Mayor John Hickenlooper was the featured speaker at AIDS Walk Colorado 2008.
I managed to catch up with him after his speech to ask him why, after all this time, AIDS Walk is still relevent. Here's what he had to say:
"We've made great progress and some of the drugs that have been developed show great effectiveness but we still don't have a cure.
A cure is something that has been tantalizingly close for the past five years. A real cure is within grasp so more than ever we need to push and we need people walking and raising money and just talking about it to raise awareness."
And then, specifically addressing the gay community, Hickenlooper said:
"I think one of the most powerful things to realize about HIV/AIDS is that it's not just something for the gay community to deal with. It's a disease that affects people all over the country and all over the world.
Surely, in America, there's a prevalence in the gay community and with that, it brings a heightened awareness and more education and discussion and bringing it out into the open pays huge dividends. But it's a universal scourge that, as a worldwide community, we have to just step up and finish. We've got to find the cure."
More pics after the jump.
