Post Dance Marathon: An Open Letter to Our Dancers

To all our dancers, You could’ve been anywhere last weekend, but you spent the first weekend of Spring Quarter in Pauley Pavilion on your feet for 26 hours, dancing the day and night away with other Bruins. You spent 26 hours becoming advocates for those affected by HIV and AIDS. Twenty-six hours is no small …

How we talk about HIV/AIDS matters

Language and activism have a necessarily fraught relationship: the right words can define successful activism just as the wrong ones can undermine it. For activism like that in the fight against HIV/AIDS, one unfortunately inextricable from misconception and stigma, language proves especially significant. Put simply, how we talk about HIV/AIDS matters. In any successful allyship, …

The science behind HIV & the potential for a cure

Human Immunodeficiency Virus, otherwise known as HIV, is a virus that is ubiquitous in social, political, and media-related contexts, yet is often poorly understood. Understanding the science behind HIV/AIDS is crucial to combating stigma as many negative misconceptions about the virus stem from a lack of knowledge about the biology that underlies HIV and AIDS, …

UCLA Professor & HIV/AIDS Activist Fights Stigma in and out of Classroom

Long before there was a Pediatric AIDS Coalition at UCLA, there was a passionate professor who was bringing awareness to the cause through a class called MAKE ART/STOP AIDS in UCLA’s World Arts and Cultures Department (WAC). The exhibition created by the class was displayed in the Fowler Museum of Cultural History in 2006, teaching …

Keith Haring Remembered 29 Years after Death

My first time seeing a Keith Haring painting was on a t-shirt. It was purple with two little caricatures embracing drawn with bold, white lines. I did not yet know who Keith Haring was, much less that I was wearing the work of an iconic American artist who shaped much of popular art culture in …