AIDS services under attack

In the AIDS/LifeCycle world, today is what we call "Day Zero": the day prior to the seven-day ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

Today is when 3,000 cyclists and hundreds of volunteer roadies gather at the Cow Palace in Daly City to turn in pledges, get camp tent assignments, watch videos on safety and attend to last-minute details before tomorrow's big rollout.

I'm hundreds of miles away from the Day Zero hubbub, but judging from posts I'm seeing on Facebook and Twitter, the mood in the Cow Palace is jubilant, and that spirit will serve as a seven-day tailwind pushing cyclists to the finish line in Los Angeles a week from today.

Since AIDS/LifeCycle's inception in 2002, more than $61 million has been raised for the HIV services of the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.

That sounds like a lot of money, but the 2007 operating budget of the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center alone was more than $40.7 million, and the Center received $32 million of its budget from government grants and the government-funded AIDS Drug Assistance Program. Much of the rest of the Center's budget comes from events like AIDS/LifeCycle.

This week, Governor Schwarzenegger proposed a "Day Zero" of his own for AIDS-service providers in California. In a budget proposal released on Thursday, the governor is threatening to reduce state general fund support of all Office of AIDS Programs activities to zero, zip, zilch.

What would that mean to HIV services in California? The State's General Fund annually provides funding for:

• 80 percent of HIV education and prevention programs
  
  
• 76 percent of HIV counseling and testing programs
  
  
• 84.5 percent of epidemiology and surveillance programs
  
  
• 51.2 percent of Early Intervention programs (EIP)
  
  
• 100 percent of PCR and immuno/phenotype assays
  
  
• 23 percent of AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP)
  
  
• 31 percent of Housing Opportunities for People with AIDS (HOPWA)
  
  
• 54 percent of home/community based care
  
  

It's difficult to fathom how organizations like the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation would continue to be able to deliver services to the HIV community if the governor's proposal is accepted by the state Legislature.

This would be a good time to pick up the phone or sit down and write a letter to your representatives in Sacramento.
California State Assembly
California State Senate

It's also a good time to be grateful for the riders and roadies of AIDS/LifeCycle, and the donors who support them. Riders and crew will be arriving in Los Angeles next Saturday afternoon. For information, visit AIDS/LifeCycle website

Same old shtick

The risky thing about writing a blog based on real life is that life sometimes hits a dull patch.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. After all of the drama I've seen over the past six months, there's something comforting about sitting down to write and realizing that nothing blog-worthy has happened to me in the previous 24 hours.

And I think I'm in for a prolonged dry spell.

My next medical appointment with someone on my cancer team is a good three weeks away, and the appointment after that isn't till the end of June.

I haven't had an accident in my bed sheets for months, and I think I've exhausted the slapstick potential for stories about my trach and G-tube.

I don't have a boyfriend to write about, and I don't feel especially boyfriendable, though I can see how a guy who can't talk back or steal French fries off your plate would be a dream spouse to many guys.

My job doesn't produce scintillating blog fodder, thank God, because blogging about my job only could lead to an uncomfortable conversation in the HR department.

I don't have any cute animal companions to tell you about, unless you count the creepy critters I sometimes spot scurrying across the bathtub.

So please bear with me during these dry patches between doctor's appointments and milestones in my recovery.

Things may get a tad boring but don't abandon ship.

Turning the other cheek

The need for men to shave always felt to me like some kind of twisted gender bias embedded in human DNA.

I know that women have their own set of inconveniences that men don't experience – and some of those horrify me– but at least women don't have to stand in front of a mirror every morning and mow a fresh crop of whiskers off their face.

I never was much good at manscaping my mug. Electric razors don't give me a close enough shave, and razors leave my face bloodied, like I have just escaped from Sweeney Todd's barber chair.

But cancer has given me a much-appreciated reprieve.

The effects of radiation on my face seem to have destroyed my body's ability to grow whiskers. Hair grows above my upper lip fairly robustly, and in random patches on my chin, but it doesn't grow on the rest of my face.

According to the literature my doctors have given me on the side effects of radiation and chemotherapy, the beard loss may be permanent.

Hey, I'm not complaining. I can always sprout a 'stache to remind myself of my manhood. In fact, I'm studying the packaging of Brawny paper towels to see if that might be a winning look for me.

Around the time that radiation was wreaking havoc on my facial hair, my best buddy started to allow his beard to grow out.

Just a short while ago, his beard's growth looked like how Granny Hall perceived Woody Allen's character in that scene from "Annie Hall." Currently, he's sporting more of a Paul Bunyan look, and he seems to aspire to become a doppelganger for one of the guitar slingers in ZZ Top.

