Dear Mike, After watching your interview on 60 Minutes last night, I realized that you and I are cut from the same cloth. I am a 59 year old gay man in my 40th year of living with AIDS. That is not one of our similarities. I was very fortunate in my youth to have first generation born in America Parents who instilled in my the importance of 'giving back'. I am the youngest of 3 and the only one of their children to 'Trick or Treat for UNICEF' with my little orange coin bank instead of a bag full candy. I didn't mind since I knew there would be bags of leftover candy(my favorites) waiting at home. The point is that my dad and his dad worked their collective butts off to give our family a pretty darn good life. Dad was the ballsiest business man I had ever heard of. He would give something a go if he thought he had a good idea, and my mom kept reminding him that he had 3 children in Ivy League Schools and a home and the other things in our lives that kept his specul...
I think it's wonderful that the British Royals - at least Diannah's boys - are going public with the fact that their mom's death affected them both emotionally. Gee how normal can you get. They even had moments of 'clinical depression' with all of the messiness that the 'disease' entails. Oh how brave they are to have risked being stigmatized as - I dunno uh normal'. Perish the thought. First, I think that STIGMA is the most overused and misused word in both the English and American languages. When I think of 'Stigma', I think of walking down the sidewalk with my friend Joe, who early in the AIDS crisis, looked the part of someone about to die of AIDS. He had Kaposi's Sarcoma lesions on his face and arms and legs, and sadly, internally, and upon seeing him, people would go our of their way to cross a street to avoid being even near us. Or I think of when my 33 year old sister - a Harvard Graduate with honors, suffering from the wicked symp...