A great article, from Salon, highlighting the current events surrounding Ebola and the past (and very much present!) AIDS crisis. Definitely worth a read!

 Monday, Oct 27, 2014 03:45 PM EST

“History repeating itself”: AIDS activists slam Cuomo for “stigmatizing” Ebola quarantines

Advocates and public health experts cite troubling similarities between the AIDS crisis and Ebola panic 

Lindsay Abrams

Citing a “great sense of solidarity” with Ebola survivors and healthcare workers, a group of leading AIDS activists spoke out Monday afternoon against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Ebola quarantine policy, calling it a “dangerous and explosive” overreaction that is spreading “dangerously incorrect information” about how Ebola is spread. It’s a political reaction, they say, that will only contribute to “growing stigma and public panic” surrounding the outbreak. 

 To read the full article, click the link: http://www.salon.com/2014/10/27/history_repeating_itself_aids_activists_slam_cuomo_for_stigmatizing_ebola_quarantines/



 

This is why fighting stigma and discrimination is so important still...

Oops, Pat Robertson Did It Again

 

                               By: Tyler Curry*

                   October 26th, 2014

 

 

 

The famed American Evangelist and host of “The 700 Club” is known for sticking his foot in his mouth when it comes to gay issues, and he probably doesn’t care. He has a following of millions from around the globe, many who live in developing nations and look to the TV prophet for guidance and support. He has his audience, they are loyal, and they certainly do not consist of LGBT people. But when Robertson made an off-hand remark about the dangers of traveling to Kenya, he may have alienated a major part of his faithful following.
Last week, a viewer of Robertson’s TV show called in to get the host’s thoughts on whether a planned trip to Kenya was risky or not.

Robertson responded: “You might get AIDS in Kenya. The people have AIDS in Kenya. The towels could have AIDS.”

The Christian Broadcast Network, the company responsible for airing Robertson’s show, issued this statement shortly after these comments aired.

“Dr. Robertson misspoke about the possibility of getting AIDS through towels. CBN Quickly recognized the error and quickly removed the statement from the online archive. CBN recognizes the error and apologizes for any confusion.”

Although the CBN issued a correction to his statement, many Kenyans have taken to social media, demanding that Robertson issue a formal apology on his show. Several prominent voices in Kenya have also weighed in on Robertson’s comments. Mumbi Seraki, a popular radio host in Nairobi, is rallying his listeners to ask for an on-air apology. Former legislator and human rights lawyer, Gitobu Imanyara, understands that Robertson misspoke, but questions whether he is really sorry for the damage he has done, both to the international reputation of Kenya and for perpetuating stigmatic misinformation about HIV.

According to the CDC, a person can only be infected with HIV by having sex or sharing needles with another person who is HIV positive. The virus is spread through blood, semen, pre-seminal fluid, vaginal fluids and breast milk. These fluids must come into direct contact with mucous membranes or directly injected into the bloodstream. And regardless of what Robertson thinks, the virus cannot be spread through surfaces, such as towels.

It is unknown whether Robertson plans on publicly acknowledging his stigma-fueled snafu.

*Tyler Curry is Senior Editor, HIV Equal Online

http://hivequal.org/hiv-equal-online/oops-pat-robertson-did-it-again#.VE5_LQcIWNY.facebook
 

 

Ebola, Human Rights and Health Discrimination

 Monday 20 October 2014 at 2:00 PM ET

  edited by Michael Finley

 

JURIST Guest Columnist Stefan Kirchner, of the University of Lapland, discusses the possibility of global discrimination during the ongoing Ebola outbreak ...

©  WikiMedia (Thomas W. Geisbert, Boston University School of Medicine)

 

