Tag Archives: St. Vincent’s Hospital

Whats "Too Gay" Today? – New Zealand’ Speed Skater Blake Skjellerup, VP Joe Biden’s Big Gay Weekend, Lady Gaga’s 12 MTV Award Nominations, St Vincent’s Hospital Ghost?, True Blood’s Bill and Lorena "An Undying Love" (Video) and MORE!

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* Cute and OUT New Zealand Speed Skater Blake Skjellerup (pictured left)  is single again.  Damn  WHY does New Zealand have to be so far away!

*  Vice President Joe Biden had a BIG GAY Weekend in The Hamptons when GeoCities founder, billionaire, tech entrepreneur, and gay philanthropist David Bohnett (of the David Bohnett Foundation) opened his South Hampton home to the Bidens for the weekend,  (Don;t get me wrong.  I’m not bashing Joe.  he is a nadsome silverdaddy and who in thier right mind would kick Beau Biden out of bed?)

Lady Gaga says that she was put on earth to do 3 things.  To make loud music, gay videos, and cause a damn raucous.  To bad one of them wasn’t to boycott Arizona, huh?

*  The L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center has banned smoking outdoors: “As a leader in LGBT health, the Center feels strongly that we should set an example within our community.” How about setting an example with TRUR TRANSPARANCY huh Lorri Jean?
* A shost at the closed down St. Vincents Hospital in NYC?  Perhaps it’s the ghost of all our friends who died of AIDS at St Vincents and the ghost of all the bills that St Vincents never asked poor people to pay.  I miss you guys.

*  Actor Mark Ruffalo talks about being cast as The Hulk in Joss Whedon’s upcoming GFB movie “Avengers”: “I look at it as my generation’s Hamlet.” (Yeah and you know what happened to Hamlet, right?)

*  “True Blood’s Bill amd Lorena – An Undying Love  –  (SPOILERS if you haven’t seen Sundays episode!)

Goodbye Saint Vincent’s Hospital. And Thank You.

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St. Vincent’s Hospital has never strayed from its core mission to provide care with respect, compassion and dignity for the poor and displaced members of society and in 1981 when a mysterious disease began affecting gay men in New York City.  While many other hospitals turned patients away St. Vincent’s Hospital, near the border of the Greenwich Village on West 12th Street did not.   In fact, the hospital treated and diagnosed some of the first known cases of what would eventually become known as AIDS.

Dr. Dennis Greenbaum, Chairman of Medicine at St. Vincent’s, has been with the hospital for 42 years. He saw the horror that HIV/AIDS wrought in the early days. “We didn’t know how to protect ourselves. The ICU would be filled with crying families,” Greenbaum says. “There were funerals every week. I used to live on 13th Street. I had four next-door neighbors who lived in a huge loft and all of them died. I used to go to a lot of  funerals. Then we lost our own doctors. We lost the chiefs of our HIV program.”

The obituary for St. Vincent’s, when it is finally written, will recall that the hospital’s greatest moment—and its darkest when it found itself quite awkwardly in the thick of the global AIDS plague. The flood of patients was extreme, spilling into every available bed, then throughout the surrounding corridors, where masking tape marked off virtual rooms

Sal Licata, a city AIDS specialist, spent his last days at H-01 (H for “Hallway”), waiting in vain for a room to die in. A few feet down the hall was pneumonia-weakened Aldyn McKean, his old friend, a hero of ACT UP. If you knew one patient at the hospital, you likely knew others.

For anyone familiar with those rooms and those days, news of St. Vincent’s demise is hard to accept. There is no true standing memorial to HIV victims, even though there were more from New York by 1995 than U.S. deaths in the Vietnam War. The bland building along Seventh Avenue holds that place in the geography of our plague memory; it’s our ground zero, it is a museum, a place haunted.  We see the ghosts as we pass there even now, we hear their voices, their last words, and the memories of those who vanished from those rooms and our lives.

Goodbye Saint Vincent’s.

And thank you.