part 1 of 2 Have you heard the news?” Stephanie Mines was startled by the young woman’s question. She recognized her in the aisles of the health food store as another devotee of the Swami Amar Jyoti, whose Sacred Mountain Ashram is west of Boulder, near the small mountain town…
part 2 of 2 In April 1990 Stephanie was dawdling along the aisles of the Wild Oats health food store when the young woman from the ashram approached and asked if she had heard the news. Revelations of the guru’s sexual demands had come out at a meeting of devotees…
Scratch another executive director from the troubled Colorado AIDS Council. Known as the Governor’s AIDS Council until it was transferred to the Colorado Department of Health last summer, the agency has been plagued by politics and a near-constant turnover of its top administrators. Now, after only two months on the…
The most vocal liberal on the state Criminal Justice Commission has given up–driven out, he says, by politics that seem to breed prisons. In an eight-page resignation letter, Roger Lauen urged Governor Roy Romer, other commission members and legislators to “please wake up” before the current mania for building prisons…
Ken Almos spoke quietly to the front-desk attendant at the Denver Swim Club, a gay bathhouse on Colfax. Two guys in the steam room were having anal sex, and he wanted them stopped. It wasn’t the sex he objected to; it was their failure to use condoms. The attendant walked…
part 1 of 2 A light snow was falling as Richard Games entered the Catholic church on Palm Sunday. He dipped his fingers in holy water and crossed himself. Near the front of the sanctuary he knelt and crossed himself again. Then he rose, moved to his seat and began…
part 2 of 2 It was also in 1985 that Ric met Danny and his lover, Brad. The pair ran black-market AZT from Mexico, selling bottles for $75 that U.S. pharmacies sold for $300–if you were lucky enough to be part of the government drug-testing program. They were carefree rebels,…
A city bureaucrat’s pet pig has given new meaning to the term pork-barrel politics. In 1992 Carol Moran, the administrative assistant to current Denver City Council president Dave Doering, brought a Vietnamese pot-bellied piglet home to the Capitol Hill apartment building she owned with then-friend Karen Christiansen. Louise, as the…
Lance Clem can talk for hours about what’s wrong with the way millions of dollars designed to help people infected with the AIDS virus are being spent in the Denver area. But talk like that, he says, cost him his job as the executive director of the Governor’s AIDS Council…
Greg Wiatt paces the floor of his tiny Denver apartment like a revivalist preacher preparing to tear into a congregation of sinners. As he begins to speak, he punctuates his remarks by stabbing a finger toward the ceiling. In a fit of anger, he slams a 1938 book called Heredity…
Glenn Morris, the outspoken co-director of the Colorado chapter of the American Indian Movement, reaches into a worn briefcase and pulls out a black binder. Bits of yellowed newspaper clippings and photographs poke out from behind the pages; a postcard of an Indian man wearing a feathered headdress clings to…
Kelly Roberts lays on the blue eye shadow a bit too thick for anyone other than a fortune teller. But there are no crystal balls or tarot cards in the jumbled single-wide trailer where she lives with her children in a valley near Durango. Take away her mascara, and the…