The current Ebola outbreak has lead to discrimination against those infected with Ebola as well as against health care workers caring for those infected or suspected of being infected with Ebola. Discrimination based on health reasons is hardly a new phenomenon. It has culminated in countries, which do not allow at will abortion, to permit abortion in cases where the health of the child is only marginally affected. This discrimination is also present in the outright celebration of suicide as a form of self-determined approach to sickness, where there appears to be a greater expectation of health and a lack of acceptance of illness.
While nurses, physicians and others risk their lives to fight highly infectious diseases; elsewhere it is not the disease but those affected by it who are targeted. While there is not yet a cure for HIV/AIDS, at least some patients in developed countries (a small percentage of those infected with HIV globally) have access to the full range of medical options and may start to consider HIV to be a chronic disease. Essentially, it has become possible to delay the outbreak of AIDS after an HIV infection for many years. However, HIV/AIDS will continue to provide medical and legal challenges so long as a fast, effective treatment remains globally unavailable to all affected patients.
If HIV patients are enabled to live longer, healthier lives, they will be more likely to remain part of the workforce. If the search for a cure will take many years, HIV-positive employees will become a more common phenomenon. In many legal systems this already raises the question: Under which conditions do employees have a duty to inform their employers about their infection? While information about HIV is more easily available today than in the past, the stigmatization of HIV-positive persons continues.
In I.B v. Greece, decided late last year, the European Court of Human Rights heard the case of an applicant who had lost his job after his co-workers learned about his HIV-infection. Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) protects against discrimination. The right to a private life, protected under Article 8. Article 14 sets out a number of examples where discrimination will be found, but also includes what the Convention refers to as "other status" within its meaning. This includes a person's health status. Not providing the totality of rights established under the Convention due to the fact that somebody is HIV positive is discrimination under Article 14, as a person's health status is part of the right to private life under Article 8.
Infectious diseases also have wider legal implications. While it might be difficult to successfully litigate before the European Court of Human Rights for a state's failure to prevent infections, doing so remains a possibility. Especially when it comes to infections that occur while a state has control over an individual; for example, during a detention, military service or when medical staff works on behalf of the state. In the case of the current Ebola outbreak, the non-governmental organization Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has taken the lead in the international effort to fight the disease and several nations are sending hundreds of experts to the affected countries. Under Article 2 of the ECHR, which protects the right to life, nations have an obligation to equip their staff, in the widest sense of the term, adequately with the required protective gear. The same principle applies to the deployment of armed forces in combat. Unlike a case under the UN's International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the right to life is not a social human right that could be limited by the available resources. Rather, this is an immediate obligation regardless of a nation's financial possibilities. This does not mean that volunteers for MSF, the Red Cross or others are not protected in a similar way: Their employers or sending organizations have an obligation to equip them adequately and states have a duty under Article 2 of the ECHR to ensure that this happens.
Ebola differs significantly from HIV in that the risk of an infection with Ebola is present in day-to-day interaction; such as shaking hands, while becoming infected with HIV is much more difficult. It appears justifiable under the ECHR to limit the activities of persons infected with Ebola and those reasonably suspected of being infectious. In the context of the current outbreak, there have been calls for limitations on international travel, ranging from refusing to permit infected persons entry into countries where they could actually receive highly qualified medical treatment, to the idea of closing international borders completely. The latter possibility would not be compatible with the ECHR as, at the time of this writing, there have been only a few cases of secondary infections outside the most affected countries, which does not warrant a complete halt to international traffic.
In any case, the human dignity of all patients must be protected at all times. For Ebola patients, this is often set aside due to fears concerning Ebola. Here the state has a duty to create an environment in which discrimination is prevented. This includes an obligation to inform the general population, but to also extend legal protections to health care workers by private actors such as landlords, shop owners and others who may discriminate against them.
Attempts to curb Ebola include quarantining both patients and those suspected of being infected. In an HIV context, the European Court of Human Rights already dealt with quarantine for the purpose of preventing the spread of a viral disease: Detaining a person has to be the "last resort in order to prevent [them] from spreading the [disease and] less severe measures [must have] been considered and found to be insufficient to safeguard the public interest." Also, "a fair balance between the need to ensure that the [disease] did not spread and the applicant's right to liberty" is required by the European Court of Human Rights. In Enhorn v. Sweden, the manner and length of the detention were taken into account. Although the court found Sweden at fault for hospitalizing an HIV positive man for a year and a half, quarantining suspected carriers of the Ebola virus for the duration of the incubation period of 21 days would seem to be compatible with the ECHR, especially in light of the dangerous nature of Ebola.
Infectious diseases remain an important and often global health care challenge and in a globalized and highly mobile and interconnected world diseases like bird flu, swine flu, Ebola, HIV and other diseases are likely to be spread more quickly than in the past. At the same time globalization allows the world to react better to health emergencies. Rather than being split by fear of infection, such diseases should bring the world closer together in the fight against disease. Human rights norms, such as the European Convention on Human Rights, provide a legal obligation to take action and to protect the ill.
  http://jurist.org/forum/2014/10/stefan-kirchner-health-rights.php

Stefan Kirchner is Associate Professor for Fundamental and Human Rights at the Faculty of Law of the University of Lapland in Rovaniemi, Finland. A former Rettungssanitäter (Emergency Medical Technician) with the German Red Cross, he wrote his Doctoral thesis in Social Sciences on Biolaw and the European Convention on Human Rights and his Master Thesis on pharmaceutical intellectual property rights. Dr. Kirchner is admitted to the bar in Germany (Rechtsanwalt) and specializes in proceedings before the European Court of Human Rights.

Tyler Curry

Op-ed: How to Survive an Ebola Plague

One parallel between HIV and Ebola is uncanny, says activist Tyler Curry.

BY Tyler Curry

October 16 2014 7:30 AM ET

CDC director Thomas Frieden talks to the media.

