How did life at The Moth begin for you?
I’m the last one in. A year and a half ago, the executive director stepped down and I was asked by a board member if I would be interim director while they looked for a permanent replacement. I’ve never done anything without sinking my teeth into it!

What work are you doing today for The Moth?
Today, I’m actually in Portland to celebrate the 15th anniversary of The Moth. There were 2,700 people at the event in Portland tonight, sharing stories. The impact that The Moth has on people is astounding; it creates an authentic dialogue between storytellers and audiences.

How did The Moth come about?
The novelist George Davis Greene would get together with friends on a porch in Georgia, and then when he was up in New York, they’d do the same thing in a small Manhattan apartment—friends would just get together to tell true stories about themselves. It’s called “The Moth” because so many moths would come to the well-lit porch when they were telling stories. And now, audiences flock like moths to the light. These are true stories that resonate personally and universally.

Why storytelling? Isn’t that outdated in the age of technology?
Storytelling is as old as time; it can never go out of fashion! The Moth came about because George was interested in reminding people to listen to one another. Over time, The Moth staff has figured out how to help storytellers craft and shape their stories so that it’s easier for audiences to hear and receive them. Shaping a true story so that there’s a narrative arc and an ending allows storytellers to expose vulnerability, be it through humor or pathos. In any case, it makes the stories immediately available to other people.

What makes New York City a good headquarters for The Moth?
Well, we aren’t New York City-centric, but many of our storytellers are part of the New York City literary world. The diversity of New York City fuels us and, in turn, makes us acceptable. We are more and more a part of the fabric of New York City life. People are either at the mainstage show or at an open mic slam or listening to one of our free podcasts. There are a lot of interested people. You can always spot a Moth event because of the lines down the street. We never have enough seats.

How do you see The Moth shaping Downtown?
The Moth is a lively part of the Downtown scene. When we did our first show at Cooper Union, we were terrified that we wouldn’t fill the house, but we sold out. I think The Moth appeals to people Downtown who want to be involved in something affordable and intriguing in which everybody gets a chance. Our Downtown slam at the Housing Works Bookstore Café is a great example of this spirit: There was a snowstorm two years ago and most of New York City shut down. We had a slam planned for the evening and considered canceling it. The place was packed!

At our core, we’re here to build community in the smallest and largest senses of the word.

What’s the most difficult aspect of your job?
Probably managing our ambitions and dealing with growth carefully. We’re in a wonderful situation in that people want us to branch out all over the world. But we need to be sure that we manage delivering what we deliver well and never lose our standards. There are no compromises at The Moth.

What do you love most about your job?
I’m a process person, so I love the excitement of process. To watch a storyteller sit with a director and to see the two of them take a story, respect the integrity of that story and then search for how it could be immediately available to others—it’s a joy I really can’t describe to you. There’s also such a magnetic ambiance at Moth events and with the Moth staff.
But even more than all that, when I see a kid come alive, a kid who has been downcast and outcast, and see her tell her story and through that create relationships with her peers and her community, I know she’s had a gift. I love being a part of that gift.

By Penny Gray

Back in the mid-1990s, when Dr. Tony Urbina was completing his residency at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village, he witnessed a major turning point in HIV/AIDS care. At the time, medication cocktails were just being introduced to the infected. “There were patients who looked like walking corpses; with [medication], in a matter of weeks, they would miraculously come back from the [brink of] death,” Urbina recalled in an interview.

Over 10 years later, HIV/AIDS no longer is seen as a death sentence but a chronic condition that can be treated with proper medical care. Once again, however, Urbina finds himself at a precipice in the story of HIV/AIDS. Instead of diagnosing middle-aged and older gay males, Urbina’s newly diagnosed patients are frequently minority men, some of whom are as young as 16, who have sex with other men.

What HIV/AIDS Looks Like in the 21st Century

At subway stations throughout New York City, HIV prevention posters are pasted on the wall with the message “Get Tested,” often featuring serious-looking minority men. Are they really the faces of HIV today? And if so, are posters like these promoting prevention and testing or are they alienating the at-risk community?

Data from the New York City Department of Health (DOH) suggests that the faces of the HIV prevention campaign are indeed representative of New York City’s highest HIV risk group in the city: minority men who have sex with men.
According to the DOH, in 2009, gay men and other men who have sex with men (MSM) accounted for 43 percent of the newly diagnosed HIV infections in New York City—more than any other group—and they experienced more than half of new diagnoses (57 percent) among men. Forty-eight percent of all new infections were reported from the African-American community, 32 percent from the Hispanic community and 3 percent from the Asian/Pacific Islander community.

