If I admit I’m HIV positive, some men immediately reject me. If I lie and say I’m HIV negative, many of those same men will gladly have unprotected sex with me.

That contradiction has haunted me for years and made me wonder: What would the gay men who died of AIDS in the 1980s think if they could see us now?

The future would absolutely astonish them. Everybody carries around a handheld device that can instantly broadcast their thoughts, faces, bodies, and lives to the entire planet. We elected a Black president twice. Same-sex marriage is legal. Gay people can openly marry, raise children, grow old together, and even get divorced like everybody else. HIV itself is no longer “the deadly disease” it was when I learned I was infected in 1985 at age 23.

Back then, life expectancy was often measured in months. Surviving long enough to grow old felt like science fiction.

Now there are medications that can suppress the virus so effectively, a person living with HIV can become “undetectable,” meaning they cannot sexually transmit the virus. Countless people who once expected to die can now live long enough to worry about all the ordinary things people worry about as they age: heart disease, bad knees and what restaurant closes too early.

Back then, that wasn’t even a pipe dream. But the future also got weird.

What shocks me most is not the medical progress. It’s the emotional contradiction surrounding it. The general public no longer fears sharing space with people living with HIV. Most people understand you cannot get HIV from a hug, a handshake, sharing food, breathing the same air, or sitting next to someone on a plane.

But sex is different. Especially in the gay world, where stigma still lingers in strange and contradictory ways.

I’ve watched gay men reject HIV-positive men while simultaneously engaging in anonymous unprotected sex with people whose status they know only because somebody typed a word into an app. “Negative.” “Clean.” “DDF.”

As if viruses never lie.

At the same time, we now live in a sexual culture far more open and visible than anything most gay people from the 1980s could have imagined. The bathhouse has largely been replaced by hookup apps and social media. Sexual behavior is documented, broadcast and archived in real time.

But greater sexual freedom did not necessarily bring greater emotional clarity.

Some men still fear HIV intensely. Others eroticize it. Some even document their attempts to acquire it.

We solved the medical crisis of HIV far faster than we solved the psychological, emotional and sexual contradictions surrounding it.

As a long-term survivor, I sometimes feel like a time traveler trapped between two worlds: one that remembers the terror and one that barely remembers the war.

That feeling became the seed for my new novel,“The Unfrozen Few.” I imagined a group of AIDS patients from the late 1980s choosing cryogenic freezing rather than death, only to wake up in present-day America. They emerge into a world of smartphones, same-sex marriage, social media and medical breakthroughs, but also into a world that still doesn’t fully know what to do with people living with HIV.

In many ways, the frozen few are simply long-term survivors with the volume turned all the way up.

I think the dead would be amazed by how far we’ve come. And stunned by the ways we still haven’t.

Randy Boyd is a longtime HIV survivor, five-time Lambda Literary Award finalist and author of five novels, including ‘The Unfrozen Few,’ a speculative series about AIDS patients who were cryogenically frozen in the 1980s and awaken in present-day America. More information is available at randyboydauthor.com.

Ghanaian lawmakers on Friday approved a bill that would, among other things, criminalize LGBTQ allyship.

Reuters reported MPs approved the Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill, 2025, in a voice vote after parliament’s Constitutional and Legal Affairs Committee backed it.

MPs in 2024 approved a similar bill, but it faced legal challenges and then-President Nana Akufo-Addo didn’t sign it. Lawmakers last year reintroduced the measure after President John Dramani Mahama took office.

The bill awaits his signature.

Rightify Ghana, a Ghanaian LGBTQ advocacy group, in a series of social media posts notes MPs passed the bill days before the 4th African Inter-Parliamentary Conference on Family Values and Sovereignty will take place in Accra, the country’s capital.

When Albert Camus published “L’etranger” (“The Stranger”) in 1942, he was living in Nazi-occupied France, so it’s no surprise that it became one of the most celebrated “existential” novels of all time. A fascist regime is great for inspiring thoughts of an indifferent and meaningless universe.

It wasn’t his first experience with authoritarianism. Born to a working-class white European family in then-French Algeria, he grew up observing the harsh treatment of the native North Africans by the colonists who governed them. It was this personal history, amplified by the spread of European fascism, that found its voice in “The Stranger.” Short, terse, and shrouded in a cloak of ennui, it was his first novel – novella, really – but its impact was seismic.

Naturally, its influence has run through the world of cinema, and, it has been translated to the screen three times — most recently by French filmmaker François Ozon, whose screen version won acclaim at last year’s Venice Film Festival, and is now available for on-demand streaming in the U.S.

Ozon’s vision is captured in gleaming black-and-white, blending the luster of modern-day faux-vintage fashion photography with the nostalgic flavor of classic era “arthouse” and European cinema, and it maintains a largely faithful connection to Camus’s novel, at least in terms of plot. It’s the story of Meursault (Benjamin Voisin), a French settler living in the capital city of Algiers, who receives word that his mother has died. He takes time off from work, traveling to the nursing home – where he had sent her three years before – in order to attend her funeral, but remains seemingly emotionless throughout, prompting members of the staff and other residents to mark his apparent lack of customary grief.