In case you haven’t heard, the Ebola virus has officially sent the United States into a media, and therefore, public frenzy over the risk of widespread transmission from the first domestic diagnosis and subsequent transmissions.
Several leading media sources have referred to the recent spread of Ebola as the new AIDS, as the infection continues to spread and public health officials are left with little-to-no tools to treat the virus once it has been caught.
Even the director of the Centers for Disease Control, Thomas Frieden, has compared Ebola to AIDS. “This is a fluid and heterogeneous epidemic. It’s changing quickly, and it’s going to be a long fight,” Frieden said during a World Bank forum last week, according to reports. “I will say that in the 30 years I’ve been working in public health, the only thing like this has been AIDS. We have to work now so this is not the world’s next AIDS.”
Even though Ebola and AIDS are starkly different in more ways than they are the same, there is one deeply troubling parallel between the two diseases, and it is how the American culture addresses such issues.
A disease knows no borders, no nationalities, and no sexuality. Ebola (or HIV) was easy to ignore as long as it stayed in West Africa (or the gay community), but after two missionaries (or a heterosexual child and a movie star) became positive, swift governmental measures had to be taken.
When HIV began to spread in 1981, no one had a clue as to how the virus spread, and why it seemed to only infect gay men. It was initially referred to as gay cancer, then Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID), before the disease became known as AIDS.
By 1983 researchers in Maryland identified HIV as the virus that causes AIDS. But the federal, state, and city governments simply couldn’t be bothered to release any information to the general public, much less commit funding for research to the growing epidemic.
But why did the majority not care, you ask? The answer is simple, because as long as the disease only affected gay men, it wasn’t a real American problem.
In 1985 Rock Hudson passed away from AIDS, and a fresh-faced, Midwest teenager named Ryan White contracted the virus through a contaminated blood transfusion. It had been four years since the virus began to spread, but now the gay plague could no longer be ignored, for it had ravaged one of the most beloved leading men in the history of the big screen and now could be transmitted to heterosexuals as well.
So President Reagan uttered “AIDS” and “HIV” for the first time, four years after the epidemic began. By this time, nearly 4,000 people, almost all of them gay men, had died. The U.S. Congress allocated $70 million to AIDS research, because as much as it may have been on the news, it finally hit Doris Day’s on-screen lover and the boy next door.
Cue panic.
Although the first Ebola outbreak occurred in 1976, it remained that ominous exotic and foreign disease that some people remembered from that book released in the 90s, The Hot Zone. When the CDC issued its initial announcement of an outbreak in Guinea, and 89 reported cases in Liberia and Sierra Leone, the information was consumed and discarded by the American masses just like any other foreign issue with no direct link to middle America. As the outbreak continued to grow throughout the summer, major U.S. media sources continued to increase its coverage of the epidemic. But this was received, by in large, as much more of the same.
Surprising, you say? Well, just like with HIV, out of sight, out of mind.
The streaming news of the Ebola remained background noise until news broke of two American aid workers in Liberia who tested positive for the virus. American doctor Kent Brantly from Texas and Mission worker Nancy Writebol from North Carolina were the first Americans touched by this exotic plague. As they were transported to the U.S. to receive treatment, Writebol was described by multiple news sources as a loving mother, a devoted wife and a humble woman of faith. Dr. Brantly was a young, attractive doctor with a wife and two children. Now, Ebola wasn’t just the ominous African disease seen on the news, because it had suddenly affected a white church lady and a young American doctor, and it was coming stateside.
Panic.
American culture and media has created a public that can’t fathom how a problem affecting such a destitute part of the world could worm its way into the exceptional land that is the U.S. This, however, is the kind of mindset that diseases like Ebola and HIV thrive on.
Brantly and Writebol were U.S. citizens, and so as much as their case was considered a tragedy, it was also viewed as caught from the "outside." They had contracted the virus while in West Africa, so the evil still was born and remained overseas. Ebola hadn’t actually come to the U.S., not until Thomas Eric Duncan walked into a hospital in Dallas. After more than 4,000 people had died from Ebola, this one case of the virus had even the most news illiterate people paying attention and demanding something be done.
Now, around-the-clock news coverage is swarming around the case of the young nurse, Nina Pham, and the protocols in place in the U.S. Even reports about Pham’s dog have taken precedent on CNN and MSNBC, overshadowing the countless stories of struggle, loss and the fight to quell the raging epidemic in West Africa. The picture of Pham and her puppy are much more captivating.
And here is where Ebola is precisely like AIDS. Today, virtually all of the coverage on Ebola is about the situation in America, not the massive problem abroad. To date, roughly almost 5,000 people have died from Ebola, but the victims were from the wrong country and were the wrong skin color for people to think it had anything to do with them. Exchange wrong skin color for the wrong sexuality, and it’s the same problem in a different package.
Nobody deserves to contract a deadly virus such as Ebola or HIV, regardless of nationality, sexuality or because of the color of our skin. Hopefully, our nation can unite with Uganda, Liberia and the other countries that have experience treating the Ebola virus. Our resources combined with the experience of these nations could quash the spread of the virus.
Ebola and HIV are different diseases. But both show how badly we need action that values the lives of all people. We should pay attention to anyone who experiences loss of someone they love, regardless of race, color, nationality or sexuality.