Perhaps even more disconcertingly, a recent study of MSM in New York City showed that 53 percent of those who are HIV- infected were not aware of their status, suggesting that messages of prevention and testing are not being communicated adequately to high-risk groups.

Dr. Donna Mildvan, chief of infectious diseases at Beth Israel Medical Center at 16th Street, has been around the block with HIV/AIDS, having been one of the first doctors in the city to recognize the symptoms in the late 1970s and early 1980s. (“A point,” she said, “we don’t need to dwell on. We just have the long-range view here at Beth Israel, that’s all.”) As she sees it, the minority MSM acquisition of HIV is a recent and troubling phenomenon. For his part, Urbina said he first noticed it roughly five years ago.

“What we’re looking at is a population of young people who don’t see this as a threat,” Mildvan said. “These statistics reflect the fact of a cavalier attitude among young people.”

Indeed, for a generation most familiar with Magic Johnson’s 1991 diagnosis and successful antiretroviral treatment, HIV no longer holds the threat of AIDS and imminent death that it did 30 years ago.

“Now, we can treat patients with one pill a day and we have options about what that one pill will be. It looks easy—looks like it’s not the disease Larry Kramer wrote about in The Normal Heart. But it’s a lot worse and a lot more complicated than other degenerative diseases,” Mildvan was quick to point out.

Dr. Victoria Sharp, director of Saint Luke’s-Roosevelt’s Center for Comprehensive Care on 17th Street, has recognized similar trends in public attitudes. “This disease was once the disease of white gay men. There’s not manifestations as there was 15 years ago, when it was a lot easier to see the physical signs of the disease. These were the walking dead. Now, the younger generation senses that it’s not a problem.”

Sharp is quick to link social stigma to the heightened HIV infection rates among minority gay males. “For many of these at-risk communities, there’s stigma attached to sexual intercourse with other men. So these are MSMs, but they don’t publicly identify as such. They are on the down-low,” Sharp said.

Originally an African-American slang term, the phrase “on the down-low” has been adopted by the HIV medical community to describe men who have sex with men but for social or personal reasons choose not to socially or publicly identify themselves as homosexual.

“Having unprotected sex on the down-low affects infection rates in multiple ways. Young MSMs are infected, but women are infected through men who are on the down-low as well. After all, African-American women are the other group with rising infection rates,” Sharp reported.

Ding Pajaron, director of development at the Asian & Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS (APICHA) and Daniel Goldman, development specialist at APICHA, confirmed the prevalence of social stigma in minority communities that makes prevention and care very difficult. Indeed, the Asian community has the highest rate of concurrent diagnosis of both HIV and AIDS, which is a signal of late testing.

“In minority communities, there is stigma associated with homosexuality that makes it difficult for people to access services,” Pajaron said. “It can be really brutal. One of our clients came out to his family; when he did, his parents brought him to the cemetery and said, ‘We consider you dead.’ As you can imagine, this sort of attitude makes it seem dangerous to access services.”

Goldman concurred. “The fact of the matter is that people at risk for this disease are disenfranchised in the city. HIV is affecting the African American population, the Latino population and the Asian/Pacific Islander population, so there is very good reason for resources to go into these communities. Our aim and mission is to provide general primary care to those who are at high risk for HIV. As we speak, we are expanding our services to more at-risk communities,” he said.

In both the public and private sectors, many HIV care facilities are moving to an all-in-one care model in an effort to combat HIV infection trends. One such facility is the Center for Comprehensive Care (CCC), the largest HIV/AIDS treatment center in New York State, which currently serves 5,000 patients in the city.

Sharp, director of the CCC, reasoned, “How can we thin this trend? Well, everybody gets HIV from someone, right? So treatment is tantamount to prevention. If we can put an HIV-infected person on medication, we can prevent them from passing the infection along. As the Center for Disease Control recommends, first get tested and then immediately get linked into care so you can’t pass it along.”

In 2011, the New England Journal of Medicine published results suggesting “a 96 percent reduction in HIV transmission risk to an HIV-negative partner…[is] definitive proof of the concept that antiretroviral therapy lowers the risk of HIV transmission.”

