20th Century 21st Century
In "NORMALISING" and even glamorising HIV, the DECLINING effectiveness of campaigning became INVERSELY proportional to the burgeoning DEMAND for AIDS Inc.'s portfolio of HIV SERVICES, which, perversely and macabrely, require a steady FLOW of MSM to be seroconverting in order to be LUCRATIVE and COST-EFFECTIVE.
~ Annie Lennox [The Pink Paper, 17 April, 2008]
Born of a response to the siren call to contain and curtail the spread of HIV, the real fight against AIDS ended in the mid-1990s. Since then AID$ Inc. has systematically immersed itself in managing and commodifying the virus while paying scant lip service to preventing the spread of HIV and keeping the safe sex message alive.
"Many organisations...chose to tone down or scale back their prevention outreach for gay men, just at a time when infection rates for gay and bisexual men - particularly young men - began to climb again after posting declines in the 1990s."
~ Bob Adams [The Advocate]
By the early/mid-1990s, the compassion-led advocacy of many AIDS organisations in the West - not least the encouraging of safe, mutually-respecting behaviours combined with effective, hardhitting safe sex campaigning - had succeeded in substantially reducing HIV transmissions to the extent that their task was becoming minimalised. To survive and expand, many larger organisations abandoned their enshrined principles and objectives and "sold their souls" to outside interests, and a process of bureaucratisation - or "quangofication" - ensued that, ultimately, would see a devastating price paid by those whose health they were tasked to protect.
The start of today's upward trajectory in HIV transmissions can be pinpointed precisely; to the emergence of combination therapies in 1995/6 when infection rates were at their lowest level since the start of the epidemic. Some AIDS agencies publicly hailed HAART - highly active antiretroviral therapy - as a miracle panacea, providing the pretext for a seismic shift in their priorities and emphasis away from effective HIV prevention campaigning towards HIV management; one that would enforce a renewed dependency for a sector dispensing vital services and life-saving treatments while justifying their demands for ever greater injections of cash to support their reconstructed, market-driven frame-works. Today, The Terrence Higgins Trust in London receives millions of pounds annually to provide HIV services from primary care trusts, local health boards and other central government health bodies. The equation is simple: the more HIVers it provides for, the more central funding it receives.
The commodification of HIV saw extraordinary levels of obfuscation, manipulation, intimidation and control freakery creep into AID$ Inc.'s practices, and public relations experts - "spin doctors" - appointed as "health experts" to justify and deftly explain away the scaling back or abandonment of established, proven structures and procedures in favour of brutally efficient, market-responsive systems that would ultimately maximise the sector's new, HIV services-oriented framework, and in ways which raised few eyebrows and prompted no questions from a compliant, ad revenue-hungry gay media. [See Smoke and Mirrors]
The politically correct strategy of reducing HIV stigma via the avoidance of offending and/or upsetting the feelings of HIVers was the pretext by which AID$ Inc. justified diluting the impact of established and proven graphic HIV prevention campaigns.
"95% of HIV+ people would not care if an advert implied it's dumb to fuck without a condom, or that saggy arses and diarrhoea stink and will ruin your lovely gay image - whatever it takes to deter someone going through what they went through!"
~ Ricky Dyer [HIV+ journalist]
Such campaigns were watered down and their impact diminished in ways which many interpreted as a green light to dispense with precautions altogether and continue to do to this day, while the line dividing HIV- and HIV+ blurred as safe sex campaigns stopped attacking the virus and instead adopted a universal "play safe/use condoms" approach aimed at all MSM simultaneously rather than being targetted specific to HIV-status. These gave rise to oblique, confusing "one-
size-fits-all" messages that prevail to this day; devoid of the immediacy, consistency, accessibility and effectiveness of the aggressive, to-the-point campaigns they superceded, they have spectacularly failed to address the educational needs of the (still) negative majority as soaring HIV rates testify.
"Our community used to be at war with HIV, back when graphic campaigns worked, but truth is often the first casualty in war. Subsequent campaigns progressively failed to hit the message home why HIV must continue to be avoided at all costs. Instead they sexualised, romanticised, fetishised and ultimately normalised the virus to the extent where "bug chasing", bareback films and high-risk sex venues are tolerated and even endorsed. When will the dangerous PC rationalising and commodification of HIV cease and the compassionate task of preventing this disease spreading even further begin?"
