituaries often included pertinent details omitted from obituaries in mainstream newspapers: their life partners, their chosen families, or preferred or performance names by which they might be better known.

Uncaptioned cartoon by Ben Carlson in Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco CA, August 13, 1998

Ben Carlson's cartoon above appeared in the Bay Area Reporter's "No Obits" edition of August 13, 1998. A brightly colored banner headline on page one heralded the fact that for the first time in years, the San Francisco weekly newspaper did not have a single obituary in it.

"That doesn't mean that there were no AIDS deaths in the past week; next week's issue may have more obits than usual... After more than 17 years of struggle and death, and some weeks with as many as 31 obituaries printed in the B.A.R., it seems a new reality may be taking hold, and the community may be on the verge of a new era of the epidemic ... Perhaps."

By 1998, my cartoons were syndicated to the LGBTQ press, I'll close with a couple of my own scribblings from the past 20 years. The sketch above was commissioned in October, 1998 for AIDS Action's project AIDSWatch.

I didn't draw a World AIDS Day cartoon this year. It used to be that with newsmakers often on Thanksgiving holiday immediately beforehand, there frequently would be no distraction from the topic when I sat down at my drawing board. Thanks to presidential twitterrhea, that hasn't been the case lately.

Given the Corrupt Trump Administration's record on HIV/AIDS, I could simply have reissued this cartoon from January.

__________

* Ed. note: Wrong. I drew at least one AIDS cartoon earlier than the one at the top of this post.

Q Toon: PSA, Not PDA, for Trump

The more you know...

Microsoft founder Bill Gates revealed last week that on two separate occasions, Donald Joffrey Trump asked him whether there was a difference between HIV and HPV.

As a public service, on the off chance that Mr. Trump happens to read my blog, this week's cartoon includes a few basic distinctions between the two viruses (viri?). There are more, which you can read about on the Department of Health and Human Services web site, Don, at least until you and Secretary Azar decide to scrub fact-based information from the site in favor of abstinence-only sermons or faith healing or whatever snake oil your Faith Initiative Board is selling you that day.

Wait — you'd better bookmark some other government's web page instead.

Then, next time you run into Mr. Gates, you can stick to topics that genuinely interest you. Like how hot you think his daughter is.

Or perhaps you can ask him what it's like to become a billionaire by producing innovative and creative new products instead of just slapping your name on crap.

Q Toon: PACHA Comes to Shove

Amid a blizzard of Big Button cartoons today, I've drawn about the President's Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS instead.

With no explanation, the White House has terminated members of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS amid widespread discontent with President Trump’s approach to the epidemic.
After six members of PACHA resigned in June, the White House on Wednesday terminated the remaining 16 members without explanation via a letter from FedEx.
Scott Schoettes, a Chicago-based HIV/AIDS activist and senior attorney for Lambda Legal, was one of the six who resigned in June over Trump’s inaction on HIV/AIDS and said on Twitter the remaining members were fired.
“No respect for their service,” Schoettes said. “Dangerous that #Trump and Co. (Pence esp.) are eliminating few remaining people willing to push back against harmful policies, like abstinence-only sex ed.”

Some gay Republicans have defended the Corrupt Trump Administration's move on the grounds that George W. Bush and Barack Obama had both stocked PACHA with appointees of their own; but since this issue doesn't register with confederate flag-waving Trump loyalists or relate in any way to Trump's penis size, others see the hand of Vice President Pence and his brand of faith-based policy makers behind this move. Sources close to the decision tell Newsweek that they "suspect the charter for PACHA will be re-written with renewed focus on abstinence and religious, non-evidence based public health approaches."

Time, as the cliche goes, will tell, but the Corrupt Trump Administration's record so far is hardly encouraging.

Q Toon: Pondering President Pence

Monday, I mused that this, my third cartoon of 2017 with Mike Pence in it, could set a record for the most times I have cartooned a Vice President in the first year of his term. Since then, I have checked, and the record in fact stands tied for now.

I drew three cartoons of Dan Quayle in 1987. (For the record, I drew two cartoons of Al Gore in 1993, and none of George H.W. Bush in 1981, Dick Cheney in 2001 or Joe Biden in 2009.)

