LAWRENCE D. MASS, born on this date, is an American physician and writer. A co-founder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, he wrote the first press reports in the United States on the illness that later became known as AIDS. He is the author of numerous publications on HIV, hepatitis C, STDs, gay health, psychiatry and sex research, and on music, opera, and culture. He is also the author/editor of four books/collections. In 2009 he was in the first group of physicians to be designated as diplomates of the American Board of Addiction Medicine. Since 1979, he has lived and worked as a physician in New York City, where he resided with his life partner, writer and activist Arnie Kantrowitz.Having written for the New York Native since the 1970s, he currently writes a column for The Huffington Post. An archival collection of his papers are at the New York Public Library.

Mass received his B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1969, and his M.D. from the University of Illinois’s Abraham Lincoln School of Medicine in 1973.

Completing his residency in anesthesiology at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital (in association with Harvard Medical School), Mass encountered homophobia during his interviews in Chicago for a residency in psychiatry when he disclosed that he was gay. This treatment became the catalyst for his activism that he pursued via journalism, making him the first openly gay physician to write on a regular basis for the gay press.

In 1982, Mass joined Larry Kramer, Edmund White, Paul Rapoport, Paul Popham and Nathan Fain in co-founding Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), the world’s first and still largest AIDS information and service organization. For 10 years, through four revisions, Mass authored GMHC’s guide, Medical Answers About AIDS, which usually concluded with an appeal for civil liberties for sexual minority persons and the sanctioning of same sex relationships as “essential considerations in the preventive medicine of AIDS and other STDs.”

By the mid-1990s, thanks largely to the efforts of Kramer and ACT UP, HIV infection had become largely manageable with medical care, and gay activist concerns began to shift. Mass has continued to write about more recent health problems afflicting gay men, including the escalation of HIV among minority teens and the elderly, the crystal meth epidemic, hepatitis C and anal cancer.

Beginning in the late 1990s, Mass extended his public health interests to the bear subculture of the gay community. He has addressed in a regular column a range of health topics of interest to this subculture, initially consisting of middle-aged overweight men, first for American Bear Magazine and later for A Bear’s Life magazine.

The papers of Mass and Kantrowitz are designated for deposit with the New York Public Library.