It's a good look for him but frankly, I don't know how he's able to hold his head upright when the thing gets damp.

Me, I'm still hoping that my life reverts to normal in the wake of this cancer ordeal. But if the consequences of cancer treatment leave me saddled with this itty-bitty side effect, I'd be better off than I was before.

I'll take my Ser-Chia pet lip growth any day.

A sad day

The protests that followed the passage of Proposition 8 last November seem like a lifetime ago to me.

I rode my bike to all of the rallies and marches I attended: in West Hollywood, Hollywood, Silver Lake and in downtown L.A. I wasn't able to yell like most of the other marchers –my voice was already faltering– but just showing up in the streets in those days and weeks after Prop. 8 passed made a loud statement in its own way.

Like millions of other people, I was logged on to the California State Supreme Court's website on Tuesday morning as 10 o'clock approached, nervously refreshing my browser so I would see the court ruling the instant it was posted. In my gut, I knew that the court would uphold Prop. 8, but in my heart I was hoping against reason that Prop. 8 somehow would be overturned.

It reminded me of September 2005, when a bill legalizing same-sex marriage landed on Gov. Schwarzenegger's desk, and he faced the choice of vetoing it or signing it into law. I was working with an advocacy group fighting for marriage equality at the time, and I thought the governor just might decide to stun everyone and sign the legislation. We had news releases prepared in the event of either outcome.

Gov. Schwarzenegger didn't sign the marriage equality bill in 2005, and he didn't make marriage equality a reality in 2007, either, when the state Legislature sent a similar bill to the governor's desk.

That step forward was taken by the State Supreme Court last May.

Now the court has taken a step backward by upholding Prop. 8. The governor tweeted his reaction –"I believe one day CA will recognize gay marriage but I will uphold decision. Made right choice allowing 18K marriages before vote to stand"– and then went on the Tonight Show, while outraged Californians marched in cities across the state.

I decided to sit out Tuesday's demonstrations. Some days, by the time I get home from work and pour dinner down my tube, my energy is depleted, and Tuesday was one of those days.

The news on Tuesday wasn't all bad. The court did state that the 18,000 same-sex unions that took place last year between June and Election Day remain legal.

I'm happy for those 18,000 couples. I know a bunch of 'em and believe they have just as much of a right to remain married as anyone.

As for the rest of us, well, Tuesday's ruling is a sad moment for California. In the eyes of six justices of the California Supreme Court and 52 percent of California voters who approved Prop. 8 last November, gay men and lesbians are second-class citizens who don't enjoy the same rights as everyone else.

Despite what the governor may tweet, marriage equality in California isn't inevitable. There's a lot more ground to cover in this fight, and there's too much at stake for people who care about their rights to sit on the sidelines.

What would Mister Magoo do?

The other night I stepped up to the box office of a movie theater on Hollywood Boulevard to buy a ticket.

After I held up a single finger, the woman on the other side of the glass looked at me and asked, "Senior or adult?"

I grabbed a pen, wrote "ADULT!" across the front page of a newspaper I was carrying, and then underlined it a few times.

I was stunned. No one had ever offered a senior discount to me before! At 51 years old, I'm a good decade away from being able to legitimately qualify for discounts available for senior citizens.

I stewed in my seat awhile, pondering what might have prompted the woman in the box office to think I was a senior citizen.

I don't wear Mister Magoo glasses. I wasn't toting a box of Depends. I have a full head of hair and it's not glued to my scalp.

As I waited for the movie to begin, I sent a text message to a friend about the slight at the box office window. He texted back: "Smack her."

Soon the lights went down, and I forgot about the insult.

A few days went by, and on Monday I went to a friend's Memorial Day barbecue. On Monday evening, I started to get emails telling me that people at the barbecue were posting photos from the party on Facebook and tagging me in them.

I opened one of the photos and thought, "Say, who is that geezer? Was he at the party? Sure don't remember seeing him."

Then I recognized the Paul Frank kerchief around the geezer's neck and realized that the geezer was ME!

Throughout the evening, I got alerts from Facebook that I had been tagged in more photos from the party. I looked old in every one of 'em!

Sometime over the past six months or so, I've been catapulted into the middle of the 21st Century. This may be a result of the effects of cancer; it could be AIDS finally catching up with me; it may be the fact that the situation with my mouth prevents me from wearing my dentures, giving me that tell-tale "Grampa forgot to put his choppers in" look.

Whatever it is, I might as well just accept it.

And start milking dem senior discount opportunities.

More tongue troubles

Turns out that the road to recovery isn't a one-way street.