Being nominated to run for Vice President used to be an honor akin to having a post office building named for you: that's nice and all, but everyone is still going to call it "the post office." FDR's first Veep, John Nance Garner, is quoted as having said that the vice presidency was "not worth a bucket of warm piss." Woodrow Wilson's Veep, Thomas Marshall, had a joke about a man with one son who went to sea and drowned and another who was elected vice president; neither son was ever heard from again.

Nowadays, we reserve one of the election debates for the vice presidential candidates, but other than pundits, cartoonists and members of the nominees' families, nobody really pays any attention to them. If any memorable lines come out of the running mate debates — e.g. Lloyd Bentsen's "You're no Jack Kennedy" or James Stockdale's "What am I doing here?" — the comments nearly always come from November's losing ticket, so the candidates are better off being forgettable. (Quick: who debated opposite Mike Pence last year? No fair googling the answer!)

Presidential nominees usually select their running mates with November in mind, not the next four years, or the possibility of accession to the presidency. Veep candidates are often picked to provide geographical or ideological balance to a ticket; Kennedy-Johnson is an example.

Richard Nixon introduced a new twist to the calculus of selecting a running mate with his choice of Spiro Agnew: once they were elected, Democrats couldn't get rid of Nixon without ending up with someone they considered worse. (He just didn't count on Agnew having to resign first.)

Donald Berzilius Trump's strategy last year used both the Kennedy-Johnson calculus and the Nixon-Agnew calculus. Pence has the bona fides with the party's Christian Right that Trump lacks, which cemented their support for the ticket and this administration. Meanwhile, liberals stomping their feet that Trump must be impeached have been cautioned that in many ways, having Mike Pence as president would be worse.

It certainly looks that way from an LGBTQ perspective. Trump admitted as much with his reported remark that when it comes to gay rights, “Don’t ask that guy—he wants to hang them all!”

The New Yorker article which recounts that Trump comment also discusses an antigay bill Pence signed as Governor of Indiana:

In the spring of 2015, Pence signed a bill called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which he presented as innocuous. ... But then a photograph of the closed signing session surfaced. It showed Pence surrounded by monks and nuns, along with three of the most virulently anti-gay activists in the state. The image went viral. Indiana residents began examining the law more closely, and discovered that it essentially legalized discrimination against homosexuals by businesses in the state. ...
The outcry over the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was enormous. Gay-rights groups condemned the bill and urged boycotts of the state. Pete Buttigieg, the young gay mayor of South Bend, who is a rising figure in the Democratic Party, told me that he tried to talk to Pence about the legislation, which he felt would cause major economic damage to Indiana. “But he got this look in his eye,” Buttigieg recalled. “He just inhabits a different reality. It’s very difficult for him to lay aside the social agenda. He’s a zealot.”

While the article does say that Pence was not the force behind the passage of the bill in the legislature, his record is littered with antigay zealotry. As head of the Indiana Policy Review in the 1990's, he advised employers not to hire gays and lesbians, writing,

“Homosexuals are not as a group able-bodied. They are known to carry extremely high rates of disease brought on because of the nature of their sexual practices and the promiscuity which is a hallmark of their lifestyle.”

In Congress, he groused when the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes bill was signed into law in 2009, complaining that it advanced a “radical social agenda” and would have “a chilling effect on religious expression, from the pulpits, in our temples, in our mosques and in our churches.” He was against the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) on the grounds that "Either the employer has to ban employees from having a Bible at the workplace for their break time, or displaying Bible verses, and thereby face a lawsuit under title VII for religious discrimination, or the employer then has to continue to allow it and face a potential lawsuit under ENDA by the homosexual employee."

Pence voted against the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," arguing the shibboleth that repeal would damage military readiness and recruitment. He co-sponsored the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would have enshrined denial of marriage equality for same-sex couples into the U.S. Constitution.

Finally, the issues page from Pence's 2000 campaign web site demanded "an audit to ensure that federal dollars were no longer being given to organizations that celebrate and encourage the types of behaviors that facilitate the spreading of the HIV virus. Resources should be directed toward those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior."