TYLER CURRY is the senior editor of HIV Equal, a comprehensive online publication dedicated to promoting HIV awareness and combating HIV stigma. To learn more about HIV Equal, visit HIVequal.org or follow Tyler Curry on Facebook or Twitter @iamtylercurry. He was also named to HIV Plus magazine's list of 20 Amazing Men With

What It Means To Be HIV Equal

By: Tyler Curry

June 1st, 2014

As a reluctant HIV activist, there have only been a handful of public messages about facing down the stigma of being positive that have truly resonated with me. Sure, there are many organizations putting out meaningful content with admirable intent, but their campaigns seem to often fall into only one of two categories.
They go a little something like this:

"If you are negative, take charge and save yourself before it’s too late."

"If you are positive, you don’t have to feel like garbage even though society may view you as such. Life doesn’t have to suck as much as you think it does."
As lovely as these campaigns may be, I was neither HIV negative nor did I ever allow myself to feel like garbage and I certainly didn’t care to listen to others talk about me being such.

This feeling of in-between led me to publish my first article on HIV, called “The Needle Prick: Reluctant Commentary of a Newly Positive 20-Something,” and many subsequent articles since. With titles like “HIV Positive, Unapologetic and Fabulous,” and “HIV Positive and Sexy as I Want to be,” I may have raised a few eyebrows. The titles were certainly salacious, which that was the point, but the material was always heartfelt and written with a very purposeful message. My intention was to wake up those who were a little wary of the usual HIV essay, both positive and negative, and force them to try on a new way of thinking about the virus. If baring a little skin and shocking your system to snap you out of a media haze was what it took, then someone turn the heater on because these clothes were coming off.

Still, I struggled to craft the exact message that I, myself, would want to hear. In the meantime, even though it seemed that many were moved by the content I crafted, others took umbrage with the nuance of my words. I kept telling myself that you can’t win them all, right? But then again, maybe you can.

After the first ten or twenty columns on living confidently with HIV were published, many newly HIV positive men began to ask me how do I do it. How do I not let the nasty sink in, marinating under the surface and poisoning my self-confidence? Or, to put it simply, how do I keep my head high in the dating pool?

Sure, I have been called all of the usual names: slut, skank, diseased whore, used up trash, so on and so forth. My personal favorite was the Queen of HIV (although I am sure it was meant as an insult, I still giggled and pictured a silly red crown full of ribbons). Several HIV negative and positive men accused me of trying to glamorize HIV, that I was delusional, and that my erroneous self-confidence was merely some sort of a defense mechanism.

As the calamity of insults ensued, pessimistic onlookers waited in anticipation for me to have my epiphany that I am, somehow, less than I was before. It was as if my detractors thought I was high on the drug of attention and once it wore off, the cold reality would set in.

I was angry, but not because I ever bought into any of this nonsense purported by my detractors. It was because I noticed that many HIV positive men silently nodded their head in agreement, resigning themselves to a lower notch than they previously held when they were HIV negative. Just like anything in life, something is only true once you agree to it. There had to be some message, some new approach that would help break this delusional ascending order to pieces.

It was then that my friend and mentor, Jack Mackenroth, a brilliant photographer named Thomas Evans and the team at World Health Clinicians came out with a new campaign and a name and tagline that seemed to read my mind.

It was called the HIV Equal campaign. The tagline; “Everybody has a status. We are all HIV Equal.”

It was simple, yet profound. At first, the obvious message may settle on the service. But after a minute of reflecting on what being HIV equal meant to me, it was the jumbling of words I had been struggling to find.

In the 50 or so essays that I have published on this topic, the rambling of words can always be reduced to a simple message. Some people struggle with addiction. Others battle an unhealthy body image. Many of us have struggled with poverty. Even more of us have experienced rejection. Racism still exists. Diseases happen to the good, the bad, and the various shades in between. But no matter how bad you may have it, someone can trump you.

To every newly positive man who looked at me with defeat, asking how I can be so confident while so many judge, we are all equal. To every long-term survivor that doubted if my steadfast determination to not let my diagnosis break my stride would last, we are all equal. And to every queen who scoffed at the notion that we were equal until he received a positive diagnosis, we are all equal.

Everybody has a status; short, fat, tall, hairy, selfish, depressed, bald, skinny, poor, rich, ugly, beautiful, HIV negative, shy, big eared, small hands, silly, serious, stupid, smart or HIV Positive. Whether you don these statuses with pride or with defeat, we are all a collection of the definitions that we wear. But we have at least two things in common. We are human and we are imperfect.

