After 14 years of working at a reporter, I figured it was finally time to get serious and build a web site. It’s been quite the ride amassing all my archives and organizing them for this site. As it turns out, I’ve done a lot of typing over the years. This makes me think of that line in The Miracle Worker: after Mrs. Keller asks Annie Sullivan how long until Helen learns what a word is.
“Maybe after a million words.”
Plenty of my work is easily accessible on the respective publications' web sites; but once you go back to the mid-2000s or earlier it gets harder to dig things up. Luckily, I’ve saved a paper rendition of just about everything I’ve ever written, dating back to my first college articles for the Columbia Daily Spectator in 1998. So I've been able to add scanned copies of such relics to my own web site.
Yes, I’m talking about traveling back in time to a dusty era when plenty of publications still hadn’t discovered this thing called the Interwebs. I wrote about New York City community boards for The New York Observer from 2001 to 2003, at a time when the salmon-colored paper was still laid out by hand—and I mean with scissors and glue. When I interned at George magazine during the summer of 1999 (yes, that summer), only one or two computers in the entire office actually had the capacity of getting online; and even then, succeeding in making the T-1 line come to life involved a baffling level of sorcery. George had no web presence beyond the dreaded “AOL keyword” effect (millennials, ask your grandparents). My snarky review of Orrin Hatch’s Christian music CD survives, thanks to the magic of an ink-jet printer, as does a hokey list of tips of how to prepare for Y2K (kids, ask your elders).
I’ve arranged my archives into six main sections (some of which have subsections), including: HIV, New York City, LGBT, Hepatitis C, General Health & Science, and Profiles and Arts & Entertainment. You can click on any of the hyperlinks in the previous sentence to go to those pages. Or run your mouse over “Archives By Topic” in the toolbar at the top of this site; then you’ll see all the available categories and subcategories.
My home page comprises a scroll of featured recent work, as well as mentions of an award I recently received for my HIV-related coverage, and a recent radio interview I gave on the topic.
An editor at large at POZ magazine, where I cover the science of HIV and hepatitis C, I have been involved with the HIV field for 20 years, spending the first six doing volunteer work and the rest of the time working as a reporter. (My full bio is here.) My first article about HIV, a profile of a Columbia student living with the virus, ran in November 1998 in the Spectator. It’s fascinating to see what a history piece the article has become: the vast quantity of pills the fellow had to take throughout each day (today he’d likely need just one); and his desire to remain anonymous (it’s doubtful I’d now have much trouble finding someone on campus who wanted to go on record about his HIV status).
From 2003 to 2010, I was an editor at large at HIV Plus magazine, where I largely covered sociocultural aspects of the disease: the transition into society after incarceration; profiles of inspiring HIV-positive individuals; repeated looks at how HIV affects different ethnicities; and mental health-related coverage, etc.
After assuming the same title at POZ in 2012, I moved to the scientific beat. My tenure has coincided with a resurgence in the general public's interest in HIV, thanks to the advent of Truvada as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) against HIV, as well as the recent understanding that HIV-positive people who have a fully suppressed viral load thanks to antiretroviral treatment are very unlikely to transmit the virus to others. I’ve written about PrEP a great deal and have a page devoted to that reporting, one that I hope will serve as a resource for people who are looking for the latest scientific data and analysis. Then there’s another page for people living with hepatitis C who want to know about their ever-evolving treatment options.
On the lighter side of things, I found quite a few old clips of mine that made me howl with laughter, if for no other reason than I found I’d somehow gotten away with being utterly politically incorrect. Or maybe it's just that the political-correctness dial has been turned up to 10 in recent years. (A difference, I find, between right-wingers and the leftists who lean a bit closer to the center is that these two groups disagree on where to draw the line delineating where contemporary demands for political correctness become excessive.) Reporting for New York magazine about a major protest march during the 2004 Republican Convention, I was clearly in desperate need of the yet-to-be-coined term “hipster” when I tried to characterize a “latter-day hippie” crowd that was itself still pining for not-yet-popularized terms such as “wealth inequality” and “the 99 percent.” Check out more of my outrageously silly reporting on the more-mild-than-wild (but still outrageous) 2004 convention party scene on my New York City-related reporting page.
