AIDS
Poverty Fuels HIV Infections in US
May 28, 2006: New York - Poverty is a key reason why African-American heterosexuals have a far higher rate of infection with HIV, the virus that causes Aids, than other racial groups, a new study suggests. Read more.
HIV Prevention and AIDS Services Campaigns We Like
Know HIV/AIDS Campaign has made at least a hundred ads, PSAs and videos. Check them all out to get your own ideas (or adapt for your community).
HIV Stops With Me campaign
www.hubba.co.nz- "No Rubba, No Hubba Hubba" campaign from New Zealand
Catchy Public Service Announcement's from MTV's "Fight for Your Rights: Protect Yourself" website. Bill Roady, president of cable music giant MTV, has vowed not to stop the channel's hard-hitting AIDS and condom messages despite the US government promoting a sexual abstinence programme to counter the pandemic. Check 'em out!
Staying Alive, a website with great graphics (and partners MTV, UNAIDS, etc.)
ScenariosUSA is an amazing website and organization that holds a national screenwriting contest for teenagers. The winning screenplays are produced into fabulous shorts by award-winning directors. A popular one written by teenagers in Rikers jail is about teenagers in NYC dealing with HIV/AIDS is entitled "The Monster."
www.POCC.org- website of People of Color in Crisis
www.crenyc.org/postcards- website exhibiting fabulous postcards made by non-tech staff of local NYC non-profits
2003 Competition
Winners from the World AIDS Day PSA Video
Competition
also related South African videos, Meeting
Mandela and Dreams of the Good Life
My personal favorite HIV prevention video, Sugar Baby Love, is a charming queer animated short that was part of a French HIV prevention campaign. There are also two other animated masterpeices from the sameFrench animator, Wilfred Brimo.
www.keepachildalive.org- The flash movies add a lot of interest to this mainly HTML site. Small, functional and very sticky.
www.becomeadrugdealer.com- Yes, the domain name is wack. But, the graphics -- and the message -- are great.
www.thethreeamigos.org- three animated condoms in hilarious tv spots in 41 languages
www.beingalivela.org- not gorgeous but great info, esp. about crystal meth from a queer perspective
Check out the large amount of ads the campaign "Know HIV/AIDS" has made! Common's ad.
In the U.S. their is a debate between strict sexual abstinence versus a pro-condom approach. The U.S. government and the religious right claim strict sexual abstinence without condom education will save young people from HIV/AIDS. A new study shows this approach does NOT work as young people in these programs are MUCH less likely to use condoms and just switch to oral and anal sex instead or vaginal sex; and, anal sex without a condom is very high risk for STDs.
Great webpage by Med that has self-written and photographed stories by people living with AIDS from 8 countries around the world. www.msf.org/source/annual/wad/2006/mylifewithaids/
Check out the many dog-themed posters of the DogsAreTalking.com-- the latest campaign by the San Francisco City Clinic to convince MSM to get tested for syphillis by enlisting man's best friend.
submit your favorite
Condom Wars: New
guidelines gut HIV prevention -- and endanger young people’s lives
by Doug Ireland
www.dissidentvoice.org
June 27, 2004
First Published in the LA Weekly
Lethal new regulations from President Bush’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, quietly issued with no fanfare last week, complete the right-wing Republicans’ goal of gutting HIV-prevention education in the United States. In place of effective, disease-preventing safe-sex education, little will soon remain except failed programs that denounce condom use, while teaching abstinence as the only way to prevent the spread of AIDS. And those abstinence-only programs, researchers say, actually increase the risk of contracting AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).
Published on June 16 in the Federal Register, the censorious new CDC guidelines will be mandatory for any organization that does HIV-prevention work and also receives federal funds -- whether or not any federal money is directly spent on their programs designed to fight the spread of the epidemic. (The CDC is the principal federal funder of prevention education about HIV and AIDS, and its head a Bush appointee). It’s all couched in arcane bureaucratese, but this is the Bush administration’s Big Stick — do exactly as we say, or lose your federal funding. And nearly all of the some 3,800 AIDS service organizations (ASOs) that do the bulk of HIV-prevention education receive at least part of their budget from federal dollars. Without that money, they’d have to slash programs or even close their doors.
