[QUANGO (Quasi-NGO): A non-governmental organisation/semi-public advisory and administrative body that is financed and supported by the government and having most of its members appointed by the government]

AID$ Inc.'s frenetic fundraising activities - which have variously been described as "grasping" and "begging" - yield it by far the largest slice of the funding pie compared to smaller, tight-knit operations like Stop AIDS and UFA, who remain committed to their missions and focused on keeping their core message alive, devoid of self-interest, greed or external influence. Indeed, the need to do so can be so all-consuming that the time and energy devoted to raising funds often features some way down their list of priorities, hence their constant struggle just to survive. 

The alternative? To prostitute themselves to the culture of dependency on taxpayers' cash that saw AID$ Inc. long ago wave goodbye to its independence and climb into bed with outside interests, in the process morphing from compassionate servers into academical adjuncts of government (quangos), jumping and kow towing to its excessive dictates and demands. Demands that have seen the aggressive, compassion-led campaigns that once stemmed the spread of HIV and correlated health risks long be superseded by the creeping "left-is-right/black-is-white/two-plus-two-is-five" pervasiveness of political correctness which has:

• Served to legitimise and normalise the virus;

• Eroded and decimated the collective health of men who have sex with men (MSM) throughout the West, and;

• Sent HIV transmission rates soaring.

"Most [US] HIV prevention campaigns targeted at meth users are ridiculously shallow. The government has actively participated in the deaths of gay men by prohibiting funding from being used to disseminate the graphic information needed to make informed decisions."

~ Patrick Moore [The Village Voice]

"Charities have donors with pre-conceived notions of who must be kept sweet. Government research money is now heavily under political influence; it would be a brave academic hoping for future grants who used government funds to conclude the latest Downing St.-trumpeted health service initiative was garbage."

~ The Cochrane Collaboration

"Britain is the birthplace of many renowned charities. In the past few years, many of these organisations have undergone a curious transformation. They have begun to receive much of their income from the State rather than from individual donors. And they've given up important aspects of their work and concentrated instead on publicity and propaganda... The public has, for the most part, not yet noticed these changes and continued to give generously to charity appeals. But awareness is growing and the charities should realise that, if they abandon their traditional role, they may also weaken the respect in which they are held, and face a long-term loss in contributions that will end by making them wholly dependent on the government."

~ The Mail on Sunday [Editorial, February 2007]

A pattern of compliance to external directives that ultimately adversely impact on gay men's health is blatantly evident in Britain, shedding light on AID$ Inc. UK's inability and thinly-veiled reluctance to act in the best interests of those it professes to serve.

"Common Purpose: Although it has 80,000 trainees in 36 UK cities, 30,000 graduate members and enormous power, Common Purpose (CP) is largely unknown to the general public. It recruits and trains its leaders to work beyond authority, to abuse their posts and serve CP instead of their own departments, which they then undermine. Its members control the NHS, where it wastes £60bn, much of it going into private pockets, and controls most of Britain's 8,500 quangos which spend £167bn annually according to the Cabinet Office. Most of that is waste... CP is identifying leaders in all levels of our government to assume power when our nation is replaced by the European Union, in what they call “the post democratic era.” They are learning to rule without democracy"...

~ Brian Gerrish  [Common Purpose Exposed]

"Quangos have proved the perfect vehicle for transforming the social fabric of Britain into a politically correct nanny state while avoiding the need for a democratic mandate for change."

~ Leo McKinstry [The Daily Mail, June 20, 2007]

In Britain, this bureaucratically-inflicted decline has taken root thanks to the HIV sector’s accountability to shadowy "commissioners" within the state-owned NHS; the UK's once world-renowned public health service which, like the gay men's health sector, has seen its once high standards eroded from within since New Labour acquired power in 1997, despite having had £269.2 billion - over half a trillion dollars - of taxpayer pounds lavished on it. This publicly unaccountable, self-selecting body has the power to make major decisions that affect society, and it announced, in December 2006, that the entire approach of agencies like THT and GMFA would be rethought due to their "failure" to impede record rates of HIV among MSM (for the third year running over 2,600 were diagnosed HIV+ in the UK in 2007 - the highest rate on record); a decision effectively imposed on an HIV sector that has allowed itself to become a government arm, responsive to its misguided dictates and directives in order to secure additional funding. "We [have] little evidence as to the effectiveness of current HIV prevention programs," the commissioning body said when setting out its proposal to restructure the way AID$ Inc. UK tackles HIV prevention.

Last November, the London Gay Men's HIV Prevention Partnership (LGMHPP) - a central fund contributed to by London's NHS Trusts and administered by NHS commissioners - confirmed it would be slashing the budget for information resources such as booklets and advertising campaigns in gay media by 36% and axing a swath of sexual health counseling in favour of "Persuasive Interpersonal Interaction" - face-to-face interviews with gay men conducted by hundreds of volunteers converging on bars and clubs, probing and snooping into every area of their sex lives on the pretext of "disseminating safe sex advice based on each individual's needs". Dubbed "quality interaction" by the propagates of this controversial new approach, every intimate detail gathered would then be stored on a cross-accessible central database, adding to the UK government's growing raft of intrusively sinister Big Brother measures that include 4.2 million CCTV cameras erected in towns and cities across Britain (one for every 14 citizens), a national biometric ID card, the proposed microchipping of criminals, and a multitude of databases ranging from a DNA archive to one that stores school children's fingerprints.

"Hardly a day goes by without a Minister calling for yet another vast database or yet more surveillance powers. What is wrong with Britain? Why are we sleepwalking our way into a surveillance society? This government's relentless urge to snoop, record and file every detail of our lives is putting our very democracy in danger."

