In 1960 I entered Harvard Medical School with a plan to take degrees, first in Medicine and then in Psychology, as preparation for becoming a Psychoanalyst. About halfway through the medical course, I dropped out due to disillusion with what I had learned about both psychiatry and psychoanalysis.

One of the pivotal moments in arriving at this decision was a Saturday Clinic at the Beth Israel Hospital in which a small group of students (all men of course) accompanied a psychiatrist on his morning rounds. I’ll never forget the moment when we arrived at the bed of a young man who was actually strapped down. …

It seems curious to me that many people (most?) still use the term epidemic with reference to HIV-AIDS rather than pandemic, often in a way that implies that COVID-19 is the first pandemic since the 1918 Spanish Flu. Yet AIDS is certainly a pandemic by any measure.

My Oxford dictionary says that the word pandemic is a subset of the word epidemic: “A pandemic is a widespread epidemic that may affect entire continents or even the world”. The WHO website uses the terms ‘pandemic’ and ‘global epidemic’ for both COVID-19 and HIV-AIDS

The 35+ million (overall total) that have died from HIV-AIDS were spread over every country in the world, and it‘s still the leading cause of death in some countries. Nearly 40 million are still living with HIV. About a million people a year still die from it. In many countries men and women have died in more or less equal numbers, and of course, depending on their sexual practices, straight people are as susceptible to AIDS as gay people. …

What to Expect from the Writing Queer Mystery Workshops

What’s Queer and What Ain’t

This session incorporates an informal overview of what is meant by Queer crime or mystery writing. First of all, how do we define the genre? It makes sense, at least as a starting point, to keep the definition relatively loose and broadly open. So we can say that a Queer Mystery story has at least one or more of the following particulars:

• an “out” lgbtq or ally author;
• a queer sleuth — whether Police Detective, CSI/DCI, forensic pathologist, lawyer or private eye (whether professional or amateur);
• one or more main characters from the lgbtqia+ gender spectrum (always remember that fictional queer victims & villains are a dime-a-dozen and often utilize stereotypes that are extremely harmful to…