These new regs require the censoring of any “content” -- including “pamphlets, brochures, fliers, curricula,” “audiovisual materials” and “pictorials (for example, posters and similar educational materials using photographs, slides, drawings or paintings),” as well as “advertising” and Web-based info. They require all such “content” to eliminate anything even vaguely “sexually suggestive” or “obscene”-- like teaching how to use a condom correctly by putting it on a dildo, or even a cucumber. And they demand that all such materials include information on the “lack of effectiveness of condom use” in preventing the spread of HIV and other STDs -- in other words, the Bush administration wants AIDS fighters to tell people: Condoms don’t work. This demented exigency flies in the face of every competent medical body’s judgment that, in the absence of an HIV-preventing vaccine, the condom is the single most effective tool available to protect someone from getting or spreading the AIDS virus.
Moreover, the CDC will now take the decisions on which AIDS-fighting educational materials actually work away from those on the frontlines of the combat against the epidemic, and hand them over to political appointees.
This is done by requiring that Policy Review Panels, which each group engaged in HIV prevention must have, can no longer be appointed by that group but must instead be named by state and local health departments. And those panels must then take a vote on every single flier or brochure or other “content” before it is issued.
This means that, under the new regs, political appointees will have a veto and be able to ban anything in those educational materials they deem “obscene” or lacking in anti-condom propaganda. With Republicans controlling a majority of statehouses, and having handed over control of the health departments to folks deemed acceptable to the Christian right and cultural conservatives in many Southern and Midwestern states -- and the rest of public-health departments notoriously subservient to political pressure from the state and local legislatures that control their appropriations -- anti-condom junk science that plays politics with people’s lives will rule the day.
Under the new regs, it will be impossible even to track the spread of unsafe sexual practices -- because the CDC’s politically inspired censorship includes “questionnaires and survey materials” and thus would forbid asking people if they engage in specific sexual acts without protection against HIV. For that too would be “obscene.” (Questions about gay kids have already disappeared from the CDC’s national Youth Risk Survey after Christian-right pressure).
So what will be left? Why, the abstinence-only ed programs dear to Bush’s heart and to the Christian right. A third of all federal HIV-education money -- some $270 million more in Bush’s latest budget -- now goes to abstinence-only programs, almost universally to Christian groups as part of Bush’s “faith-based initiatives” (no Jewish or Muslim groups receive any funds). This is a brilliant maneuver -- Bush has turned money earmarked for fighting AIDS into political pork for his Christer base. Much of this money goes to anti-abortion groups masquerading as “women’s health” or “crisis-pregnancy” centers. Others receiving such funds engage in religious propaganda -- a federal judge found that Louisiana’s federally funded Governor’s Program on Abstinence illegally handed out Bibles, staged anti-abortion prayer rallies outside women’s clinics, and had students perform Bible-based skits.
Yet Bush’s Health and Human Services Department refused demands to audit the Louisiana program, while at the same time conducting repeated harassing audits of effective AIDS-fighting groups that have vigorously protested Bush policies on AIDS, like New York’s Gay Men’s Health Crisis and San Francisco’s Stop AIDS Project. (The latter lost its federal funding earlier this year for sex-ed thought crimes similar to those banned in the new CDC regs -- a pre-emptive warning to all other ASOs to toe the Bush-Christer line -- and subsequently got a $100 contribution from former Bush AIDS czar Scott Evertz, ousted by Bush’s theocrats, to help continue what he called Stop AIDS’s “good work”).
Teaching about condoms doesn’t increase sexual activity and certainly doesn’t increase unprotected sex, but abstinence-only ed does both. For example, a Minnesota Department of Health study of the state’s five-year, abstinence-only program found last year that sexual activity by students taking the program actually doubled, from 5.8 percent to 12.4 percent.
Even more alarming, a study by Columbia University Department of Sociology chairman Peter Bearman of the sex lives of 12,000 adolescents from 12 to 18 years old over a five-year period found unsafe sex much greater among youth who’d signed pledges to abstain from sex until (heterosexual) marriage (a key component of most abstinence only–based education programs, which leave gay kids, who can’t get married in 49 states, to face a lifetime of chastity).
