Lack of information is a big problem! Just try clicking on the Ryan White Program website and making clear sense of it. Try googling HIV treatment and finding clear instructions for how to get help. Oh, if you live in NYC, Chicago, San Fransisco, or Los Angeles — or other big cities — you’ll probably be fine.

But if you live in the rural South, or in some small town in the Med West Bible Belt, good luck.

Outreach is the key. Getting affordable medication into people’s hands is the key. We’re doing (collectively, as a nation) a very poor job at that.

It’s hard to get people to care, though, because the people dying are marginalized anyway. They’re usually poor, Black or Latinx, or elderly. They fall between the cracks because nobody’s paying attention, and because they just don’t matter enough to make a fuss about.

I write about the issue sometimes, and I must say the response is always underwhelming.

White, middle-class, privileged people aren’t dying of AIDS. So getting people to give a damn is an uphill struggle