- Ben [Pink Paper letters]
"20 years ago the unequivocal message was 'AIDS means death - don't put yourself at risk'. How that message has changed since then. One recent [UK] sexual health campaign encouraged us to pull out 'like a porn star' rather than cum inside. There was no 'don't do bareback' message at all."
~ Paul Heeley [The Pink Paper]
"It's not rocket science to see that current efforts to prevent the spread of HIV are failing. The time is now ripe for a return to the kind of hardhitting grassroots education campaigns that worked so effectively in the 1980s. This is an unfashionable idea, but what is the alternative? The status quo is simply not working."
~ Paul Steinberg [Boyz]
Indeed, so zealous has AID$ Inc. been at legitimising HIV that “reverse stigmatisation” has become common place, resulting in a blase social toleration of bareback videos, the high-profile endorsement of high-risk sex-on-premises venues where Class A drug use is rife, and the rise of the term “bug chasing”, whereby some HIV- men - particularly those marginalised in AIDS-ravaged gay ghettoes - deliberately acquire the virus in order to conform to what they perceive as being the social norm.
"AIDS prevention messages had not weighed the needs and experiences of HIV- men specifically, choosing instead to broadcast a generic "play safe" theme tailored to avoid offending men who were HIV+. Other language in the AIDS liturgy seemed to dangerously minimise the impact of HIV, and failed to state plainly that being HIV- is better than being HIV+."
~ Duncan Osborne [Author, Suicide Tuesday]
In ensuring their long-term survival by exerting their dominance and responding to the effects of HIV and providing services to HIVers, AID$ Inc. globally devoted less and less energy and resources to addressing the causes. As a consequence, the irrational PC belief systems by which they operate have spawned a generation of uninformed, docile and consequently HIV-infected MSM dependent on its services and Big Pharma's life-prolonging - albeit toxic and potentially fatal - combination therapies. In conjunction with other factors, these medications can cause cancer, lung, liver and heart disease, heart attacks and, contrary to the deceptively optimistic outlook fanfared by AID$ Inc. - not least their rebranding of HIV/AIDS as a "manageable" disease like diabetes - may keep the average 21-year-old newly-diagnosed with HIV alive for just 24.2 years.
"GMFA tells gay men 'If you start HIV treatment early enough you can live to be 100', which is a downright negligent and inaccurate representation. Nothing about the nausea or diarrhoea, body-changing deformaties, liver and kidney damage, the draining lethargy or a life on low state handouts because of the inability to keep a good job through HIV drug failures and side-effects or their overall highly toxic nature."
Jimmy Y [UK.Gay.Com discussion boards]
"We have the facts and yet we are still missing the message. Don't buy into the myth that HIV is like diabetes. There is nothing manageable when dealing with an uncertain future, side effects from medication and, to top it all off, rejection based purely on your positive status. An HIV diagnosis can rip through your core and make you question everything."
~ Clint Walters [Founder of Health Initiatives]
"[HIV] is manageable, but to relegate it as another chronic condition makes many gay men feel that it is less of a threat... The main questions concerning HIV are: how would you view having another chronic disease, and would you want to be diabetic if you had the choice? Certainly no one should want to be infected, especially when it can be prevented."
~ Frank Spinelli, MD [The Advocate Guide to Gay Men's Health and Wellness, Ayson Books]
"It is true that the treatment has improved, but anyone who thinks that having the virus is nothing more than an inconvenience is a complete idiot. Taking all the pills is unpleasant, but aside from that everything stops working as it should. I have constant diarrhoea one week followed by constipation the next, I’ve lost four stone in weight and can’t sleep."
