When my dad returned, we moved to San Antonio. I consider that my childhood home because I was there from fourth grade through high school.
My mother said I had musical talent from an early age. I recall how my parents used to stand me on the center of the dining room table at dinner parties to sing for their guests. In high school, I performed in musical productions and as a tenor soloist for America’s Youth in Concert when the group sang at Carnegie Hall. I also auditioned for Juilliard, which offered me a scholarship. But I decided to remain in Texas for college and graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in music.
After working as the musical director of a Dallas theater company, I moved to New York in 1990 to pursue a career as an opera singer. While in Texas, I had seen “The Normal Heart,” a play by Larry Kramer about an AIDS activist, so I was already aware of the AIDS crisis. But New York felt like a war zone to me as a gay man. The city seemed to be plastered with posters about H.I.V., particularly in Greenwich Village, and the activist organization Act Up/NY was working to draw attention to AIDS.
While auditioning for roles in opera and musical theater, I got a job working in the classical music section at Tower Records. Larry Kramer came in late one night, and while helping him I told him how moved I had been by his play. He looked at me and said: “Really? So what are you doing about it? If you really want to do something, come and join us at Act Up.”
He was right — I had to get involved. I joined the committee that studied the science behind AIDS and reported back to the group. I was also an assistant for an ophthalmologist who started a research program at what is now the N.Y.U. Langone Medical Center to study cytomegalovirus retinitis, an eye infection that people with AIDS sometimes get. I worked part time on that project and on others dealing with various infections associated with AIDS.
As an activist, I often talked to Dr. Ellen Cooper at the Food and Drug Administration, who had overseen the approval of AZT, the first AIDS drug. After leaving the F.D.A., Dr. Cooper went to work for amfAR, and in 1994 she hired me as her assistant. I rose through the ranks and became C.E.O. in 2007.
Today, we’re at the most interesting and opportune time in the history of the epidemic, but it’s the most perilous as well. Research has given us some spectacular advances. We now have extraordinary tools at our disposal, including a microbicide that reduces a woman’s risk of acquiring H.I.V. and a pill that helps prevent its acquisition in gay men.
When you combine these advances with what we know about the effectiveness of condoms, of male circumcision and of providing clean syringes to addicts for preventing transmission of the disease, we can radically change the face of the epidemic. But it takes money to distribute these tools. At amfAR, we’re directing 60 percent of our research grants to finding a cure.
A friend once said that if one person has AIDS it’s a tragedy, but when more than 33 million people are infected globally it’s just a statistic. For me the epidemic is personal; it’s not abstract. I’ve lost too many friends to AIDS. But I remain optimistic.
I haven’t given up on music. When this epidemic ends — and I believe we can end it in my lifetime — I’ll be able to pursue it again.
As told to Patricia R. Olsen.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=7f0d69938e7c4dd0409dac6ce565c1bf
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