That is what it means to be HIV equal.

http://www.hivequal.org/hiv-equal-online/what-it-means-to-be-hiv-equal

 

http://www.bestigmafree.org/

The HIV Shame Game: What Role Do You Play?

By: Tyler Curry

September 17th, 2014

Throughout the modern history of homosexual dating and fornicating, there has always been an undeniable and resilient link between sex and shame. The gay movement has made much progress in relinquishing some of the guilt associated with our innate attraction to the same sex, but shame still lingers within our ranks. Sure, we now can be seen holding hands in Texas and kissing in Georgia, but there is still a healthy amount of these guilty thoughts among gay men when it comes to their sex life.
And there is no place where shame is more apparent then when it comes to the conversation of sex and HIV. Why is that? Well, because there is still an unsettling association between gay sex and the pesky virus. And when shame is involved, we are always looking for someone else to blame.
Naturally, it is easiest to pinpoint those who outwardly identify themselves as HIV positive as the ones to blame for the continuation of this stain on our community. It is easy to forget that these individuals were also HIV negative at one point in time and, most likely, consumed with the same fears of transmission as the rest of the HIV negative demographic. Now, they must assimilate to the HIV positive ranks and be constantly berated with stereotypes of behavior and health fallacies, which plague a population that should know better. It can be a difficult road for some, depending on how privileged they were before discovering their new identity. As it turns out, those who dish the most shame aren't very good at taking it.
Of course, the shaming of those with HIV doesn't occur in a blatantly obtuse fashion. We have come a long way since the AIDS virus was discovered 32 years ago. Then, the viral divide was like a gaping crevice within the gay community that had people plummeting to their death. Now, depths of the crevice are much more shallow. People who are diagnosed as HIV positive are no longer plummeting, but rather cast down into a lower rung in the community where they are expected to stay. How do we keep them in their place? Through shame in the form of stigmatization and judgment.
Just like any prejudice born out of fear, we must eliminate the ominous stereotypes and prerequisite judgments that perpetuate HIV stigma within the gay community. But where do we start? The answer is simple. We assess the language of the HIV culture and remove the words that inherently cast shades of shame.
Coming from a community that just recently removed the 'F' word from America's common vernacular, we know that words – whether intentional or not --  are sometimes all it takes to keep a second class firmly in their place. Whether it is the way we address HIV education or the terminology we assign to our status, the HIV language is littered with dirty little innuendos that HIV negative people would never notice and which HIV positive people can't seem to forget.
Speaking of dirty, what could be dirtier than the opposite of clean?
Any single gay man navigating the gay social media apps is bombarded by the stigmatizing sentiment of associating a person's HIV negative status with being "clean."
When asked what he thought about the use of the word "clean" in regard to a person being HIV negative, HIV activist and acclaimed blogger Mark S. King, had this to say:
"I don't mind people who are simply disclosing their status and want to know mine. But 'clean?’ There are ways to get this information without making me feel like one of the great unwashed."
After all, what could be more shameful than being inadvertently labeled as "dirty?”
Who knows whether anyone has ever consciously made the outright connection between an HIV positive person being dirty, but you can only imagine the impact this word can have on the positive community.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, 44 percent of people who are HIV positive are unaware of their status. Unfortunately, the people who may be perpetuating the shame game may soon find that it is they who need the bath. This is where the real danger lies. Allowing language like this to permeate our culture only serves to promote the continuation of the HIV epidemic and enforce a second viral class among the gay community.
Of course, the burden of change rests on the shoulders of those affected the most by the shame game. It may seem easier for HIV positive men to retreat into the shadows when friends and strangers alike unknowingly use language that make them feel like a pariah in dignitaries' clothing. However, many of these accidental offenders are victims of the same phenomenon that was the basis of so much prejudice against gay men and women. They simply don't have a personal connection to the disease. HIV positive men owe it to themselves to speak out against language that demeans their worth. They also owe it to their HIV negative friends to educate them on the reality so that they don't continue to proliferate stigma or believe that they are removed from risk.
HIV positive men aren't victims, vampires, zombies or martyrs. The social and psychological factors surrounding infection are complex, difficult and impossible to simplify into one category.
Of course, the language we use and terminology we've chosen to isolate one another is just the one element of the shaming that goes on within the gay community. Combating HIV stigma is a multifarious problem that will require numerous endeavors and will take time before we start seeing measurable change.
Until then, we must remain prudent in our efforts to erasing the divide that only serves to hinder our community and proliferate HIV infection. The next chapter in the fight against HIV begins with learning from our own history and removing words that place shame on some and keep others in the risk pool.
Like I said before, it starts with those who are HIV positive to speak out against hurtful terminology and naïve generalizations that pervade their surroundings.
So I'll start.
My name is Tyler Curry. I am HIV positive and there ain't no shame in my game.

 http://www.hivequal.org/hiv-equal-online/the-hiv-shame-game-what-role-do-you-play

Why Gay Men Should Never Make Ebola Jokes

By: Tyler Curry

October 19th, 2014

Tags: From the Editor, HIV/AIDS, Ebola, Ebola stigma, HIV stigma

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 The past few weeks have been an unyielding rigmarole of Ebola, Ebola fear and fear-mongering journalism. Whether it was a report on quarantines of those who have been exposed, debates on possible travel bans to Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, a witch hunt for those responsible at Texas Presbyterian or concerns over whether a dog could carry the virus, the American public has experienced a bout of information overload that would leave even the biggest news junkie ready to change the channel.