That passage is a dog-whistle to advocate spending federal money on "conversion therapy," the widely discredited practice of using psychological torture techniques to reprogram LGBTQ patients into believing they are straight and cisgender. Pence's spokespeople now deny that he was talking about conversion therapy — I suppose one could argue that he was calling for resources to be spent on institutions which convince LGBTQ persons to settle for a life of celibacy — but that's a distinction without much difference.

2017 Locher Award Winner: Damian Alexander

This year's AAEC/John Locher Award for best aspiring college-age cartoonist has been awarded to Damian Alexander, a graduate student at Boston's Simmons College. The award was founded in 1986 by members of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists as a memorial to the late son of Dick and Mary Locher. (Dick Locher, an editorial cartoonist for the Chicago Tribune and cartoonist of Dick Tracy, died this last month.)

Alexander's illustrations highlight personal experiences with social equality, LGBTQ issues, and mental health. "Through compelling and brutally honest storytelling, Damian's entries successfully make the personal political. His comic about his teenage self thinking he had AIDS simply because he was gay speaks to the importance of media representation. His meditations on technology and suicide are also thoughtful and socially-relevant."

Excerpt from "I'm Gay. That Means I Have AIDS, Right?" by Damian Alexander in Narratively

See the rest of this comic at the Locher Award site or in scrollable format at Narrative.ly.

I hope he's seen "Jeffrey," "The Broken Hearts Club," or "To Wong Foo" by now.

Resign and Replace

Six members of the Presidential Advisory Commission on HIV/AIDS (PACHA) resigned en bloc on June 16 to protest the Trump administration's disregard of their concerns. They announced their resignation in an open letter in Newsweek magazine. (A seventh PACHA member, Dr. Jeffrey Akman, has also resigned, although without public explanation.)

As one of the six, Dr. Michelle Ogle explained to Steve Inskeep on National Public Radio:

OGLE: Since the inauguration, the first thing that happened that was a clue — the Office of National AIDS Policy website was removed. And to our knowledge at this point, that website has not been restored. Also, we've made attempts to communicate with this administration. We sent a letter to Secretary Price and to Mr. Trump to basically let them know what the advisory council does, our goals, how we want to — you know, hope to work with them. And we've just gotten nothing but a very lackluster response from the administration.
INSKEEP: OK. Let's make sure we're clear here. Is it that he doesn't care about the issue or just that he's not listening to your advice?
OGLE: No, he doesn't care about the issue. The budget proposal that he sent forward shows that he doesn't care about the issue. Also, the American Health Care Act, the bill that he's put forward that they celebrated in the Rose Garden with, shows that he doesn't care.

The commission was formed by President Bill Clinton in 1995 and renewed by George W. Bush and HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson in July of 2001.  Some 17 or 18 members of the commission remain, and, given the corrupt Trump administration's disinterest, one wonders who, if anyone, will fill the empty chairs now.

Trump couldn't even be bothered to tweet out a 140-characters-or-less congratulatory message for LGBTQ pride month, for crying out loud. He left that apparently onerous duty to daughter Ivanka, who is perhaps the closest thing to an LGBTQ ally in Daddy's administration as there is ever likely to be.

Okay, so it wasn't Jared and Ivanka's wedding planner whom Daddy hired to head Region II of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. It was Eric and Lara Trump's wedding planner whom Daddy hired to head Region II of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

She’s arranged tournaments at Trump golf courses, served as the liaison to the Trump family during his presidential campaign, and even arranged Eric Trump’s wedding.

Now President Trump has appointed longtime loyalist Lynne Patton — who has zero housing experience and claims a law degree the school [Quinnipiac University School of Law] says she never earned — to run the office that oversees federal housing programs in New York.

The sum total of housing or urban development experience in Ms. Patton's résumé is found in her five — count 'em on one hand: five — months as HUD's Director of Public Engagement from January to June, 2017.

