John S. James, born in

Brooklyn Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...

, New York in 1941, is a pioneering US

LGBT ' is an initialism that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. In use since the 1990s, the initialism, as well as some of its common variants, functions as an umbrella term for sexuality and gender identity. The LGBT term is a ...

rights activist and the writer and editor of ''AIDS Treatment News,'' one of the first and the most influential publications focused on documenting cutting-edge, science-based

AIDS Human immunodeficiency virus infection and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) is a spectrum of conditions caused by infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), a retrovirus. Following initial infection an individual m ...

research and treatment. ''AIDS Treatment News'' was founded in 1986 and published until 2007. It was widely read by people living with HIV/AIDS, policymakers, clinicians, researchers, and activists. The newsletters were later collected into two volumes and published by Celestial Arts Press in Berkeley, California. A selection of the newsletters is available in the archive of the University of California San Francisco. James also participated in the pre-Stonewall

Annual Reminder The Annual Reminders were a series of early pickets organized by gay organizations, held yearly from 1965 through 1969. The Reminder took place each July 4 at Independence Hall in Philadelphia and were among the earliest LGBT demonstrations in the ...

s, a gay rights group that picketed at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania every year on July 4 from 1965 to 1969 to remind the American people that "millions of queer American citizens were denied the rights of 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' spelled out in the Declaration of Independence." By 1990 ''AIDS Treatment News'' had received several awards (1988 from Bay Area Physicians for Human Rights; 1988 from San Francisco Cable Car Award; 1989 from Bay Area Gay and Lesbian Alliance; 1990 from Gay and Lesbian Press Association and Media Fund for Human Rights; and 1990 from the Newsletter Association). It was featured in ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'', "Underground Press Leads Way on AIDS Advice," on December 16, 1991. More recently, James won th
2019 Kiyoshi Kurimiya Award
given by

Philadelphia FIGHT The Philadelphia Fight are a semi professional rugby league team based in the Philadelphia metropolitan area. They currently compete in the USA Rugby League, having formerly competed in the now defunct AMNRL. They play their home games at A. A. ...

, a Philadelphia AIDS treatment and advocacy organization, in honor of his ground-breaking journalism.

Kiyoshi Kuromiya Kiyoshi Kuromiya (May 9, 1943 – May 10, 2000) was a Japanese-American author and civil rights, anti-war, gay liberation, and HIV/AIDS activist. Born in Wyoming at the World War II–era Japanese American internment camp known as Heart Mounta ...

was a Philadelphia civil rights and AIDS activist. James graduated cum laude from Harvard College in 1963. From 1963 to 1986 he was a computer programmer, teacher, and writer on computer languages and related topics before founding ''AIDS Treatment News.'' In the early 1980s, he established ''CommuniTree'', a computer network and electronic

bulletin board system A bulletin board system (BBS), also called computer bulletin board service (CBBS), is a computer server running software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such as ...

based in

Santa Cruz, California Santa Cruz (Spanish for "Holy Cross") is the county seat and largest city of Santa Cruz County, in Northern California. As of the 2020 census, the city population was 62,956. Situated on the northern edge of Monterey Bay, Santa Cruz is a pop ...

. Later, with the advent of the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...

, James founded a website named ''Age Treatment News'' to curate and publicize scientific developments in the pursuit of a longer, healthy life.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:James, John S. 1941 births Living people Writers from Brooklyn Harvard College alumni 20th-century American newspaper editors American LGBT rights activists American computer programmers 20th-century American male writers American male journalists American gay writers LGBT people from New York (state)