Naturally, there is a tendency to lean on humor in times of intense overexposure to such a serious topic. There has been talk about how to dress up as Ebola for Halloween, several comics have made jests about outbreaks at major gatherings and the fear of the virus has almost taken on a cartoonish appeal, given that only one person has died from the disease in the U.S. And who is better at making the sometimes inappropriate, maybe-too-soon, à la Joan Rivers joke than gay men? But as much as the gay community loves a good off-colored pun, the sensitive nature that is the Ebola crisis should strike some place so close to home that nothing could be funny about such an awful tragedy.

For those who lived through the beginning of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, you know all too well how it feels to have your community ravaged by a disease while outside onlookers barely flinch. That is, until a heterosexual person or man-of-interest contracted HIV and an all out panacea of fear spread throughout the nation. And you, the gay man who had lost half, or maybe more of your loved ones, has to watch the news as the entire country rallies around a few people who “mattered.”

For those who were born in the 80s or after, picture this:

It is 1983, and you and your best 20-something guy friends are listening to the latest Madonna song while you get ready to go out to the gay bars. You are not just in the gay community; you are in the community, as this was before the era of gay-is-the-new-black, corporate-sponsored-Pride-parades, gay-dads-on-T.V. You are isolated, confined to the gay ghetto that houses your entire world and all of the people who you love. But life is good as long as you have your friends who now feel like family and maybe a boyfriend if you are lucky.

As Madonna tempts you and your homo clique to take a holiday, you notice a dime-sized red sore on your friend’s hand. He nervously says that it’s nothing and you continue the night as if nothing is the matter. But this is 1983, two years after the gay plague had begun to spread among your community. You know it’s something called AIDS, and that it is probably going to kill your friend, maybe even you.

Now its six months later, and you have to decide which of your friends’ funerals to go to. It is 1984 and the fear of AIDS has crippled the gay community and is even starting to get some pretty decent news coverage. It has taken two of your lovers, many of your friends, and almost all hope of living a normal, happy life. Sure, you have moments of reprieve, but the sheer pain of loss has become commonplace and natural. The worse part is, no one outside of the gay community still seems to give a damn.

Now, it is 1985, and the President finally makes the containment of AIDS a priority. Almost 5,000 of gay men just like you are dead, but the media focus is on only but a few heterosexuals who have unfortunately contracted the virus. As the American masses learned more about the nature of HIV, how it was transmitted and whom it affected the most, the wildfire of fear and panic allays to a slow burn as most people realized that they most likely wouldn’t contract the virus. Even though HIV continues to dominate the headlines, it also becomes a punch line for those who are tired of hearing about HIV-this and AIDS-that. Someone you know, albeit distantly as they are not a part of the gay community, thinks it is funny to dress up as AIDS for a night because it’s ironic, timely and just a joke. And he isn’t the only one.

Ebola is different from AIDS. It is transmitted differently, it affects the body differently and it is targeting a different population. It also has taken nine months to kill the amount of people that took HIV four years. For the many in West Africa who have recently buried their loved ones, the pain is fresh, blinding and wrought with anger and grief.

Imagine burying your sister, your mother or your husband, or maybe all three. There is no infrastructure to control the growing epidemic that has brought crippling fear in your town. The outside world is looking at quarantining your entire country, and you are just trying to survive.

Now ask yourself, do you still think it’s not too soon to crack an Ebola joke?

Gay men now enjoy the luxury of dancing in and out of the gay ghetto that once imprisoned their homosexual identities. We are moving into the suburbs, having babies, getting married and inching toward equality day by day. And as we step further and further away from the struggle and tragedies that quite literally plagued the gay community in the 80s and 90s, we run the risk of becoming as insensitive as the people that we have spent years fighting again.

