Canadian activist and writer Shawn Syms has penned a very thoughtful and insightful essay for Xtra.ca on the horrific AIDS campaign out of Germany that compares AIDS to Nazi Germany. It's a very smart essay - and a must read. Here's a peak:
This campaign is a joke. There is nothing shocking or cutting edge about it. Its horny Hitler is hilarious. The fact that he, Hussein and Stalin are all deceased adds a certain necrophiliac irony to the whole cartoonish exercise. For a campaign with a digital component, they seem to have forgotten the lessons of Godwin's Law, which points out the absurdity of making online comparisons to Adolf Hitler. If anything is disturbing, it's the fact that the "logic" behind this campaign makes sense to anyone -- especially an AIDS-awareness group like Regenbogen, whose members include people with HIV.
"AIDS" is not a "mass murderer." It's a health condition caused by an untreated viral infection. HIV is the virus that can lead to AIDS, usually after many years and in the absence of medication. HIV is a significant medical condition, and there are countless reasons why anyone who doesn't have that virus should avoid getting it, and that anyone who does have it should avoid passing it on to anyone else.
But it doesn't help anyone to confuse HIV and AIDS with one another, or to exaggerate the impact of HIV by inextricably linking it to death. Dr Joseph McGowan of North Shore University Hospital recently counselled a parent about her 10-year-old son's HIV infection on the medical website TheBody.com: "If he is monitored carefully there is no reason your son ever has to progress to AIDS. He can expect to live a very long life." This is the current reality of HIV for most people in developed countries. The constant, hyper-emotional assertion that HIV equals guaranteed death ought to be calmly challenged every time it rears its insistent head. Neither is it "murder."
And since "AIDS" is not a person, let alone a "murderer," who are we really talking about here? Of course, we are talking about people who have HIV in their bodies. The Regenbogen campaign isn't actually about AIDS itself at all. It's about the risks of (presumably unprotected) sex with regard to HIV transmission, arguing that passing on HIV is akin to Nazism, and suggesting that the other person engaging in sex has no role other than that of victim. Notably, the mass murderers in the campaign are all men and their victims are all women. Meanwhile, the most recent high-profile HIV-criminalization case in Germany targeted a woman, Nadja Benaissa of the pop group No Angels.
Did the campaigners not think twice about wrongly comparing human sexual behaviour to the Holocaust, and inappropriately demonizing people with HIV in the process? The insistence on seeing HIV transmission as villainy obscures the most stubborn fact about the epidemic -- far from being the realm of malevolent or sociopathic people, HIV is transmitted through behaviours that are otherwise completely natural and normal, such as penetrative intercourse -- or behaviours that may often be hard to control rather than "intentional," such as needle sharing in the context of addiction. We already know that those most infectious with HIV usually don't know they have it, and that most people with diagnosed HIV take great pains to prevent further transmission.
The CDC announced Tuesday their first national HIV communication campaign in almost 20 years. And this "Every 9 1/2 minutes" totally uninteresting, trite, and utterly boring campaign was all they could come up with? As Lifelube notes, the campaign's website mentions very little about the gays, and of course gives a shout out to abstinence (sigh). As Jim also notes, this is the first half of the campaign, with a probably more targeted second phase to come.
But still: "Every Nine and a Half Minutes"? This is the problem with those sanitized public health-heads. They can only imagine to think in bland statistics, with no real meaning or lived experience reflected in their cold, calculating numbers. It's all about probabilities, correlations, and p-values. Anyone actually dealing with the possibility of becoming HIV-positive can't relate to this tripe. They're better off putting their $45 million towards housing for HIV-positive people or treatment.
In short, my message back to the CDC is clear: EARTH TO PUBLIC HEALTH! TALK ABOUT SEX! OR REAL PEOPLE! OR OUR EXPERIENCES! OR SOMETHING THAT MATTERS!!!!!!!!!!!
Jesus H Christ. This crap just pissed me off more than I can express. You can find the campaign website here. Here's the 411 via Out in America:
Every 9 ½ minutes another person in America becomes infected with HIV. Officials from the White House, Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced today a new five-year national communication campaign, Act Against AIDS, which highlights this alarming statistic and aims to combat complacency about the HIV/AIDS crisis in the United States.