The zany times continued in articles such as: a profile of my now-friend Michael West’s inimitable alter ego, the brassy songstress “Pee-Wee Merman”; as well a recounting of the premier party of Nicole Kidman’s The Others, in which I got away with describing the freshly-divorced Tom Cruise and his then-girlfriend Penelope Cruz as a “homonymically-named duo." Not having left my room in college, I was so out of it at the time I attended that party that I interviewed a delightfully sweet Jimmy Fallon and thought that he was rocker Dave Navarro. I was baffled when he told me he was working on a comedy album. The article makes me sad because of my mention that the great Kevyn Aucoin did Kidman’s makeup. I always found he was a very kind and warm fellow when I used to see him out and about in the early 2000s before his untimely death.
Recently, I’ve started to branch out as a freelancer a bit more, landing my first article in The Atlantic (about a study finding that it really does appear to “get better” for LGBT teens after all), and getting back in New York magazine after a lengthy absence (reporting on a study finding that racial conflicts appear to rise at the “fuzzy” ill-defined barriers between segregated neighborhoods). Then of course there is my riveting reporting about the (supposed) horrors of the balding wonder drug Propecia. (To quote Steve Martin in L.A. Story, the article is “a real weenie-shrinker.”)
Another history piece that provides an interesting, and sobering, source of reflection on contemporary times is my spring 2000 article profiling various women who were sexually assaulted while students at Columbia. They recounted how they negotiated the university's dreadful disciplinary system in pursuit of justice. It seems that not a lot has changed on that front in the 15 years since.
I’ve included a photography page on my web site as well. I’ve always been a shutterbug, and was the family documentarian growing up; but I didn’t get a swanky digital SLR until a few years ago—a Canon 5D Mark II. I’ve included albums of: marches for civil rights and the environment; gay-rights victory celebrations at Stonewall; trips to Western Europe; Broadway Bares (a benefit show for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS); the weddings of a few friends and family members (shooting in an unofficial capacity); and a series I’ve been working on involving looming skies.
Then there’s my YouTube section, which takes a turn for the especially zany, including: my ode-to-cinematic-hysteria montage video, “GET OUT!!!”; my viral It Gets Better video; various appearances on TV and in film from my acting days (yes, I was a hand model, and open a mean box of pizza as you’ll soon learn all too well); and a video I put together of my late mother’s life on Super 8 film.
Thanks for checking out my site.
Cheers,
Ben
(No one calls me Benjamin, PS. When I first started writing I decided to go with Benjamin as a nom de plume, since Ben Ryan is the world’s most diminutive name.)
“Maybe after a million words.”
Plenty of my work is easily accessible on the respective publications' web sites; but once you go back to the mid-2000s or earlier it gets harder to dig things up. Luckily, I’ve saved a paper rendition of just about everything I’ve ever written, dating back to my first college articles for the Columbia Daily Spectator in 1998. So I've been able to add scanned copies of such relics to my own web site.
Yes, I’m talking about traveling back in time to a dusty era when plenty of publications still hadn’t discovered this thing called the Interwebs. I wrote about New York City community boards for The New York Observer from 2001 to 2003, at a time when the salmon-colored paper was still laid out by hand—and I mean with scissors and glue. When I interned at George magazine during the summer of 1999 (yes, that summer), only one or two computers in the entire office actually had the capacity of getting online; and even then, succeeding in making the T-1 line come to life involved a baffling level of sorcery. George had no web presence beyond the dreaded “AOL keyword” effect (millennials, ask your grandparents). My snarky review of Orrin Hatch’s Christian music CD survives, thanks to the magic of an ink-jet printer, as does a hokey list of tips of how to prepare for Y2K (kids, ask your elders).
I’ve arranged my archives into six main sections (some of which have subsections), including: HIV, New York City, LGBT, Hepatitis C, General Health & Science, and Profiles and Arts & Entertainment. You can click on any of the hyperlinks in the previous sentence to go to those pages. Or run your mouse over “Archives By Topic” in the toolbar at the top of this site; then you’ll see all the available categories and subcategories.
My home page comprises a scroll of featured recent work, as well as mentions of an award I recently received for my HIV-related coverage, and a recent radio interview I gave on the topic.
An editor at large at POZ magazine, where I cover the science of HIV and hepatitis C, I have been involved with the HIV field for 20 years, spending the first six doing volunteer work and the rest of the time working as a reporter. (My full bio is here.) My first article about HIV, a profile of a Columbia student living with the virus, ran in November 1998 in the Spectator. It’s fascinating to see what a history piece the article has become: the vast quantity of pills the fellow had to take throughout each day (today he’d likely need just one); and his desire to remain anonymous (it’s doubtful I’d now have much trouble finding someone on campus who wanted to go on record about his HIV status).