As gay men, we cannot only care about the issues that directly impact us while we laugh at the ones that affect others. Most of us still cringe when someone makes an AIDS joke because, 30 years later, it’s still not funny. An AIDS Halloween costume will never be appropriate; not yesterday, not today and certainly not tomorrow. So, when it comes to Ebola, just take a minute to think how it would feel to hear someone who has lost no one joking about a disease that just wiped out your community.

http://www.hivequal.org/hiv-equal-online/why-gay-men-should-never-make-ebola-jokes

   12.01.2014 World AIDS Day

Columbus, Ohio

    http://ohioaidscoalition.org/events/ohio-conference-on-hivaids/

Social Media Activists:
  The New Hope in the   Fight Against HIV

 By: Tyler Curry*

In the short but vitriolic history of HIV/AIDS, the narrative is one of immense depths and monumental peaks. The 80s and early 90s were defined by catastrophic loss, an ominous fear of anything to do with gay sex – and gay men, for that matter – and one of the greatest achievements in the history of activism. After almost two decades where gay men seemed to be doomed for extinction, combination antiretroviral therapy hit the market in 1996 was when everyone took a breath. AIDS related deaths significantly declined, an HIV diagnosis was no longer met with the question of cremation or burial and the shouts and cries of AIDS activists across the globe dulled to a murmur.

The decade that followed was what many refer to as ‘The Quiet Years.” Gay men with AIDS were achieving undetectable viral loads, the threat of imminent death was over, and the gay rights movement shifted focus to marriage equality, equal employment laws and other issues that were less dreary than AIDS. So HIV was forgotten, but not gone.

While the images of death from AIDS faded all but into a past nightmare, a new generation of young gay men entered into the playing field. These young homosexuals knew they were supposed to wear a condom and that HIV was bad, but didn’t seem to get the importance of the rubber as much as they were supposed to.

Meanwhile, the infection rates were rising among this youthful population. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), HIV infection rates among gay men reached an all time low in 1993. Since its peak of almost 80,000 infections in gay men in 1984, the number of infections had been reduced to under 20,000. But, as better medications continued to hit the market, rates once again began to rise back to around 30,000 in 2001, and that is where they have stayed ever since. Additionally, young gay men continue to be the only demographic where new infections are still increasing.

So every year since the introduction of achievement of antiretroviral therapy, more and more gay boys have been hiding their HIV meds and living under the dark and portentous cloud of HIV stigma. Yes, these kids are living. But when that life is filled with shame, regret and self-loathing, most of thes kids feel like are nothing more than dead men walking.

Which leads us to the state of HIV/AIDS activism today. Whereas the first era of HIV/AIDS was consumed with noise and the second filled with silence, a new era has begun – One that will go down as a movement to be equal, but aware.

Throughout the 20th International AIDS Conference in Melbourne, Australia, thousands of LGBT youth have gathered to participate in a meeting of the minds with one shared goal in mind – to once again raise awareness around HIV transmission and reduce infections to zero. Many older activists have voiced their disappointment with this generation, claiming that they aren’t being loud enough – certainly not as loud as in the ACT UP and TAG days where people screamed, shouted and did just about everything except spontaneously combust to get attention for their cause.

These veterans shake their fingers and often rebuke the younger generation, dismissing their obsessive Facebooking, Tweeting and texting as evidence of a generation lost. But while these young LGBT activists feverishly jam their fingers on their iPhones, they are quietly forging what is to be the new hope for an AIDS free world.

During the “Like Me, Post Me, Tweet Me” Session at the 20th IAC, bright young millennials from around the globe gathered to discuss the importance of using social media to engage at-risk populations about testing, prevention and awareness. Among the panelists were the creators of two successful social media campaigns who, through creative messaging to target populations, have been able to tap into the minds of the young gay men who are most at risk for HIV infection.

Yvees Calmette is the Principle Planner of the Ending HIV campaign, a program of the AIDS Council of New South Wales, which launched in February 2013 in Sydney, Australia. Calmette, along with a small team of media savvy group of gay men, created the campaign as a platform to educate and mobilize people around prevention with a advantageous goal to end the spread of HIV by the end of the decade.

But before Ending HIV began, Calmette and his team launched the Know Your Risk campaign, which was designed to target sexually adventurous gay men and to educate on the variables of risk, including undetectable viral load, sero-positioning and men who are unaware of their status. The campaign involved a web application that allowed gay men to calculate their risk of transmission by entering in their sexual habits. According to Calmette sexually adventurous men (e.g. lots of sex, group sex, sex on drugs) were only 15% of the gay male population in Sydney but represented 35% of HIV infections.

Recognizing the need for a more inclusive campaign, the team created Ending HIV to include everyone at potential risk for HIV infection.

We wanted to create a universal message to reach the entire community,” said Calmette.” But we also use specific targeted messages through social media to reach specific groups within the community such as positive men, young men, men in relationships, transgender people and so on.”

With a constant focus on producing material that promotes interactive communication, Ending HIV has made a huge impact in the effort to resurrect the dialogue around HIV prevention and awareness and renew the commitment to reducing HIV infection to zero.

Apiwit Tibamrung took on a slightly more salacious approach with his campaign, Suck, F#ck, Test, Repeat (SFTR). This Bangkok based testing initiative was created to reduce stigma around getting tested through the use of provocative and often hilarious viral videos.