[snip]
“Act Against AIDS seeks to put the HIV crisis back on the national radar screen,” said Melody Barnes, Assistant to the President and Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. “Our goal is to remind Americans that HIV/AIDS continues to pose a serious health threat in the United States and encourage them to get the facts they need to take action for themselves and their communities.”
The campaign will feature public service announcements (PSAs) and online communications, as well as targeted messages and outreach to the populations most severely affected by HIV/AIDS, beginning with African-Americans, with subsequent phases focusing on Latinos and other communities disproportionately impacted.
To help achieve widespread use of the campaign messages within African-American communities, the Obama Administration also announced today the Act Against AIDS Leadership Initiative (AAALI), a partnership with 14 of the nation’s leading African-American civic organizations to integrate HIV prevention into each organization’s outreach programs.
WASHINGTON – White House officials will team up with the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to announce a new national communication campaign on HIV/AIDS Tuesday April 7th at 1:00 PM. This marks the first federally funded national domestic HIV/AIDS campaign in almost twenty years.
The Obama Administration will join with leading civil rights and HIV/AIDS groups and officials from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation to announce the first phase of the $45 million campaign. The announcement will take place in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Room 450.
What: Kick off of new national campaign on HIV/AIDS awareness
Finally, here is video footage from the entire forum I participated in last month, titled "BUS STOPS, BILLBOARDS & YOU: CAMPAIGNING FOR QUEER HEALTH. My co-panelists included Michael Petrelis, Michael Siever (Tweaker.org), and Jason Riggs (STOP AIDS).
You can hear me rattling on at:
23:10 -- Introductory Talk
44:48 -- Troubling Evidence for Campaigns' Success
58:18 -- Sex Education / HIV / Bush Administration
1:22:00 -- Angry Activists ---> AIDS, Inc
1:30:40 -- Community Building Outside of Mainstream Orgs
1:44:00 -- Trouble of Outsourcing HIV Campaigns
Looks like fucked up "safer sex" campaigns aren't limited to the United States. Tulipan Condoms in Argentina has just released this fucked up campaign, directly linking sex to death. The simple message: "Be Careful."
I don't know about you, but I fucking sick of this tired bullshit. This does one thing: promote shame and fear. Social marketing folks have yet to realize (despite mounting outcries from the communities that violate and manipulate) that fear and shame do not promote healthy behavior; they only serve to, 1) make people distrust health officials and, 2) make people deeply ashamed of their sexuality and body.
It's part and parcel of a kind of political climate filled with nasty images of the potential outcomes of sex, and VERY little practical education on risk and sexual health. We're teaching kids that: 1) you can get AIDS; and 2) if you have sex, you probably will get AIDS; and 3) Then you will die. Call me crazy, but this isn't useful information. It's fear-mongering.
After the community forum last Thursday here in San Fran on social marketing -- "Bus Stops, Billboards, & You: Campaigning for Queer Health" -- I wrote a letter to the Bay Area Reporter editor with some thoughts post-forum, since their staff did not cover the event. They didn't publish the letter (I got it in a little late), so I thought I'd publish it here. Hope you like!
To The Editor:
I’m happy to report that last Thursday’s community forum at the LGBT Center, “Bus Stops, Billboards, & You: Campaigning for Queer Health,” was a resounding success. While Bay Area Reporter staff did not attend, their absence did not prevent a thoughtful discussion exploring the past, present, and future of social marketing as a tool for promoting queer health.
Many challenges remain for community leaders and public health officials who turn to billboards in their quest to promote healthy behavior. As several panelists at the forum noted (including myself), there is a history of these ads being received as promoting more than just positive change, but also prejudice and hostility. While their defenders assert that these campaigns were designed with the help of the populations they intended to represent (whether it be HIV-positive men or young black men), this does not seem to preclude their potential promote racism, homophobia, or pozphobia.
Further, as a panelist I encouraged attendees to resist relying on formal organizations to “do the work” of community building and HIV prevention. I noted that anyone in the community who feels left out or isolated at community events or even at the bars should take matters into their own hands. Whatever it is that you enjoy doing – going to movies, playing “Dungeons and Dragons,” or playing Canasta – whatever it is, there are at least a dozen other folks in this town who’d be happy to join you. This should be the kind of health promotion that is most encouraged; the kind that never involves a billboard or the words “HIV” or “meth.” In my book, getting guys together for softball, movies, or boardgames is HIV prevention.