But she's black, just like HUD Secretary Ben Carson, the neurosurgeon who by some amazing coincidence also has zero experience in housing or urban development. I don't know if that means that Trump doesn't have any white friends willing to work in the department, or if he thinks that Urban=Black and Those People are all interchangeable anyway.

So that's how I feel about the Trumps. They're all pretty interchangeable.

But I probably need to figure out how I want to draw Eric, and, for that matter, Donald Jr.  As long as the U.S. of A. is a wholly owned subsidiary branch of Trump Enterprises Inc., it makes more sense to be familiar with the people who are really in charge — as opposed to those titular heads of cabinet departments.

Q Toon: Go Away, Kid, You Bother Me

I shouldn't admit this, but the one thing that doesn't work in this cartoon is its very premise.

Not the part about Ivanka's tweets. That much was real.

But if there's one thing you and I know about Mr. Donald Joffrey Trump, it is that he is not really, really busy making policy decisions with his staff this month. He's watching TV today, phone in hand, ready to cast self-serving — check that, make that deranged — tweets about Jim Comey's Senate testimony.

He's also not dedicated to any philosophy, antigay or otherwise, other than continuing the con job that has so improbably propelled him from real estate swindler to Trump University scammer to children's charity fraudster to President of the United States. The men on the other side of the table in this cartoon may be dedicated to slashing the budget for HIV/AIDS, blessing discrimination against same-sex couples, and keeping transgender persons out of public lavatories, but Trump is interested only in keeping the suckers who have thus far fallen for his con job from turning against him.

On top of all that, doesn't Jared have something he's supposed to be doing, like bringing peace to the Middle East, running the Office of American Innovation, setting up super-secret back channels to the FSB, diverting the doomsday asteroid, or something?

Q Toon: Atlas Shkrugged

I'm posting this week's cartoon a little earlier than usual because of a full schedule at home on Christmas Eve. And again, it's not a Christmasy topic, although I'm kicking myself that I already used both A Christmas Carol and It's a Wonderful Life as the basis for a cartoon just a few weeks ago:

Martin Shkreli came to national attention as the 32-year-old Shkrooge who bought the patent on Daraprim, a drug needed by HIV/AIDS patients, and promptly raised the price of the medication by 5,000% -- from $13 per pill to $750. For each individual pill. His response to the instant and near-universal condemnation of his inhumane money-grubbing was to wish that he had raised the price even higher.

Last week, Shkreli was arrested for securities fraud:

“Shkreli essentially ran his companies like a Ponzi scheme, where he used each subsequent company to pay off the defrauded investors in the prior company,” U.S. Attorney Robert Capers told the press in a statement after Shkreli’s arrest.

Prosecutors deny Shkreli's whine that the charges are related to his Daraprim price gouging. I wouldn't be surprised, however, if the price gouging were not directly related to his need to pay off some of those previously defrauded investors.

Martin Shkreli embodies everything that is wrong with our present economic system, which places little or no value on actually producing things of  any actual useful purpose day to day. Oh, sure, you can become a billionaire by inventing the next flashy new app consumers can use to shout "Look at me!" on the internet.

But why bother with any of that when the real money is in hiding other people's money under a shell and moving it around a lot?

That's the Last Time I Send Money to a Nigerian Prince!

The new antigay laws in Uganda and Nigeria go beyond criminalizing homosexuals:

"The [Ugandan] law also makes it a crime to fail to report anyone who breaks the law, essentially ensuring that gays will need to live secret lives. The law even makes illegal the 'promotion' and 'recognition' of homosexual relations, including by any government entity or nongovernmental organization inside or outside Uganda. And for the first time, the law targets lesbians."

HIV/AIDS in Africa is not a disease confined to the gay community, but the disease is widely blamed on gays nevertheless. Since failure to report homosexuals to the authorities is now criminal, consider this from The Week's "Everything You Need to Know about Africa's Antigay Crackdown"

"Uganda was once an AIDS success story, but that is now changing. The portion of the population that identifies as gay is tiny, but there are many more men in Uganda — and across Africa — who have sex with other men but do not identify as gay or bisexual. These men, many of them married, are now less likely to be honest with health-care providers and less likely to get the education, free condoms, and HIV testing they need. They are also more likely to contract the virus and spread it to their female and male partners. In Senegal, after several HIV prevention workers were imprisoned in 2008, the number of men seeking sexual health services in that area dropped sharply." 

