Tim Barrus, New York Times

I am conflicted about inclusion. I have been in the thick of it. In some ways, it’s just managing chaos. After a year of inclusion, my typical 6th graders never once invited the disabled in – the disabled kids were not their friends, they were just obstacles in the classroom…

Tim Barrus: The New York Times

Sometimes Kara seems like she might have lost her edge. Kushner is hopeful. I am not here to dish him. I’m just not hopeful. It seems like an easy intellectual out to me.

Tim Barrus, New York Times

For me, it’s foster kids with HIV. At 18, they are dropped at the side of the road, and the bus leaves them standing in a swirling dust. The kind of assistance federal dollars pay for community AIDS support is a quaint idea. It’s a systematically designed dysfunctional institution (hates…

Tim Barrus, New York Times

Today, HIV gets a tiny mention in the New York Times. In an article about sexually transmitted diseases. One word at the end of the piece. This, too, marginalizes. We are ashamed. We hang our heads. We did it to ourselves. Normals refuse to see HIV as a sexually transmitted…

The Straws That Break the Camel’s Back

Tim Barrus, the New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/03/health/coronavirus-tuberculosis-aids-malaria.html#commentsContainer&permid=108456967:108456967 Theoretically, someone could have multiple diseases. And public health, as we know it, is the answer. Malaria. Covid. TB. HIV. Are you kidding me. I have been visiting other public health systems versus just the one I am intimately acquainted with where I…

Tim Barrus in the New York Times

HIV clinics, here in Appalachia, often have no doctors on the premises. Doctors are expensive and are seen as a luxury. On a good day. These are not good days. It feels like the 1980s all over again. With HIV, your health is inherently precarious, and when the systems that…

A Deviant’s Morning Eyes

the way it unfolded was not unlike the way it always unfolds/ we are at opposite ends of a picnic table/ six feet apart/ but connecting/ boats in the immediate distance bobbing about on the water smelled of rich people somewhere else/ i am sitting with andrew as the dew…

Quarantined Boys

#Does that mean sex, too.” #Sex, too,” I explained. “It’s just another virus, not at all unlike the one you have.” There was a long silence among the boys. One disease could take more than we thought we could handle. Two was an abstraction. We do get out at night.…

Tim Barrus: New York Times

I teach boys at-risk who have HIV. Cancer and HIV are formidable. I have seen teenagers decide they cannot endure what they call poisoning. Adding antiretrovirals into a pharmacological regimen can be hard. Easier said than done. Especially with kids whose compliance is iffy, and who are not undetectable. TV…

The Drive to the HIV Clinic Far, Far Away

He usually falls asleep on the way there. I encourage this so I don’t have to listen to all the fear and paranoia. I have my own paranoia. “We’re here.” “I don’t want to go in there. Look, there are cops at the door.” There were cops at the door…

Tim Barrus: New York Times: Jumping Off the Cliff

Nicholas Kristoff at the New York Times is speaking about who and what American culture has left behind. I don’t think he sees much hope. If any. But he provides examples of hopefulness on the part of released prisoners. Why. Because he’s writing for an editor. I have written for…

Genetic Mutation in HIV: Tim Barrus in the New York Times

I’m with anything that will take out HIV. That particular species should be burned crisper than toast, slashed, nuked, bombed, extinguished, executed, shot by drones, mutated out of existence, and squashed. I’m with eradication. But what about the rogue nation that keeps the virus around. Like us. But what about…

Rabbit Hole

Boys with HIV kill themselves at rates eight times the rate of typical adolescents who attempt suicide. Children who kill themselves, kill themselves for a reason. And society recoils. The institutions of society need for the people in that society to want to stay. Or at least pretend to want…

When They Take The Food Right Out Of Your Mouth…

Contrary to what you might be hearing from the white, privileged, upper-middle-class activists, AIDS is not over. No quite yet. https://timbarrus.tumblr.com

Tim Barrus in the New York Times: Boys Who Do Sex Work

I teach boys called the Hard To Reach. More stigma. Most have done lots of sex work. Many have HIV. Some have starred in porn where the age of consent is fluid, often fictional, and enhanced youth in post-production. My work is exhausting and most traditional teachers vividly do not…

Tim Barrus in the New York Times

AIDS in Appalachia I live in the Blue Ridge in Appalachia where health care is a nightmare. Public Health has waiting lists which means you cannot get an appointment for seven to eight months. Public Health throws you around like you are just a carcass of meat. They sexually exploit…

Tim Barrus in the New York Times

I work with adolescent boys at-risk. Many have HIV. They are frequently referred to as – the Hard to Reach. A term that carries stigma like a tsunami. I tweet like crazy. Usually about them and me. Relationships matter. AIDS is not over. I want you to know that HIV…

Tim Barrus in the New York Times

AT NIGHT, THEY PACE you were sleeping and I would sculpt your naked body with the contours of my tongue/ you were that flawless carnal bleeding from your hole/ the inside of my mouth was eros drowned in blood/ in the cold hours of the night, you were awake and…

holding me up

in the war against boys, first you cut off their legs/ well, i am ill, but i’m not dead/ and i don’t know which of those i prefer because that limb which i have lost, well it was the only thing holding me up, holding me up/ https://timbarrusart.tumblr.com

when death is best

One Trip To One Clinic

The CDC is developing new projects “to defeat AIDS once and for all” they claim. Not one of those programs is destined for Appalachia. Not one. We are left with a world of breathtaking indifference. We do not exist. We are not important. We can drive all day and all…

What Cure

The Smash Street Boys and I wrote a book called JUST BEFORE THE CURE. We put the thing on Medium. One person read it. Sex, violence, and post-apocalyptic resistance were the project’s main themes. My original idea was that it could raise the awareness of the adolescent boys themselves as…

I Hate the Term: Hard to Reach

it brings up all the wrong images/ when i hear the term: hard to reach, it makes me want to puke/ it purports that as a source it means you are speaking truth to power when, in fact, it’s sheer bullshit designed to keep people and racial minorities in their…

visiting hours

they arrived when visiting hours were supposedly over of course they arrived when visiting hours were over everyone was supposed to leave the hospital so us inmates could all die alone like guards of the dark under our death sheets and our tongues of foam and our pushing the sky…

Ports In Storms

Fresh off the truck, I did not want to know how Dane stole the Harley-Davidson Low Rider. Since HIV, Dane has had one killer disease after another. He has an infusion port built into his forearm. An implanted venous access port is a device used to give treatments and take…