HIV and Aids Showbiz and Celebrity Breaking News

Carl Bean was a minister, AIDS activist, and singer known for his 1977 dance club hit, “I Was Born This Way.”Bean, a gay man, was singing in gospel groups and appearing in Broadway shows when Motown Records asked him to record a cover of “I Was Born This Way,” first recorded in 1975 by Valentino.

Patrick O’Connell was the founding director of Visual AIDS, where he developed programs for HIV/AIDS awareness including the red ribbon.O’Connell was a member of New York City’s gay community in the 1980s, when AIDS was ravaging that community but was rarely talked about elsewhere. The government was largely silent as the then-misunderstood disease killed many.

Joseph Sonnabend was a physician who was one of the first to notice symptoms in his patients that would later be identified as HIV/AIDS.A native of South Africa, Sonnabend studied in London and later came to the U.S. to practice medicine.

Leanza Cornett was a TV personality and musician who was crowned Miss Florida in 1992 and Miss America in 1993.Before she was crowned Miss Florida, Cornett was the first to play Ariel in the live-action “Voyage of the Little Mermaid” at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, and she was in the contemporary Christian music group Area Code. In 1991, she was crowned Miss National Sweetheart before moving on to fame as Miss America, the first Miss Florida ever to win the national pageant.

Timothy Ray Brown was known as the “Berlin patient,” the first person who was known to have been cured of HIV infection.Brown was working as a translator in Berlin in the 1990s when he was diagnosed with HIV. He took protease inhibitors, allowing him to have a near normal life expectancy, but in 2006, he was also diagnosed with leukemia.

Flossie Wong-Staal was a molecular virologist whose research on HIV was crucial in the development of blood tests to detect the virus.A native of Hong Kong, Wong-Staal immigrated to the U.S. as a student and later began working with the National Institutes of Health.

NEW YORK — Larry Kramer, an author, playwright and film producer who helped shape U.S. healthcare policy with his early advocacy of a national response to AIDS when it first emerged in the 1980s, died on Wednesday at 84.

NEW YORK — Author Larry Kramer, whose early advocacy for a national response to AIDS as the disease first emerged in the 1980s helped raise awareness and shape healthcare policy into the 1990s, died on Wednesday at 84.

“Is it safe to have sex amidst this Coronavirus outbreak?” S* posted in an online LGBTQ+ wellness forum, earlier this week.