Richard Berkowitz
was born in Newark, New Jersey and graduated from Rutgers University in 1977. An author and activist, he is probably best known for two landmark writings, which he co-authored along with Dr. Joseph Sonnabend and the late Michael Callen. First, the controversial 1982 New York Native article, "We Know Who We Are: Two Gay Men Declare War on Promiscuity" and second, the self-published 40 page manual, How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach, in May 1983, which has been hailed as the invention of safe sex and has served as the framework for safe sex campaigns ever since.

His 2003 book, Stayin' Alive: The Invention of Safe Sex (Westview Press) tells the story of his life as a sex worker in New York City before and after AIDS. He is the last surviving co-founder of the People with AIDS self-empowerment movement, which helped sparked patient advocacy groups and breast cancer activism. His writing has appeared in dozens of publications and has been quoted, attacked, misrepresented and occasionally praised in scores of books, journals and on-line magazines.

Currently, Richard lives alone in Chelsea and spends his free time with his mother, four nephews and niece.

Dr. Joseph Sonnabend
(born 1932 in South Africa) is a distinguished retired physician, scientist and AIDS researcher, notable for pioneering community-based research, the propagation of "safe sex" to prevent infection, and an early and unconventional "multifactorial" model of AIDS. During the 1980s and 1990s he treated many hundreds of HIV positive people.

Dr. Sonnabend was born to a physician mother and a university professor father in South Africa. He trained in infectious diseases at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. During the 1960s he conducted research at the National Institute for Medical Research in London, where he worked under Alick Isaacs, a pioneer of interferon research.

In the early 1970s Sonnabend moved to New York to be an associate professor at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. After losing his interferon research grant he worked at Kings County Hospital Center and as Director of Continuing Medical Education at the Bureau of VD Control for the New York City Department of Health. In 1978 he started a private clinic for sexually transmitted infections in Greenwich Village.

Dr. Sonnabend was one of the first physicians to notice among his gay male patients the immune deficiency that would later be named AIDS. Independently of government agencies he conducted some of the earliest research on the syndrome, and in 1983 founded one of the first AIDS journals, AIDS Research (renamed AIDS research and human retroviruses in 1986, after Sonnabend's departure).

Larry Kramer
is an American playwright, author, public health advocate and gay rights activist. He was nominated for an Academy Award, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and was twice a recipient of an Obie Award. In response to the AIDS crisis he founded Gay Men's Health Crisis, which became the largest organization of its kind in the world. He wrote The Normal Heart, the first serious artistic examination of the AIDS crisis. He later founded ACT UP, a protest organization widely credited with having changed public health policy and the public's awareness of HIV and AIDS. Kramer currently lives in New York City and Connecticut.

Ardele Lister
has been making films and videotapes since the early 70s when she co-founded ReelFeelings, a women's media collective, in Vancouver, Canada.

When her first film, So Where's My Prince Already? ('76), was selected for the International Festival of Women's Films, Ardele relocated to New York City, where she has since lived and worked. Her works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Beaubourag Centre (Paris), the Kunsthalle (Berlin), and the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa)- to name a few. Lister founded The Independent, the monthly publication for independent video and filmmakers (still published by the Foundation for Independent Video and Film), and has written on media and art for Afterimage, Felix, Criteria and other publications.

The characters in many of Lister’s works, particularly the early films (So Where’s My Prince Already, and Split) ask us to reconsider what on the surface appears to be ordinary people struggling to make sense of their lives, as they are lived and mythologized. Hell, Behold the Promised Land and Conditional Love (See Under Nationalism-Canada) look at how media contributes to our beliefs, hopes, disappointments and most of all, our identities. Whether the subject matter is serious or playful, personal or political, Lister creates work full of humo(u)r and pathos which reflects and hono(u)rs the complexities of people's daily lives.
One of the first artists to work with digital technologies, Lister’s art (notably Hell, 1984) led to her work on avant-garde television projects such as PeeWee's Playhouse (CBS). For this innovative television show Lister produced all the Connect the Dots segments, in which live-action Pee Wee jumped into the computer generated Magic Screen, to be digitally layered and animated.

Lister is an Associate Professor in the Visual Arts Dept., Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, teaching media production and critical studies.

Krishna Stone
is the Assistant Director of Community Relations at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York City. She has worked with GMHC for the past 15 years in many capacities. She began her career their as a volunteer in 1986 with the first AIDS Walk New York.

Sean O. Strub is well-known as an activist, writer and entrepreneur. He has founded many successful fundraising, publishing and marketing organizations, virtually all in support of progressive social change efforts. He founded POZ Magazine in 1994 and has received numerous awards and honors from AIDS organizations, community and professional groups, including the 1995 AIDS Action Foundation's National Leadership Award, the 1996 Cielo Latino Companero award from the Latino Commission on AIDS and Los Angeles-based Being Alive's Spirit of Hope award in 1997. A native Iowan, Sean attended Georgetown and Columbia Universities. He lives in Milford, Pennsylvania and New York City.

