public universities

A Michigan appeals court ruling that bans public universities and state and local governments from providing health insurance to partners of gay employees has alarmed gay rights advocates nationwide.

A voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage prohibits Michigan public universities and state and local governments from providing health insurance to the partners of gay employees, an appeals court ruled Friday.

During the 1980s, Jim Curran, MD, MPH, was one of the most vital scientific minds driving the U.S. government's fight against the awakening AIDS epidemic. As an epidemiologist at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Curran was present during the first cases of the condition that would become known as AIDS--a syndrome that would change the world. Curran became chairman of the Kaposi's Sarcoma Opportunistic Infection Task Force in 1981, and eventually the director of the CDC's Division of AIDS. Today, he is the dean of the School of Public Health at Emory University in Atlanta and the director of the university's Center for AIDS Research. To mark the 25th anniversary of the first identified AIDS cases, Dr. Curran spoke with Benjamin Ryan.

The Williams Institute for Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, released a report Monday documenting what it called "a gay demographic explosion" in some of the country's reddest of regions. Using recently released data from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey, the analyses show that the number of same-sex couples in the United States has quadrupled since 1990, growing at a rate 21 times that of the population. But increases have been the most dramatic in the Midwest, Mountain, and Southern states.