Strange Fruit

In an interview with Matt Lauer, Charlie Sheen revealed earlier this week that he's HIV positive. But in the days leading up to that, media outlets were already reporting his status. And according to Sheen himself, other people in his life had been blackmailing him for years to keep his secret. While those of us who routinely pay attention to issues surrounding HIV and AIDS know Charlie Sheen is not the face of the disease, the mainstream and tabloid media seemed to have forgotten about HIV until now. And the headlines feel like they were ripped from the early days of the AIDS crisis. To make some sense out of the way we're talking about HIV in the wake of Sheen's announcement, we turned to health policy analyst and friend to the show Preston Mitchum. Mitchum says Sheen's revelation, after years of publicly seeming out of control, draws an unhelpful parallel between illness and a behavior. "There is no person who deserves HIV," he explains. "Not sex workers, not someone who's only had sex once,