Demetre Daskalakis M.D., B.A.
is an assistant Professor in the department of Medicine (Infectious Diseases& Immunology) at New York University’s Hospital. He attended NYU’s School of Medicine and has written many articles about infectious diseases affecting the Gay Population.

Richard Dworkin
is a musician and has been active on the New York music scene since 1980, when he began playing with the Microscopic Septet. He has appeared on over 35 CDs, drumming for James Chance, Alex Chilton, Harry Shearer, Samm Bennett, Eric Anderson, Fast 'n Bulbous, Michael Callen, and others. He is the surviving partner of beloved activist Michael Callen.

William Haseltine
is Chairman and CEO of Haseltine Associates, Ltd. and President of the William A. Haseltine Foundation for Medical Sciences and the Arts. He is a professor at The Scripps Research Institute and sits on the board for the Institute for One World Health. In 1992, he founded Human Genome Sciences, serving as its chairman and CEO until October 2004. A Harvard University faculty member from 1976-1993, he created and served as chair of two academic departments – the Division of Cancer Pharmacology and the Division of Human Retrovirology – at Harvard’s Dana Farber Cancer Institute. Haseltine founded The Journal of AIDS Research and Retrovirology and The Journal of Regenerative Medicine. He has received numerous awards and honors for his research on cancer, AIDS, and biotechnology. His active business career includes establishing seven biotechnology companies, among them, Dendreon, Diversa, and Human Genome Sciences and participating in the formation of another 20, including Medimmune, as a Healthcare Ventures advisor. Active in the scientific and public policy communities, he sits on numerous boards. Haseltine did graduate and postgraduate work with Nobel laureates James Watson, Walter Gilbert and David Baltimore. Haseltine earned his Ph.D. in biophysics from Harvard University.

Michael Lucas
was born in Moscow, Russia. He was raised in Moscow and attended college there, graduating with a degree in law. In 1995, Lucas moved to Germany, then to France, where he began modeling and appearing on several European television programs and covers of many European magazines. In 1998, Lucas opened his own production company, Lucas Entertainment, in New York City. Later that year, he made his directorial debut with the well-received Back in the Saddle. This first production sparked the Michael Lucas "renegade" vision that is indelibly New York. Additionally, basing his company in New York City, as opposed to the more traditional Los Angeles, enabled Lucas to showcase the diversity of types and ethnicities found nowhere else. He currently produces many adult male films, some of which he stars in.

Francisco Roque
serves as Assistant Director for the Institute for Gay Men’s Health at GMHC where he supports innovative approaches to reaching and mobilizing men most impacted by HIV/AIDS. These include community driven programming, dynamic publications, and high visibility social marketing campaigns. Mr. Roque coordinated programs at The Hispanic AIDS Forum in Jackson Heights for three years. Prior to moving to New York he managed Demonstration Projects for the Office of AIDS Programs and Policy (OAPP) for Los Angeles County. He also coordinated prevention programs for the African American Support Services and Survival Institute (AMASSI) in South Central, Los Angeles for three years. Over all he has worked in HIV prevention for over 10 years in both Los Angeles and New York focusing primarily on “Communities of Color”.

Edmund White
noted author, cultural critic, and playwright, continues to make his mark on the world of literature. Growing up in an era when homosexuality was socially unacceptable, he spent his teenage years searching for images of affirmation. Finding none, White would go on to build his literary career around describing and validating gay community.

With a career spanning four decades, White has provided the world with a smart, unapologetic look into the lives of gay men. Many of his novels take place in Paris, mirroring his own period of living in France from 1983 to 1990. Many of his later works focus on the difficulties of living and loving in the time of AIDS, of dealing with losses he has described as “far more painful than cathartic. ”White’s long career has produced a total of seventeen books, and he has written plays, novels, short stories, travelogues, essays, autobiographies, and biographies, including the award-winning Genet: A Biography. He has been equally influential as a cultural critic, writing scores of reviews and articles, and editing three anthologies, including Loss Within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS.

Gabriel Rotello
is an author, journalist and documentary writer/producer/director living in Los Angeles. Since 1998 he has produced and directed numerous documentaries for HBO, Showtime, Bravo, Cinemax, AMC, Vh1 and other networks. They range from Bravo's lighthearted "The Christmas Special Christmas Special" to Cinemax's controversial "Hidden Fuhrer: Debating the Enigma of Hitler's Sexuality." He has also produced and directed a number of documentary series such as AMC's "Movies That Shook The World," a look at the way films have shaped culture. Prior to coming to TV, Rotello was the founding editor-in-chief of OutWeek Magazine in 1989. In 1992 he became the first openly gay man to be named as a columnist for a major American newspaper, New York Newsday.

Rotello has been a columnist for The Advocate, and has contributed to The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Out Magazine, The Village Voice, The Nation, The New Scientist and many other publications. He recieved the GLAAD Media Award as Outstanding Journalist of the Year in 1995. In 1997 Rotello's landmark book "Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men" was published by Dutton.

Dotty Berkowitz is Richard’s mother. She is retired and resides in New Jersey.

Don Adler is a former sex worker and school teacher. He lives in New York City.

Bill Stackhouse is the Director of Gay Men’s Health Crisis Institute for Gay Men.