HIV/AIDS

Kushner adapted his epic Tony-award winning play Angels in America into a screenplay for HBO (broadcast this month in two three-hour parts). The play is set in New York in the mid-1980s during the midst of the AIDS epidemic. The HBO film is directed by Mike Nichols and stars Al Pacino, Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson. Kushner also has a new semi-autobiographical musical Caroline, or Change at the Public Theater in New York.

Goemaere is head of Doctors Without Borders ( Medecins Sans Frontieres) in South Africa and a leading AIDS activist for South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign. He was recently featured on a Frontline report, "AIDS Treatment for Africa: The South African Struggle," that appeared on PBS.

Journalist Jon Cohen recently finished a four-part series on HIV and AIDS in Asia for the Science Magazine. In researching the series, he traveled to six countries and talked to doctors, patients, public health officials, sex workers and drug users. Cohen has been writing about the AIDS epidemic for 15 years. His book on the search for a vaccine is called Shots in the Dark.

Writer Susan Sontag died Wednesday at age 71 of leukemia. We listen back to two interviews with her: a 1989 conversation about her book AIDS and Its Metaphors; and 1993 interview conducted shortly after Sontag returned from Sarajevo, where she directed a performance of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot in Serbo-Croatian.

With Desmond Tutu leaving as the Anglican Bishop of Capetown, South Africa, Njongonkulu Ndugane will replace him. He is an outspoken leader against poverty, third-world debt, and HIV/AIDS.

The novel Veronica by Mary Gaitskill.

Edmund White has been writing about gay culture in fiction and nonfiction since the 1970s. He has a new autobiography, My Lives. White is director of the creative writing program at Princeton University.

Dr. Mark Kline is president of the Baylor International Pediatric AIDS Initiative and chief of retrovirology at Texas Children's Hospital. Kline discusses his efforts and the advances that have been made in treating HIV-infected children.

Last summer, Kline launched the Pediatric AIDS Corps, which sends doctors to six African countries to treat HIV-infected children and train medical professionals. Recently, BIPAI signed an agreement with UNICEF to get first-rate drugs to infected children throughout the world.

In her new book, The Wisdom of Whores, epidemiologist Elizabeth Pisani interviews sex workers, drug users, health officials and bureaucrats in an effort to determine why 40 million people are living with HIV — and what can be done to curb the epidemic.

The actor plays Muddy Waters in the new film Cadillac Records, which tells the story of Chicago's Chess Records, where Waters launched his career alongside Etta James, Chuck Berry and others.

AIDS activist Martin Delaney died from liver cancer Jan. 23 at the age of 63. Delaney was a former Jesuit seminarian and the founder of Project Inform, an organization that speeds access to AIDS treatments.

Gay rights activist Rodger McFarlane was involved in the earliest efforts to combat the transmission of AIDS during the 1980s. McFarlane, who was 54, died May 15. According to his bother, the cause of death was suicide.

In 2008, jazz pianist Fred Hersch slipped into an AIDS-related coma for more than two months. When he came out of the coma, he couldn't walk, eat or play piano. Hersch explains how he rebuilt himself after his illness and composed music for his latest album, Whirl.

Fresh Air's critic-at-large John Powers was raised to dislike Elizabeth Taylor. But he soon fell for her charms. He remembers the legendary actress who was a siren on-screen -- and a committed supporter of HIV/AIDS research.

Journalist Craig Timberg, the former Johannesburg bureau chief for The Washington Post, says international AIDS organizations working in Africa went off in the wrong direction in fighting the spread of HIV across the continent.

AIDS is the primary killer of African-Americans ages 19 to 44, and the mortality rate is 10 times higher for black Americans than for whites. A new Frontline documentary explores why.

Marco Roth grew up on New York's Upper West Side in the 1980s, where a liberal Jewish culture infused with European tastes was breathing its last gasps. In his memoir, Roth describes how he learned -- years after his father died from AIDS -- that his father was probably gay.

In her new memoir, Fairyland, Alysia Abbott describes her childhood as the daughter of an openly gay father in San Francisco while the gay liberation movement was gaining strength. Her book is based largely on her father's journals, which she found after his death in 1992.

In Dallas Buyers Club, Leto plays Rayon, a transgender woman who is living with HIV and a drug habit. Rayon becomes an unlikely friend to Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey), a rodeo cowboy who starts smuggling HIV drugs from Mexico in the 1980s after he's diagnosed as HIV-positive and given just a few weeks to live.

On Sunday night, HBO presents a new TV version of Larry Kramer's 1985 play. Kramer himself wrote the adaptation, which stars Mark Ruffalo and Julia Roberts.