The Columbia study, released last March and financed in part by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, showed that while 59 percent of teenage males who did not pledge abstinence used a condom during sex, only 40 percent of abstinence-pledging boys used a condom. As Bearman told The New York Times, telling teens “to ‘just say no,’ without understanding risk or how to protect oneself from risk, turns out to create greater risk” of HIV and other STDs. In his study, 88 percent of those who’d pledged chastity reported having sex before marriage. The large Bearman study confirms one published in the American Journal of Sociology in 2001, which showed that pent-up sexual desire and failure to realize risk exposure among students in abstinence-only programs made them a third less likely to use condoms than others, even if, on average, they began having sex a year and half later.
All those numbers help explain why the new CDC regs are causing outrage and anguish among leaders in the AIDS community. “Kids are being taught that condoms don’t work, while real life-saving HIV education is being eviscerated across the board,” fumes Sean Strub, founder of POZ, the magazine for the HIV-positive community. And, Strub points out, the Bush administration has hamstrung AIDS organizations, “which are faced with the terrible choice of prioritizing care for existing HIV-positive clients over speaking out against the new CDC rules and risking losing their federal funding.”
There’s only a tiny window of opportunity to try to get the new CDC censorship rules changed before they go into effect (the deadline for public comments is August 16 -- they may be e-mailed to HIVComments@cdc.gov or faxed to 404-639-3125.) But when the regs begin to be felt, just watch already-rising AIDS infection rates really soar.
Doug Ireland is a New York-based media critic and commentator whose articles appear regularly in The Nation, Tom Paine.com, and In These Times among many others. This article first appeared in the LA Weekly.
Crystal Meth and HIV/AIDS
A Metropolitan Community Church pastor, Rev. A. Stephen Pieters, asks, "What is the appropriate pastoral response to individuals involved with the circuit?" Towards this end Rev. Pieters sought understanding by interviewing a a self-defined "Circuit Partier," Steve Smith, a leader in the Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles. Steve was open, very human and very articulate in his interview. Steve explained the experiences of having so many people die around him and being so prepared to die and how hard it is to prepare to live again, especially when so many people are still dying; explained the fellowship he found on the dancefloor; explained the differences between living the safest sex lifestyle for a few years vs. 10 or longer; spoke very openly about realities of high risk behavior and desire in the circuit scene; spirituality; healing and a lot more. I highly recommend reading this interview.
In April 1998 Steve Smith killed himself to the shock of many members of the Los Angeles LGBT community who looked up to him as a leader, and who remembered him looking like the exemplar of health. Others in the community remembered his struggle with crystal meth and his despair at having relapsed recently. As LGBT people we have to struggle hard with the reality that it is easier to deal with being queer than addicted and learn how to support our brothers and sisters struggling with addiction better. This follow up article on Steve Smith is a step to learning how.
Other LGBT Responses to Crystal Meth in NYC
www.newyorkpanthers.org/playsafe.html- The New York Panthers Leather Club doesn't just talk about safer sex, they actively promote safer sex activities and make them sexy, fun... and even a bit... dangerous!
www.gaycenter.org/Surveys- The Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Transgender Community Center of New York City has a crystal meth information and referral page. Check it out and find referrals to services in New York City.
www.hafnyc.org/crystal.htm- The Hispanic AIDS Forum has an extensive listing of resources about crystal meth.
www.positivehealthproject.org- The Positive Health Project is a harm reduction organization. Their program is designed for people using drugs. Many people who go to the Project are queer and/or HIV +. They will help you, not judge you.
/www.latinoaids.org/crystalmeth/- Finally, Crystal Meth information in spanish -- and it is gay-friendly to boot. Hurrah for the good folks at LCOA!
HIV Deaths Drop 90 Percent Among African-American IDUs Who Are Given Access to Combination Drug Therapy, Academy Research Finds
Results of 14-year longitudinal study reported in upcoming June issue of American Journal of Epidemiology
NEW YORK CITY, May 26—Combination drug therapy effectively reduces 90 percent of HIV deaths in African-American injection drug users when they are given ample access to care, according to a new Academy study in the June issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology.
Because this disadvantaged population has historically lacked access to pricey multi-drug therapy, there has long been uncertainty about whether it would reduce their late-stage HIV infection and whether these patients could adhere to such a complex treatment regimen, especially among racist government officials looking for an excuse not to help Black people.
The results of this important longitudinal study, conducted over the course of 14 years, show that HIV-related deaths nearly disappeared among these minority drug-users when they received access to highly active antiretroviral therapy, or HAART.