Stephen Gendin (February 20, 1966 – July 19, 2000) was an American AIDS activist in the late 1980s and the 1990s, whose advocacy is credited with having promoted changes in government policy that improved the lives of HIV positive people.

[1] He was a founder and the chief executive of the Community Prescription Service, an organization that distributes information designed to help people with HIV and AIDS as well as supplying medication via mail order.

He was Valedictorian of his high school and then attended Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where he learned that he was HIV positive as a first-year student in 1985.

He used his column to discuss in graphic detail the toll that AIDS took on his body, as well as sharing his fantasies of political assassination and the deeply conflicted feelings of guilt and pleasure that he experienced after having unprotected sex.

[12] His activism was pivotal in reforming the FDA drug approval process to expedite HIV and AIDS patients' access to more effective anti-retroviral treatments.