~ Anon [Pink News]
By reconstructing HIV in this way - in the process legitimising and even glamorising the HIV virus that can still lead to full-blown AIDS, and which is still killing 200 men each year in the UK alone - the declining effectiveness of safe sex campaigning became inversely proportional to the burgeoning demand for AID$ Inc.'s portfolio of HIV services, which, perversely and macabrely, require a steady flow of MSM to be seroconverting in order to be lucrative and cost-effective. In London, where the AIDS sector has presided over a rapid decline in the overall sexual health of MSM since 1996, HIV infection rates continue to spiral alongside:
• Glossy, dumbed-down HIV brochures packaged and presented in ways which, to the uninformed and uninitiated, can appear to glorify the virus and equate acquisition with gaining entry into an exclusive members' club;
• "Have-the-sex-you-want" courses ranging from "Bondage for Beginners" to "Sauna Cruising Tips" and "Arse Classes" advertised in scene listings magazines aimed at under 25-year-old club kids, 75% of whom no longer consider HIV to be a major health risk, according to a recent survey;
• Saturation advertising campaigns for PEP that lull some into a false sense of invincibility with their reputation as an (unproven) "quick fix"/morning after pill, particularly among crystal meth users.
"Younger gay males think if they get [HIV] it won't be so bad, and they're just plain wrong. The pills are horrifying and can cause heart attacks, liver failure and a host of other problems, but how would they know? In the gay community the face of AIDS is healthy, active, geared to go...hell, damned sexy in some cases!"
Several years ago, Spectator journalist Leo McKinstry infiltrated a GMFA sex course and exposed the group for squandering funds intended for HIV prevention. This resulted in The Charity Commission censuring GMFA, which narrowly escape closure. The validity of such courses to empower MSM to "get the sex you want" wasn't in question. That they were being run by a charity funded to address major issues around sexual health and HIV was. Today, GMFA gets around such technicalities by calling itself, somewhat questionably, "The Gay Men's Health Charity"; a tacit admission that it is no longer in the business of "Fighting AIDS".
"The HIV community is very attractive. We have a glossy magazine full of gentle messages of love, care and support for our condition with lovely pictures of attractive people in drug company ads holding hands with a 'spirit of love' or 'we understand' message. The THT logo of two hearts entwined tells gay men to come be part of the 'love in' that is HIV/AIDS."
~ Anon [UK.Gay.Com message board]
A climate in which HIV treatments - not prevention - are routinely hailed as the solution [See "HIV is no Picnic"]; where three young gay men can catch HIV on the set of one bareback film, which itself is catering to a growing demand fuelled by an AIDS industry that refuses to stigmatise or speak out against such forms of "entertainment"; and where HIV prevention ads now advise you to “Pull out like porn stars!” before you cum where once they advocated condoms at all times and without question, or, if you already have an STI, to “Get it checked. Get back out there!” instead of pausing to consider how your sexual behaviour might need to be addressed. The latter, 2005 campaign was relaunched by THT in May 2008, soon after its latest money-spinner – STI testing kits by post – were widely publicised in the gay press…
~ Jasper Reynard [Chairman, GMAF]
According to the last UK Gay Men's Sex Survey, 31% of the respondents whose last HIV test was negative had unprotected anal sex with someone whose HIV status they did not know, and 3.5% of negative MSM had unsafe sex with someone whose status they knew to be HIV+, while 42% of positive respondents had unprotected anal sex with someone whose HIV status they did not know, and 21% had unprotected sex with someone who had told them that their last test was negative...
men who should be taking the lead where safe sex is concerned. Yet who is it holding the gun?"
~ Philip Rochester [UK.Gay.Com discussion board]
~ Gus Cairns [Positive Nation]
When, in 1999, UK AIDS charities were told that American MSM were responding to the complacency of their AIDS agencies' wishy washy safe sex messages and returning, en masse, to unsafe sex practices in the wake of the popped corks and premature sighs of relief that greeted combination therapies, and that hard-hitting campaigns were again needed to reinforce the message to UK MSM that AIDS remained a chronic and incurable killer disease, they dismissed the warning out of hand. It clearly did not make good economic sense for them to do otherwise: today, calls by distressed, newly-seroconverted MSM to most gay organisations and helplines in the UK are automatically referred to The Terrence Higgins Trust.
In the tax year 2005/6, The Terrence Higgins Trust announced in its annual Trustees Report a cash haul of £12,842,000. In 2006/7, a year that saw a further record rise in HIV transmissions, this had risen to a staggering £13,452,000... [Click on THT PDF link, left]
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