This promising data has solidified the DOH’s own focus on HIV testing as a means of prevention. According to its press office: “The Health Department collaborates with community partners on various initiatives that focus on areas of high HIV prevalence and work with vulnerable populations. Two such initiatives are The Bronx Knows (which just ended in June of last year after a very successful three-year run) and Brooklyn Knows, currently in its second of four years. Both are initiatives designed to routinize HIV testing in clinical settings, facilitate testing for every person who is unaware of their status (i.e. anyone who has never taken an HIV test) by providing free test kits to those who are uninsured, collaborate with non-clinical testing sites and link those who test positive to quality care and services.”

Confronting HIV/AIDS

Authorities seem to agree that HIV testing ultimately leads to both care of the HIV-infected person and prevention of the spread of the disease. But everybody seems to have a different idea about how to arrive at widespread HIV testing. Robert Shiau, AIDS administrator at the AIDS Center of Beth Israel Medical Center, pointed out, “There’s a lot of education out there, but we need to increase access to education on safer sex, condoms and clean needles.”

Mildvan went even further in her convictions about outreach and prevention, saying, “We need to get very, very creative at this point and start making full use of social media. We need novel ways of reaching a populate at huge risk.”

Mildvan pointed to HIV BIG DEAL, a social media campaign run by Public Health Solutions, as a prime example of successful social media. The brainchild of Dr. Mary Ann Chiasson, vice president of research and evaluation at Public Health Solution, HIV BIG DEAL uses 10-minute video dramas to realistically address the social and health-related
dilemmas MSMs face.

But Urbina, the associate director of CCC, suggested the young minority MSM population can’t be pinned down to prevention strategies so easily.

“If the prevention message doesn’t resonate, it isn’t going to be effective, “ Urbina said. “There’s actually data to show that young MSMs have higher rates of condom use than their heterosexual counterparts. And young African-American men have fewer sexual partners than their white and/or heterosexual counterparts. Hence the paradox of higher rates of infection.”

“What’s actually playing out here is that for a young MSM, that one chance encounter is much more likely to lead to an infection. It doesn’t mean they’re having any more chance encounters than a young heterosexual male. It’s difficult because young men are exploring and just awakening to their sexual identities, and hyper vigilance is not a normal response for young people. Sex is a biological urge in all of us, and it’s difficult for youth to accept and internalize the need for condom use,” Urbina lamented.

“There are engaged, talented young men becoming infected because of one chance encounter. We see track stars, we see straight-A students coming in, infected with HIV by the time they get to high school. We’re all struggling with this.
“All efforts at prevention are well- intentioned, but we need to go back to the basics and realize that a community approach is the solution. The sooner we normalize our approach so that it’s about health, spanning across all cultural, ethnic, economic and sexual orientations, the sooner we’ll put an end to HIV.”

By Penny Gray

Michael Dorf, creator and owner of City Winery, at 155 Varick St. in Soho’s Hudson Square, talks about life as an entrepreneur—and it is so darn satisfying Downtown when you run a winery/restaurant/music venue.
How did City Winery come about?
Well, it was born out of a desire to pursue my passions, really. I figured out a hospitality model around some of the things I love most: wine, music and food. It was almost a hedonistic enterprise made for me and by me in the hopes that what appealed to me would appeal to others. Luckily for me, it did.

So you’re a real entrepreneur, then?
Yeah, you’ve got to figure out how to make money doing what you love to do in the world. The real sign of that is when it’s hard to tell what is effort and what is enjoyment. I just had to find a culture and environment that needed a business like the sort of business that would make me happy.

Was City Winery your first endeavor?
There’s a history of entrepreneurship in the family. My grandfather had a food distribution business that my father also ran. I was next in line for it, but in college I realized I was more interested in selling the arts, figuring out what that was and where that was possible.

So when I was 23, I came to the city. I was managing a rock band at the time and tried to start up my own recording business. That failed, and a year later I turned that space into a live venue, The Knitting Factory, which opened in 1987 on Houston Street and later moved to Leonard Street. I left there in 2003 but have been in the music and promoting world for 25 years now.

Both the Knitting Factory and City Winery have been Downtown venues. Why is that?
For me, I never considered uptown. I’ve always had my businesses Downtown. If the choice is up or down, I’m a Downtown guy. Since this is for me, ultimately I want it to be a place that my friends and I want to go. And we want to hang out Downtown.

Has your Downtown location served you well?
It’s definitely hitting the mark. We had lofty expectations that it would do well, and sure enough, it’s doing very, very well.

