When I made the short film "HIV is Not a Crime" several years ago, it was out of frustration that while some policy leaders were finally beginning to talk about HIV criminalization and what terrible public health policy it was and how unjust it was to people with HIV, the conversations were always held in the abstract. 

There is something kind of simplistic, if not cheesy, for someone who came so close to death to give thanks to their doctor for having “saved” them. Dr. Joseph Sonnabend didn’t jump in a river to rescue me while I was drowning; he didn’t race into an intersection to grab me out of the path of a vehicle hurtling towards me; he didn’t talk me off a ledge when I was ready to jump.

When he was alive, I thought of Vito Russo as a friend and an activist I admired.  I didn’t realize the significance of his impact on my life until after he died, of AIDS, in 1990.