Travels with Samantha Slide Show Page 21

All this was sculpted by the Colorado River, several hundred miles upstream from the Grand Canyon.

"I was diagnosed HIV-positive in 1984. I've been very lucky to be one of the few without symptoms. I decided to spend some time giving back and now I'm going to enjoy. I was experimenting at just the wrong time, in the late 1970s. I tell young people today `sex is wonderful, sex is exciting, have fun with casual sex but use a condom.' I get really scared when I hear that the fastest growing incidence of AIDS is among college students. These people are throwing away their exuberance."

Arthur was Colorado's first gay rights lobbyist. He has spent seven years without pay, living under the shadow of H.I.V., trying to insure anonymous H.I.V. testing for Coloradans. The passage of Amendment 2 to the Colorado Constitution is a fresh wound.

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I was well-received at a sidewalk cafe in Aspen, getting a free meal and a date with a beautiful woman but I pressed on over 12,000' high Independence Pass [BIG] and went mountain biking at 10,300' in Vail. [BIG].

Friends in Boulder prepared me psychologically for the drive through Kansas and into Kansas City, Missouri, home of Hallmark Cards and a great art museum.

Thomas Hart Benton, who painted in Kansas City around 1940, said "I'd rather my art were exhibited in saloons where normal people can see it than in museums." A typical vaulted-ceiling marble-floored museum gallery is devoted to his work. My favorite is this crowded portrait of Hollywood as a sham machine running on cheesecake. Life magazine commissioned it but wouldn't print it because of the half- naked woman in the center; they changed their tune a year later after the painting won a big award.

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