And in Nigeria:

"[John ]Adeniyi [a human rights program officer at the International Center for Advocacy on Rights to Health, an HIV intervention organization based in Abuja] estimates that since the law took effect in January, the number of patients coming into ICARH for HIV treatment has dropped by over 50 percent. 'One person told me he would rather die…than come to the organization' and risk imprisonment, he says. He adds that LGBT couples living with HIV may also be discouraged from going to the doctor for couples counseling, out of fear that the doctor may turn them over to the police.

"Eight organizations that provide HIV treatment and prevention services in northern Nigeria have cut back on HIV outreach, training, and education programs, according to Dorothy Aken'Ova, executive director of Nigeria's International Center for Reproductive Health and Sexual Rights (INCRESE). 'People thought, "You know what? I don't want to be in prison because I'm providing treatment for these gay homosexual people,"' Adeniyi says. He expects more organizations will drop their programs in the coming months."

Q Toon: Your Mirandskavitch Rights

This week's cartoon was occasioned by this brazen attack on a St. Petersburg HIV support group on Sunday, but it's really about the open season on LGBT Russians declared by their government.

Anastasia Smirnova, the general project manager of the Interregional Social Movement Russian LGBT Network, reported on Russian queer newsgroups that two masked men with guns and baseball bats attacked a "rainbow social" at the offices of LaSky, an HIV organization for gay men,  just over an hour ago. The police reportedly arrived at the LaSky office but left immediately saying they saw no evidence of a crime. 

Two patrons of LaSky were hospitalized; one had reportedly been shot in the eye, and a woman had been beaten with a baseball bat.

Well, you can't blame the Russian police for not wanting to do anything that might get themselves in trouble for violating the ban on "pro-gay propaganda."

Russia's antigay pogrom (also against immigrants and dark-skinned Russians) has been going on for months now, possibly to distract citizens from the massive sums of money being spent on the Sochi Olympics. In July, the Guardian's Nancy Goldstein rattled off a list of other antigay attacks:

[Do Vladimir Putin and the International Olympic Committee think t]hat we'll just happily ignore last week's news of skinheads luring gay teenagers with an online dating scam, then taping the sessions where they torture them so long as no one blocks our view of the figure skating events?...

[A] BuzzFeed photomontage of '36 Pictures From Russia That Everyone Needs to See' brought millions of viewers image after image of bloodied and crying LGBT Russians clinging to one another — people trying to shield themselves from blows and rotten eggs at peaceful protests turned violent where the police, skinheads, and large crowds of anti-gay protestors beat, mock, assault, and arrest them.
So the news from the Russian LGBT Network that four Dutch tourists had just been jailed under the new "gay propaganda" law for filming a documentary on LGBT rights in Russia was the last straw. ... 

Last month, killers reportedly stabbed and trampled a man to death before putting his body in his car and setting it on fire. Just weeks before, 23-year-old Vladislav Tornovoi's friends murdered him because he mentioned he was gay while they were getting drunk, according to the BBC. They raped him with beer bottles before smashing his skull in with rocks.

Q Toon: Obama at the HRC Dinner

Speaking at the Human Rights Campaign dinner on Saturday, President Obama listed his administration's accomplishments in furthering LGBT rights.

Originally, I had set up this cartoon to liken LGBT voters unhappy with President Obama's record to those Republicans who fantasize about Chris Christie getting into the presidential race -- having had those same fantasies about Rick Perry's bigger head until he actually became a candidate.

Since I drew the cartoon, Christie has decided that he won't run for president after all, which leaves the Republican party stuck with its earlier dream candidates. And Mitt Romney.

I'm glad that I decided that the Christie analogy version of the cartoon was too preachy. I cast about until I hit on the "Mama didn't raise me..." line, which seems to argue against the original point that I hoped to make, but I think it's a better cartoon. (It still allows President Obama to point out the positives in his record.)