Happy to see you all soon!

How many times have I left the house and gone to the airport or train station to head out to work with dedicated activists - including many who are living with HIV - to put our heads and hearts together to demand changes that we need to overturn this epidemic?

Perhaps too many times. Or not yet enough...

But it's feeling strangely unfamiliar, as this is just my third week back from parental leave - so it's been months since I have been able to throw myself into this work (and sometimes it seems that I've barely been able to leave the house at all!)

I feel so honored to be able to re-emerge in the context of this gathering, where my family will join me in traveling to see you all, and to once again bring the best that we have to offer to our collective strategizing and action-planning that we need.

In preparation for tonight's dinner, I was explaining to my wife that there will be people there who have known me since I was 22 years old, fully two decades ago, as well as newer comrades to this shared struggle against HIV/AIDS. I can't wait to introduce her, and our 4-month-old son, to you all!

It was not long after I got involved in AIDS activism that I went to the first NATAF conference in Los Angeles, which was the model for this conference, and I was able to witness pitched battles between AIDS treatment activists as well as the respect and love that was under the surface of those disagreements. Though we have lost some of the brilliant leaders of those times to this disease, we will benefit from the participation of many of those movement veterans this week in our gathering.

But since those days, we have also seen the emergence of a movement for HIV prevention as a social justice struggle... I'm so happy to see the emphasis on HIV prevention justice in the program, and hope that some of you will come to the HIV prevention justice affinity group sessions later this week.

We really are a community, and like any community we have our struggles and our differences... but we are at our best when we come together to work out the differences and figure out how we can move forward together for the changes we all agree we need.

Wish us luck on our first flight-with-a-baby, and see you soon!

lv jd