NYC City Council candidate Corey Johnson has come out as HIV-positive in a NYT article which casts Johnson's political pursuits in the footsteps of his predecessor Tom Duane, who was also out, gay, and HIV-positive:
Mr. Duane famously won the district that covers much of Manhattan's West Side below 59th Street (currently represented by the mayoral candidate Christine C. Quinn) in 1991, during the height of the city's AIDS panic, as one of the first openly H.I.V. positive political candidates in the country. Lending his friend his valuable endorsement, Mr. Duane told me he phoned Mr. Johnson not long ago to talk about the campaign, asking him first, “How are we going to handle your H.I.V. status? Have you told your mother?”
Times have changed since then, however, though not completely:
When Mr. Duane joined the Senate in the late '90s, he said, there were people in Albany who would not shake his hand. He cries talking about a little boy upstate who was denied admission to his community pool because of his illness. “I'm the bearer of many people's secrets about H.I.V.,” Mr. Duane said.
Mr. Johnson has many friends with H.I.V. who fear telling employers. “There's still so much stigma and people don't realize it,” he told me.
And there is still more to be done for those who do not share the advantages of white men living in Chelsea — budget increases for the city's H.I.V./AIDS Services Administration, for example. Mr. Johnson is eager for a chance to have the fight.
More here…
Note: Johnson is Towleroad's former political director.
