AIDS INC. copy

Terrence Higgins Trust and GMFA's LOVE-IN was unashamedly SERENADED in the London club listings magazine QX, when they RUBBER-STAMPED their JOINT APPROVAL of the growing number of SEX- ON-PREMISES venues in London that specifically cater for ANONYMOUS, and invariably UNSAFE, sexual encounters.

Bureaucratisation, political correctness and collusion are devices of the greedy, cowardly, unconscionable and morally bankrupt, and, where healthcare is concerned, always yield the same devastating, dehumanising results.

In the UK, they have served to transform the National Health Service (NHS) from a compassionate provider into a dispassionate, unwieldy beast, wherein most of the hundreds of billions of pounds poured into it in recent years have disappeared into a black hole or been squandered on, and by, penny-pinching, target-obsessed bureaucrats and consultants - the hidden hands behind AID$ Inc. UK [see Behind the Curtain] - with a corresponding deterioration in services and standards of hygiene comparable to that of Third World hospitals.

The same bureaucratic malaise has infected "quangoised" AIDS organisations globally who, for the last decade, have sung from identical PC hymn sheets. From the UK to Australia and New Zealand to America and Canada, AID$ Inc.’s loyal choir boys have been:

• Running the same ineffective campaigns;

• Entwined with Big Pharma and its vested interests;

• Repeating the same evasive tactics and obfuscating jargon;

• Spinning the same everything-in-the-garden's-rosy falsehoods;

• Misrepresenting the same dubious statistics to cover-up their failures;

• Jumping through the same government hoops to secure taxpayers' cash;

• B randing as liars those who dare speak out against their agenda of disempowerment...

All the while adopting the swaggering arrogance of a public monopoly combined with corporate greed; essentially a "mafia" of interconnected self-interests that waves an arrogant two-fingered salute at those they are mandated to serve.

Agencies that once boasted of their independence cosy up to their government and corporate funders, close ranks and collude to protect their mutual interests, strengthen their dominance, bolster their standing in the public eye and support each others' identical PC agendas and policies while neglecting their obligation to serve their respective communities' best interests and educate effectively on sexual health. Certainly, they give the impression of acting independently of the other, but at the end of the day they are each served by the same, PC-brainwashed system servers, with all information processed through the same PC filters to ensure that they tow the official, one-party PC line.

London's GMFA was established in the early 1990s by a group of gay men appalled by THT's distateful excesses, which were being widely reported by the gay and mainstream press at the time. Subsequently, as GMFA allowed its own infrastructure to become tainted amid claims of mismanagement and poor judgment, it climbed into bed with THT and, in recent years, has become a mere lap dog kowtowing to the dominant might of its former rival, the two agencies now speaking with one, politically correct voice on crucial sexual health matters.

"It is time we as a community woke up to what is so clearly happening in front of our very eyes and demand change. Perhaps the likes of THT and GMFA have become too incestuous and full of cronyism to even realise the extent of how their inbreeding is adversely impacing on the health of those they are mandated to serve."

~ Seb C [UK.Gay.Com boards]

THT and GMFA's "love-in" was unashamedly serenaded in April 2006, in the London club listings magazine QX, when THT spin doctor Will Nutland and GMFA mouth-piece Matthew Hodson rubber-stamped their mutual approval of the growing number of sex-on-premises venues in London that specifically cater for anonymous, and invariably unprotected, sexual encounters in adjacent articles that served to validate the others' stand, with no space provided for the opposing viewpoint.

"[Nutland] described such venues as being 'a social health benefit', as if they were outreach facilities for hospital clinics, even though those engaging in unsafe sex can easily infect themselves with STIs and other strains of HIV - something all NHS clinics would find absolutely unsupportable - [while] Hodson chillingly states: 'I support a smoker's right to continue smoking, even knowing that it is likely to kill him', as if to say:

'I support an HIV+ gay man's right to continue having unsafe sex, even knowing that is likely to kill him.'... It is [their] fundamental responsibility to maximise the health and wellbeing of HIV+ gay men, and not to sanction behaviours which can overload their immune systems with pathogens they can easily avoid."

~ Cass Mann [Positively Healthy]

"Over the past five years, the gay community has been keeping a secret: unprotected sex is becoming normal again. In the dark room of any gay club, in those pre-

sex conversations, one question - 'do you bareback?' - has become casual, ordinary, every day. Defenders of 'raw' sex see condoms as sissy, and brag that playing Russian roulette with their genitals is 'manly'."

~ Johann Hari [The Independent]

Going even further than defending the right of HIVers to transmit drug-resistant strains of the virus and STDs to one another in sex-on-premises venues while staunchly defending their right not to disclose their status to negative partners - maintaining that it is the responsibility of the negative partner to protect himself - in February 2008 the same organisations legitimised such venues that adopted their "code of good practise", Play Zone, on the pretext of providing "a safer, clean environment for customers and staff" along with safer sex information and PEP prescriptions, but yet again proving more active in their underlying support for the rights of HIVers - who comprise the core of visitors to such venues - than the chronic need to address the safety and welfare of negative men.

Justifying the move, the usual PC rhetoric was wheeled out by Will Nutland's sidekick spin drone, Rod Watson. Namely, that if such establishments didn’t exist, the same activity would be driven “underground” and those in need of such information would therefore be out of reach. In the same breath, and as if on cue, Watson then insisted that THT is not the "sex police”, yet failed to explain exactly how the arrangement could work effectively without being properly enforced by the sponsoring HIV charities, who will only be running compliance checks at the venues in question twice a year, nor how they will reach the gay men driven even further underground to unsanitised, Play Zone-free venues in search of unregulated sex.