Just when I thought that I was making solid progress in getting cancer behind me, and my weeks of coping with a swollen tongue were becoming only a dim memory, I've had three consecutive days of tongue swelling.

At the same time, the lower left side of my face is numb to the touch.

I brought up the numbness sensation with Dr. B1 on my last visit. He told me it wasn't unusual, and could go away with the passage of time. But he also warned me that the numbness may be here to stay.

It's been exactly two months since my radiation and chemotherapy treatments concluded, so I'm still in that window period where it's too soon to determine if the first round of treatments succeeded.

I'm trying not to dwell on each and every twitch, throb or tingle that I feel. I don't go back to see Dr. B1 for another three weeks, and a week following that I have a PET scan scheduled.

A PET scan may do to any lingering cancer cells in my body what George Bush tried to do to terrorists lurking in the caves of Afghanistan: it'll smoke 'em out.

The next step in Bush's strategy was to bring terrorists to justice.

I'm not feeling that generous toward my cancer cells, frankly. Doc, let's skip the military tribunals and execute my cancer cells on the spot.

The great escape

I'd go nuts if all I did was wring my hands and moan about cancer.

So every now and then, I tell cancer to buzz off.

Movies are my preferred escape hatch from this miserable disease.

If I'm not plopped on my sofa pouring Isosource in my belly while watching "Bubble Boy" for the umpteenth time, I'm slouching in a movie theater, probably with my shoes kicked off and my feet resting on the seat in front of me.

For someone looking to hide out from his or her troubles in a dark movie theater, L.A. is great city to live in. You're not limited to seeing the latest blockbuster, stuffy, arch art films or sterile cartoons animated in 3D. If you know where to look, you can always find something stimulating screening in this burg and I'm not only talking about the films that play at the Tom Kat in West Hollywood.

This week, I escaped to the movies to forget about cancer three times and not one of the films I saw starred Tom Hanks or a Vulcan.

On Sunday in Eagle Rock I caught a 1928 silent feature called "Laugh, Clown, Laugh." Lon Chaney plays a traveling circus clown named Tito who finds an abandoned child tied to a tree. Tito raises the child as if she was his own, and then he falls in love with her, and she with him.

I think "Laugh, Clown, Laugh" was a direct inspiration for Woody Allen and Soon-Yi.

Two nights later, I went to the Skirball Cultural Center and saw the 1941 drama "How Green Was My Valley." The title sounds like a question but it wasn't. Anyhow, the valley wasn't green at all; it was black and white. They should have titled this film "How Red Was My Bare Bottom" or "Citizen Caned" because the narrator, a young Roddy McDowall, really gets some lickings over the two hours of this film.

So while these two films may have raised disturbing concerns like incest and child abuse, for two whole evenings, I was able to take a vacation from cancer.

Then on Thursday, at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, I saw Dalton Trumbo's "Johnny Got His Gun," from 1971.

I didn't know much about this film going in, so I settled in for another evening of escapism from my troubles.

"Johnny Got His Gun," set during World War I, tells the story of a 19-year-old soldier named Joe Bonham, who gets severely wounded in an artillery blast and wakes up in a hospital bed surrounded by doctors. Gradually, we learn that Bonham has lost his arms, his legs and his face, but his brain remains active. The movie combines Bonham's memories and fantasies and the tragic reality of his existence, virtually immobile in the hospital bed.

Bonham is mostly concealed with sheets and a hood during the scenes in the hospital but his neck is exposed. To my surprise, it turns out that Bonham has been given a tracheotomy.

When the trach first was shown, my buddy nudged me and said something like "maybe this isn't a movie that you really want to see."

Well, I didn't find the trach disturbing –although judging by how much Bonham's trach resembled mine, it appears that trach technology hasn't advanced much since the early 1900s.

What is disturbing was the fact that wars continue to be waged nearly a century after the time that "Johnny Got His Gun" was set, and we just keep getting more efficient at manufacturing casualties.

The ending of the story is as bleak as any ending to a movie that I have ever seen. So I can't really claim that my evening watching "Johnny Got His Gun" was escapism in any way, certainly not coming on the eve of Memorial Day weekend.

So tonight I'm purging the melancholy taste that the film left in my mouth by heading to the El Capitan to see "The Boys," a documentary about Richard and Robert Sherman, brothers who were composers for Disney films like "Mary Poppins," "The Jungle Book" and "Winnie the Pooh," and who even composed the song "It's Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow" from Disneyland's Carousel of Progress attraction.

I'm not expecting "The Boys" to bring me down. But if I get a close look at Tigger, and realize that his tail is actually a G-tube, I'm going to ask for my money back.