From 2003 to 2010, I was an editor at large at HIV Plus magazine, where I largely covered sociocultural aspects of the disease: the transition into society after incarceration; profiles of inspiring HIV-positive individuals; repeated looks at how HIV affects different ethnicities; and mental health-related coverage, etc.
After assuming the same title at POZ in 2012, I moved to the scientific beat. My tenure has coincided with a resurgence in the general public's interest in HIV, thanks to the advent of Truvada as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) against HIV, as well as the recent understanding that HIV-positive people who have a fully suppressed viral load thanks to antiretroviral treatment are very unlikely to transmit the virus to others. I’ve written about PrEP a great deal and have a page devoted to that reporting, one that I hope will serve as a resource for people who are looking for the latest scientific data and analysis. Then there’s another page for people living with hepatitis C who want to know about their ever-evolving treatment options.
On the lighter side of things, I found quite a few old clips of mine that made me howl with laughter, if for no other reason than I found I’d somehow gotten away with being utterly politically incorrect. Or maybe it's just that the political-correctness dial has been turned up to 10 in recent years. (A difference, I find, between right-wingers and the leftists who lean a bit closer to the center is that these two groups disagree on where to draw the line delineating where contemporary demands for political correctness become excessive.) Reporting for New York magazine about a major protest march during the 2004 Republican Convention, I was clearly in desperate need of the yet-to-be-coined term “hipster” when I tried to characterize a “latter-day hippie” crowd that was itself still pining for not-yet-popularized terms such as “wealth inequality” and “the 99 percent.” Check out more of my outrageously silly reporting on the more-mild-than-wild (but still outrageous) 2004 convention party scene on my New York City-related reporting page.
The zany times continued in articles such as: a profile of my now-friend Michael West’s inimitable alter ego, the brassy songstress “Pee-Wee Merman”; as well a recounting of the premier party of Nicole Kidman’s The Others, in which I got away with describing the freshly-divorced Tom Cruise and his then-girlfriend Penelope Cruz as a “homonymically-named duo." Not having left my room in college, I was so out of it at the time I attended that party that I interviewed a delightfully sweet Jimmy Fallon and thought that he was rocker Dave Navarro. I was baffled when he told me he was working on a comedy album. The article makes me sad because of my mention that the great Kevyn Aucoin did Kidman’s makeup. I always found he was a very kind and warm fellow when I used to see him out and about in the early 2000s before his untimely death.
Recently, I’ve started to branch out as a freelancer a bit more, landing my first article in The Atlantic (about a study finding that it really does appear to “get better” for LGBT teens after all), and getting back in New York magazine after a lengthy absence (reporting on a study finding that racial conflicts appear to rise at the “fuzzy” ill-defined barriers between segregated neighborhoods). Then of course there is my riveting reporting about the (supposed) horrors of the balding wonder drug Propecia. (To quote Steve Martin in L.A. Story, the article is “a real weenie-shrinker.”)
Another history piece that provides an interesting, and sobering, source of reflection on contemporary times is my spring 2000 article profiling various women who were sexually assaulted while students at Columbia. They recounted how they negotiated the university's dreadful disciplinary system in pursuit of justice. It seems that not a lot has changed on that front in the 15 years since.
I’ve included a photography page on my web site as well. I’ve always been a shutterbug, and was the family documentarian growing up; but I didn’t get a swanky digital SLR until a few years ago—a Canon 5D Mark II. I’ve included albums of: marches for civil rights and the environment; gay-rights victory celebrations at Stonewall; trips to Western Europe; Broadway Bares (a benefit show for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS); the weddings of a few friends and family members (shooting in an unofficial capacity); and a series I’ve been working on involving looming skies.
Then there’s my YouTube section, which takes a turn for the especially zany, including: my ode-to-cinematic-hysteria montage video, “GET OUT!!!”; my viral It Gets Better video; various appearances on TV and in film from my acting days (yes, I was a hand model, and open a mean box of pizza as you’ll soon learn all too well); and a video I put together of my late mother’s life on Super 8 film.
Thanks for checking out my site.
Cheers,
Ben
(No one calls me Benjamin, PS. When I first started writing I decided to go with Benjamin as a nom de plume, since Ben Ryan is the world’s most diminutive name.)
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