What’s the most surprising element of success at City Winery?
I knew tickets could be sold to shows. I knew how to sell alcohol at shows. I knew how to add food and atmosphere for patrons to make those experiences of live shows and the alcohol at live shows worthwhile. The one thing I wasn’t 100 percent sure of was whether or not I could make good wine. I hired a great winemaker and bought great equipment, but I wasn’t certain we’d know until…well, until we either had very good or very bad wine. So it’s not a surprise but more of a relief that our wine is phenomenal. We keep selling out, we can never keep enough supply. And I’m feeling blessed that bringing grapes from around the country—and turning those grapes into world-class wine—has been such a success.

What can we look forward to at City Winery?
We’re expanding fairly quickly and building in Chicago. We’ll be opening in June there. We also have wine on tap in our New York location; this is wine without sulfites so it’s very, very fresh. It’s a pretty unique way to consume wine, as there are no preservatives in it for the sake of the wine to travel.

Our shows at City Winery continue to stay happy; we have more and more artists who want to perform here so you can always look out for new music. In short, there’s always something to look forward to here. There’s always something new.

For more information and upcoming shows, visit www.citywinery.com.

The owners of Walker’s, Tribeca’s favorite neighborhood eatery at the corner of North Moore and Varick streets, are rolling out an Italian alternative to their American fare next door at the new pizzeria Girello (“Walker” in Italian, posing a potential confusion for the multilingual).“This is a real departure for us,” said Gerard Walker, co-owner of the eponymous restaurant. “We’ve been the neighborhood regular for the last 30 years, so we decided it was time to become the neighborhood Neapolitan thin-crust pizza joint as well. We love the idea of evoking the same warmth with varying cuisines—that’s why we created Girello.”

Whereas Walker’s has all of the ambiance of a nostalgic American saloon, Girello has been decorated with a decidedly European feel—it looks like a simple, clean trattoria in a fading southern Italian town. “We had the option of expanding Walker’s into the space,” co-owner Scott Perez said, “but we thought it’d be fun to create the same sort of friendly environment using superior products, just different flavors.”

Walker and his partners, Perez and Martin Sheridan, first opened Walker’s three decades ago and have enjoyed steady, prosperous business there ever since. The secret to their success? “Err on the side of the customer,” Walker confided. “New York restaurant customers are the best in the world. If you treat them well and serve them quality food, they’ll return. Never, ever take them for granted.”

Walker says it’s the customers who keep him in the business. “I have the opportunity every single day to make somebody’s night special. A customer I haven’t seen in a while will come in, and I’ll say, ‘Where ya been?’ And he’ll look at me like he can’t believe anybody would remember him. You make someone’s day like that. How many people get to show up to work and do that?”

Perez is quick to add that it’s not just the customers that keep Walker’s (and now Girello) in business, it’s also the staff. “There’s such a joy and an instant gratification in working with people who understand how to treat customers well,” he said.  When the restaurant was the only spot in the neighborhood that remained open during Hurricane Irene, both men agreed it was the combined goodwill of the staff and customers that made the experience such an enriching one.
Girello may have missed the hurricane, but the new restaurant has not been without its own complications. The toughest aspect of opening the new joint? “Perfecting the dough,” Walker said. “For water, yeast and flour, there’s a lot that can go wrong before you get it right. We actually had emails from chefs all over the city writing in about ‘dough behaviors.’ Luckily, we mastered it. We mastered the dough.”

And dough there is in abundance. With nearly 30 toppings to choose from and the choice of either a margherita or white base, Girello is the controlling pizza-topper’s dream. When pressed for a favorite combination of flavors, both Perez and Walker are without answers. “Nah,” Perez said. “It’s all good. It all comes from the same dough, right?”
Also on offer are a handful of Italian and Italian-American sandwiches (including the New Orleans-style muffuletta), salads and appetizers; look out especially for the pancetta wrapped shrimp and the oven-roasted P.E.I. mussels. And in true Walker’s style, Girello offers plenty of alcohol to wash down a meal—a selection of Italian wines and a more international choice of beer, including Peroni and Heineken, along with specialty brews like Victory Hop Devil IPA and Ommegang Witte.

“It’s all just been a lot of fun,” Walker said with a glow. “Opening Girello now has reminded me of what it felt like to open Walker’s all those years ago—makes me feel like a young man again. Maybe that’s what we mean when we say Walker’s is the sort of place that makes the old feel young and the young feel like they’ve been there forever. Judging by the way I feel, Girello is following that tradition.”

Girello, 16 N. Moore St. (betw. N. Moore & Varick Sts.), 212-941-0109; 11 a.m.–11 p.m.