One of the SFTR campaign videos opens with hypnotic dance music and scenes from a late night with two men who are about to hit the sheets. The two men’s sexual dance speeds up as clothes continue to shed until both are in their underwear and the inevitable is assumed. Then, both boys abruptly lie onto their backs and lift their legs into the air, revealing that the men are both bottoms. A campaign tagline then appears on the screen, “There are more awkward things than getting an HIV test.” The video pans to both men going into an HIV clinic with fast-moving camera shots of the testing process.

“There is a lot to be embarrassed about with sex,” Tibamrung says. “Two bottoms, two tops, farting… the point is to show that testing doesn’t have to be something to be embarrassed about.”

In the United States, organizations like the San Francisco AIDS Foundation  (SFAF) are employing social media savvy young people like Megan Canon to create interactive, informational online forums to engage at-risk men in the gay community. Canon, a young heterosexual woman and the social media manager at SFAF, is uniquely in tune with the culture and sexual behavior of gay men. She is the brainpower behind PrEPfacts.org, a new type of educational website designed to inform those who are at higher risk of HIV exposure about the use of Truvada as an HIV prevention pill.

With the purposefully vague slogan, “Love May Have Another Protector,” and the use of sexy pink and teal imagery of a naked cartoon man reminiscent of 70s porn, the marketing looks like anything except an HIV awareness campaign. And that was exactly Canon’s point. But with all of its stylish appeal and San Francisco hipster vibe, it is a comprehensive educational initiative about the latest in HIV prevention.

“An informed no is just as good as an informed yes,” said Canon. “Our goal is to provide people with the information they need to make the right decision.”

In the 80s and 90s, when large scales of explosives by way of organizations like ACT UP and TAG were utilized to achieve what was needed - and as the body count continued to rise - the sound of the fight was almost deafening. Veteran observers of today’s activists may be at first underwhelmed by the lack of explosions and fireworks coming from the younger generation, and may be wondering why we aren’t screaming and shouting for change. But the fight against HIV has drastically changed, and so have the weapons we use. The virtual voices of today’s HIV activists and educators may not be sending supersonic ripples through the headlines like the activists of yesterday, but their digital reach has the potential to target the deaf ears of at-risk youth and put a end to this epidemic for good.

*Tyler Curry is the Senior Editor @ HIV Equal Online. This article was originally published on 7/24/14

 http://www.hivequal.org/social-media-activists.html

Legalizing HIV Stigma:
The Hidden Impact of Anti-Gay Legislation

By: Stephen Lucin*

During the 20th International AIDS Conference in Melbourne, Australia, a Nigerian man stands before a group of nearly 50 people and speaks about the decrease of stigma towards HIV positive populations in his country. Meanwhile, that very country has recently passed anti-gay laws that have subsequently had a negative effect for continued HIV treatment for HIV positive gay men. What is one left to think?

That’s exactly the question I posed to myself when I decided to leave the session entitled “Sexier Than You Think: HIV Policy, Regulation, Legislation” at this year’s International AIDS Conference. That, coupled along with a presentation on the Zambian law allowing men to marry their deceased brother’s wife, helped me to carry on with my day in other, more productive ways.

Nigeria passed the “Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Bill” in January 2014, which has subsequently led to abuses, discrimination and beatings of LGBT people in that country. It has also, similarly as is happening in Uganda, thrown many gay people into hiding. Consequently,that has also forced HIV positive people to go off of their medications because of a lack of access to them and fear of being labeled LGBT.

Oluwole Fajemisin gave his presentation entitled “Effects of anti-stigma legislation on the level of stigma directed towards persons living with HIV in Nigeria,” and noted that because of outreach to the various states throughout the country, stigma against people living with HIV had decreased. However, he made no mention of the impact on the LGBT Community or MSM (men who have sex with men). And that made me question the validity of his research; especially since online news reports suggest that in various states across Nigeria, the number of MSM who are made aware of HIV prevention or treatment has dropped from as little as 10 percent.

Through the sessions at this year’s AIDS 2014 conference, it’s apparent that HIV and LGBT criminalization laws across the globe need some serious overhauls if not complete overturning. And while the most shameful of all civil or common laws can be found in the developing world, there is still so much work to be done in developed countries, including the United States, Canada and Australia where there are many laws that, inconsistent with science and research, unfairly jail and/or sentence individuals who have caused no harm to society.

All researchers and legal experts point back to Former Justice of the High Court of Australia Michael Kirby’s statements that the democratic process must work for people and that science must inform law.

It’s clear that countries the world over must reassess their legal codes towards LGBT and HIV positive citizens, and to create fair and equal treatment for all people. If we can begin by enacting change in our own country, we can more firmly advocate change in countries abroad.
                  *This article was originally published 7/28/14, HIV Equal Online
                              http://www.hivequal.org/legalizing-hiv-stigma.html