“Wild Horse Running: The Courageous Journey of Tom Fox,” – Kinsey Institute at Indiana University

The opening panel focuses on Tom Fox’s courageous decision to share his struggle with a country that was terrified of this strange disease and prejudiced toward gay men. It will also explore what AIDS was like in the 1980s before there was medical hope, and the current state of the HIV-AIDS crisis, which may have dropped out of the national conversation, but has not gone away.

In his own words, “If I could help one person open his mind to this problem, I would feel like I made a difference.”

Featured on the panel will be: medical writer Steve Sternberg and photojournalist Michael A. Schwarz, the two journalists who documented Tom’s final months for publication in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Also on the panel is Dr. William Cooke, who was named Family Physician of the Year for Indiana in 2016 and the United States in 2019, in honor of his work treating HIV/AIDS patients in Austin, Indiana. The fourth panelist is Doug Bauder, an ordained pastor who recently retired as founding director of the LGBTQ+ Culture Center at Indiana University.