I have been writing about LGBT issues, popular culture, health and medicine since the early 1980s. I built my career as a journalist over more than two decades in Washington, D.C., after earning a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University. Besides my independent journalism, I have put my reporting and storytelling skills to use in staff positions as senior editor, staff writer, and publicist for national and global HIV-AIDS projects and public health organizations. My 1999 book Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America (University of Chicago Press) represented the culmination of years of reporting on the HIV-AIDS epidemic and its impact on gay men in particular. Kirkus Reviews called Victory Deferred "the most important AIDS chronicle since Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On." I am proud to say the book won a Lambda Literary Award ("Editors' Choice") and was a finalist for awards from the American Library Association and the New York Publishing Triangle. The interview recordings, notebooks, and other research materials I used to develop Victory Deferred are now part of a special collection curated by the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. I wrote Hot Stuff: A Brief History of Disco (HarperCollins) in 2001 because I have always loved music and dancing, just like my late dad. It was fascinating and fun to look back to the 1970s when I started going to discos at age 18—when they were unironically called discos! Wilhelmina Goes Wandering is my first children's book. I prefer to call it a fable for kids ages 5 to 105. Based on the true story of a runaway cow in Connecticut, where I grew up and returned after 30 years in 2007, this is a tale of learning to accept ourselves as different and finding that our true home—where others also accept our difference—may not be our "familiar pasture." I've written three more stories, a prequel and two sequels, for a "Betty's Farm" series, and intend to publish them as soon as I can raise the funds—or find a publisher who will be excited by the awesome feedback Wilhelmina Goes Wandering has received. "Extraordinary" is how the president of the New England School Library Association described it. My newest book, published in October 2017, examines the amazing resilience that most gay men develop in response to the many traumas they experience for being "different." Stonewall Strong: Gay Men's Heroic Fight for Resilience, Good Health, and a Strong Community (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers) shares my personal story of finding “what I am made of” after my 2005 HIV diagnosis. Stonewall Strong is the "bookend" of Victory Deferred. It shows what AIDS taught gay men about our own power, individually and as a community, through our most perilous fight—the fight for life itself. It’s my most “personal” book to date, and it’s the platform for the “Stonewall Strong” blog on resilience I write for Psychology Today.