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AIDS and the Law: Positive History

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Know the laws in your state that protect LGBT people and people living with HIV.
Three decades later, the mistreatment of people with HIV continues, challenging Lambda Legal and other advocates to find new strategies for dealing with some frustratingly familiar problems.
April 13, 2011

"It was a story that seemed right out of the 1980s: When Dr. Robert Franke was evicted in 2009 from a Little Rock, Ark., assisted-living facility just for having HIV, it felt like the old days—before the HIV civil-rights battles, before the public health campaigns, before all the medical breakthroughs. Thirty years into the epidemic, how could the most basic information about the virus's transmission have eluded a retirement community promising 'round-the-clock care'? How was it possible that people were still being kicked into the street for their HIV status?

"Indeed, Lambda Legal's representation of Dr. Franke, in a lawsuit that settled out of court last year, resonated all the way back to Lambda Legal's involvement in the very first HIV lawsuit, in 1983—People v. West 12 Tenants Corp.—in which we represented a New York City doctor whose coop board tried to evict him because he was treating people with HIV."

Read more in the Windy City Times.

Read the full original article in Lambda Legal's Impact magazine.

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