Meet the Ex-Football Player and the Tattooed LGBTQ Physician Leading the White House's Monkeypox Fig
Good long read.
Meet the Ex–Football Player and the Tattooed LGBTQ Physician Leading the White House’s Monkeypox Fight
https://newrepublic.com/article/167800/fenton-demetre-daskalakis-monkeypox-response
Fenton ended up getting paired with Dr. Demetre Daskalakis (he prefers to be called Dr. Demetre), a Columbia- and Harvard-educated physician who spent much of his career spearheading efforts to fight the HIV pandemic in New York City and at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Fenton and Daskalakis share a common mission of leading the White House’s response to the virus and keeping the downward trend in the right direction. Beyond that, they don’t have much else in common. Fenton has spent his career working for FEMA. Daskalakis has been a career public health official and physician. Fenton is six feet, three inches tall, 300 pounds; he played football at the University of California, Davis, before doing some professional football in Europe. Daskalakis is thin and buff and poses regularly for photos showing off his heavily tattooed torso.
The response to the Fenton and Daskalakis pairing has been dramatically different from, say, the rage conservatives spouted toward Anthony Fauci. But Daskalakis has taken his share of pot shots from right-wing trolls. He’s certainly not the shy type. His Instagram, which is now private, is a long collection of those shirtless pictures of himself. (Fenton, by contrast, is more of a LinkedIn guy.) When Daskalakis served as New York City’s assistant health commissioner, where he led the department’s HIV/AIDS bureau, he marched in a New York City Pride parade in a leather mesh shirt. Notorious right-wing provocateurs like Benny Johnson have tried to demonize him as a “satanist” because of some of his tattoos (he is not a Satanist). Daskalakis always laughs off such absurd suggestions.
“I am certainly not a satanist,” Daskalakis told The Advocate. When the newspaper asked why people seem to think that, the physician responded mischievously, “It’s because I wear high-fashion harnesses by Zana Bayne.”