When he returns to Algiers, he encounters Marie (Rebecca Marder), a former co-worker, and after spending the day together, the two become romantically involved. Their relationship continues over the next few weeks, while they also associate with Meursault’s neighbor Raymond (Pierre Lottin) – a suspected pimp who, after beating his Arab mistress, is being followed and harassed by her brother (Abderrahmane Dehkani) and his friends. After a skirmish with the Arabs, Meursault encounters the brother alone during a walk on the beach, and shoots the young man dead with a pistol given to him for protection by Raymond. On trial for murder, he offers no defense and expresses no remorse. He is convicted and sentenced to death, facing it all with emotional detachment, and seeming to find liberation in the recognition that none of it matters, anyway.

Though it’s a tale that includes romance, murder, and courtroom drama, it feels like a story in which nothing really happens – which is, of course, the perfect effect to emphasize the point of Camus’s philosophical viewpoint; but while that might satisfy the kind of viewers drawn to a film of a Camus novel, Ozon’s movie probably won’t hold much appeal for audiences seeking action, suspense, feel-good sentiment, or easy answers to the moral dilemmas that come hand-in-hand with being alive. Camus was interested in the opposite effect, a confrontation with existence which leaves no room for comfortable denials, and Ozon’s inflection on the original’s themes makes no effort to soften the blow. 

What it does, however, is introduce – without having to adjust the narrative provided by Camus – an element of queerness that lends the whole story a new layer of subtext through what can only be described as the “gay male gaze” that anchors the film’s visual aesthetic.

It’s in the way the camera – aimed by Ozon and cinematographer Manu Dacosse – remains fixated on its star, the exquisitely beautiful Voisin, lingering on his face, his frame, or his body in swim trunks. There’s a sensuality in the way the director shows us female beauty, too, but it’s never framed as the “object” of desire; and in the narrative’s key scene – the killing by the sea – there’s an inescapable element of repressed homoeroticism, born perhaps by associations with the mid-20th-century queer aesthetic of writers like Jean Genet or artists like George Quaintance, or pretentiously artsy commercials for high-end men’s cologne, or just from real-life memories of cruising on the beach. On the surface, Meursault gives no sign of queerness; but the emphasis that Ozon brings to the story – almost purely through visual suggestion – lends the character, already an outsider to the world of “normal” human experience in the first place, an even deeper sense of “otherness.”

As to that, Voisin’s performance is effective for reasons beyond his model-esque physical perfection; there’s a vast inner life happening under that pretty face, and the actor conveys it with a “less-is-more” approach that aligns perfectly with the character’s dissociation from conventional humanity. He’s compelling enough to engage us, and intelligent enough in his expression of Camus’ ideas to help us grasp them even as he makes us feel them – and frankly, that’s saying a lot.

The rest of the cast is effective, as well, though most of them serve primarily as a foil to reflect Voisin and his character. Marder brings a relatably savvy-yet-romantic presence as Marie, and Lottin gives Raymond a kind of louche charisma that evokes a brand of appealing-but-toxic masculinity. Swann Arlaud also stands out as the prison priest who attempts to convert Meursault on the eve of his execution, bearing the full brunt of Camus’ existentialist arguments in a scene that somehow taps into transgressive homoerotic fantasies even as its characters discuss impending death.

Camus, for his part, did not see himself as an existentialist; instead, he embraced and promoted a viewpoint in which human life is defined by its relationship with what he called “The Absurd” – the gap between reality and our assumed expectations about it, where our circumstances and behavior become obviously ridiculous – and believed that, in a meaningless universe, we are free to find our own meaning. An essay he published around the same time (“The Myth of Sisyphus”) posited that finding happiness in the struggle was perhaps the most logical response to facing an unfeeling world, and the Absurdist movement he helped to define used humor – albeit often the dark and sardonic variety – as a means to expose the madness of trying to impose sense on a nonsensical world. In the end, his writings reveal him as a deeply humanistic thinker, whose acceptance of objective reality served only to deepen his dedication to the ideal of a better mankind.

Whether or not any of that comes across in Ozon’s artful film, which emphasizes the immediacy of experience – the beach, the sea, the sun, the visceral responses we get from sex or violence – over the intellectual arguments that Camus would elucidate throughout his life, probably depends on one’s own grasp of Existentialist thinking and its offshoots. In any case, while Ozon’s “The Stranger” might fall short in the challenge to convey its philosophical arguments, it more than succeeds as a stylish piece of international art cinema, and it just might – hopefully – inspire audiences to go on a deeper dive into the mind of Albert Camus.

And even if it doesn’t, it’s still pretty to look at.