~ Dr. Gus Hosein [The London School of Economics]

Essentially, the NHS commissioning body was proposing intrusive measures to resolve the UK HIV sector's abject failure to stem the decline in sexual health - a failure AID$ Inc. UK allowed  the NHS to conspire in by taking its cash in return for obeying its dictates and directives!

The UK HIV sector admitted as much when one of its own health workers told Gay Times in July 2007: "Most of the gay agencies involved are furious, especially as the report dismisses most of the work they've been doing to NHS specifications for the past six years."

GMFA immediately launched a damage limitation offensive in the gay press, pointing to questionable research that claims that the HIV infection rate is at record levels only because more MSM are coming forward to be tested, and that rates have in fact remained steady over the years. "The uptake of HIV testing in recent years highlights the recent success of health promotion in reducing the number of gay men with undiagnosed HIV," claimed GMFA's Matthew Hodson - who also opposes a ban on bareback videos on the basis that “I don’t like the thought of censorship, particularly that which discriminates against gay men” - contradicting clearcut evidence that shows that HIV is on the increase due to more UK MSM than ever having unsafe sex, with up to 9000 estimated to be unaware that they carry the virus because they are not coming forward to be tested, particularly in the wake of prosecutions against those who recklessly or wilfully infect others.

Discrediting Hodson's claims that more people than ever are coming forward to be tested, 2007's Sigma Gay Men's Sex Survey reported that the proportion of gay men coming forward to be tested remains unchanged since 1997, while Will Nutland, The Terrence Higgins Trust's media-trained press spokesman (officially known as Head of Health Promotion), told the London listings magazine Out in December 2007: "HIV statistics gauged by ongoing surveys are in fact likely to be an underestimation, since around one in four gay men with HIV haven't had the infection diagnosed." 

In December 2006, a Pink Paper reader wrote that GMFA can't not be aware of the true picture because its collection buckets were a World AIDS Day fixture at Central Station, one of a growing number of sex-on-

premises venues in London where condoms are routinely shunned, barebacking is the encouraged norm and used needles and syringes are casually discarded. "GMFA are not the sex police," responded Hodson in typical PC parrot fashion, prompting a contributor to the Pink Paper's bulletin board to liken the charity's tact to that of a cancer charity begging for money in a hospital chemotherapy ward. GMFA, in tandem with THT, has since awarded a number of underground sex-on-premises venues that adopt a "code of good practice" their official 'Play Zone' seal of approval. This unenforceable code will be policed just twice a year and risks driving those in search of unsanitised, unregulated sex even further underground to non-Play Zone venues, while acting as a lure to young men who would not otherwise consider entering such environments. [See The Merchants of HIV]

"Those practicing unsafe sex need reminding that HIV is one of many STIs that HIV-seroconcordant couples may be discordant for...that can manifest more virulently in HIV+ gay men, accelerate HIV's progress, make HIV more infectious and play a role in such disorders as liver failure or cervical/rectal cancer. The take-home message simply has to be that super-

infection may well occur and are occurring in sex clubs and backrooms throughout the UK today."

~ Philip Rochester [UK.Gay.Com discussion board]

"GMFA has the bare-faced cheek to collect money at sex-on-premises establishments where condoms are shunned, and then uses that money to fund 'Arse Classes', 'Bondage For Beginners' and 'How-To-Get-That-Stud-Out-of-His-Towel-And-Into-The-Sauna' courses on the basis that they are empowering gay men to get the sex they want. What twisted logic!"

~ Paul Clifton [Disco Damaged]

"The messages [most cruise clubs] are sending out are that diseases like HIV and hep C are no big deal, and that gay men don't have any respect for themselves."

~ Spike [London club promoter]

Heavy petitioning in the gay press resulted in the HIV prevention budget being saved, but not without a major casualty. In March 2008, it was announced that GMFA's contract to supply London's HIV prevention campaigns wouldn't be renewed, thereby marginalising the charity and its activities and ending a succession of PC ads that have sought to sexualise, fetishise, romanticise, trivialise and, ultimately, legitimise the HIV virus. Instead, the London Sexual Health Commissioning Group, which apportions HIV prevention funding, awarded the three-year contract to THT - the UK's largest provider of HIV services.

“We are delighted to confirm these contracts,” Kensington and Chelsea Primary Care Trust Chief Executive Diana Middleditch said when announcing the changes. “The services they provide are vital to continue the excellent work being done in London to prevent and treat HIV in the gay community and enable people with HIV to improve their overall health,” she continued, failing to explain why the HIV prevention budget was being awarded to a charity/ quango that has excelled at managing - but abysmally failed at containing and curtailing - the virus. “It’s in everyone’s interest, not just the gay community, to see the number of HIV infections reduced. The services that will be provided over the next three years are built on best practice and evidence of cost effectiveness. We are improving the service we provide by becoming very outcome focussed.”

"The concentration of all things HIV in the hands of one organisation cannot be a good thing. THT must decide if it wants to be the dominant provider of HIV services to those who carry the virus, or a preventer of the virus. It can't be allowed to have it both ways, particularly when there is evidence to show it's become incredibly rich commodifying and pandering to the virus, encouraging its spread by adhering to a PC agenda that has sought to play down it's serious consequences."

~ Rob [Disco Damaged]

And what of the NHS commissioning body's proposed snooper's charter into gay men's private sex lives? Sure enough, as part of the round of new HIV Prevention Programme contracts awarded in March, THT announced a new "phone service" on May 1 called the London Gay Men's Sexual Health Helpline "for gay men to discuss sexual health questions" - the same pretext by which the original scheme intended to converge on gay bars and clubs to obtain intimate details of gay men's sexual behaviour...

"We are an independent charity, rooted in the communities we serve. We use our insight to innovate and inspire change in policies, services and minds."

~ Terrence Higgins Trust [A claim of independence that forms a core part of THT's Mission Statement]