As we move forward, let’s hope that public health officials resist pointing fingers at us and telling us how naughty we’ve been this past year. And let’s hope that they realize that spending 100s of thousands of dollars on billboards cannot produce substantial change in our communities. The real change happens when we come together – as a community – and support each other as friends, lovers, and perhaps even as D&D-loving, Canasta-philes. I meet far too many gay men in San Francisco who feel terribly isolated. This, to me, is the greatest challenge we face for the future. With a creative mind, we can all do our part to help.
Trevor Hoppe
Graduate Student
University of Michigan
Last night I had the pleasure of participating in a public forum on social marketing tactics used for queer health promotion -- particularly HIV prevention. I've long been an advocate for reform in the way social marketing is done. It tends to be overly stigmatizing and poorly researched and designed. The audience seemed to agree with the panelists, who came to a consensus that change is needed --- though we disagreed over how radical that change should be. One the panel: Michael Petrelis, Michael Seiver (who runs Tweaker.org), me, and Jason Riggs (deputy director of the STOP AIDS Project).
Hopefully I'll have a copy of the night's full video in my hands soon -- but until then, above you'll see a short clip of me talking about unintended audiences with HIV prevention. The compression is a bit funky since my friend shot it vertically instead of landscape, so I had to rotate it 90 degrees. So I look a little wide :) But it's good stuff nonetheless.
My friend and hero Michael Scarce has just published an editorial in San Francisco's Bay Area Reporter, reaching out to folks to join the Gay Men's Health Movement. It's a lovely piece, and it includes information on the upcoming first installment of the EdgeTalk series. I'll be on the panel that will focus on social marketing and HIV prevention for gay men. You might remember an editorial that I wrote a while back that called for a gutting of spending on social marketing, due to its stigmatizing tendencies (as seen in the controversial campaign pictured above).
The upcoming forum is titled "Bus Stops, Billboards & You: Campaigning for Queer Health," and it takes place a week from today, July 17th, from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM at the San Francisco LGBT Center (1800 Market Street). Come join the discussion!
And State funded, by the way! The message: "When we play, we live the sensation. By using condoms and testing regularly for STIs, and remembering that the more partners we have the more often we should be tested, we reduce our risk so we can give into the moment."
After I posted a photo of a quite sexy Brazilian prevention campaign here a few days ago, my friend Michael -- who is a wonderful researcher from Australia -- sent over a few examples from Australia. They were all provocative, but I thought this one in particular was quite striking for its use of interactive media on the internet - and for its thoughtful design.
Check out the image below. It's a screenshot I took of the page featuring "Michael's Story" -- which includes several really interesting sections -- "Panic Attacks"; "Mega Slut"; "Jewish & Gay"; "Euphoria"; etc. What I like here is the complexity allowed for in gay men's lives. The fact that two of the predominant themes -- religion and promiscuity -- can be featured alongside each other without any seeming contradiction. It's really quite an interesting site -- even if it had nothing to do with HIV! Ch-check it out!
So, I was hopping around the internet and happened upon this post over at Bloggernista featuring a prevention PSA developed by an activist in NYC by the name of Eric Leven. It's quite something, and definitely relates to my own experiences getting tested for HIV. Here's the vid:
I like the idea of using online media to reach gay men in new and different ways. I think it's clear that the standard practices of billboards and subway posters is problematic because 1) it only reaches urban men and 2) the urban men it does reach don't pay any attention to them - they're over it!
That said, I'm a little put off by the implicit idea here that we should perhaps be more choosy in our sexual partners. I'm not sure that "Be Selective" is the right message. Is it about choosiness? Or is it really just about using a condom or not? I think that, in general, if you follow #3, then #2 is a moot issue. Perhaps I'm missing something in his argument. Also, I'm supposing that the idea here is that the man in the video didn't use a condom - and is getting tested for this reason. But this isn't clear, and I really would have preferred that to be explicated in the background dialogue. Because that, to me, is the real issue here. If there had just been an added line like "C'mon, we trust each other - we don't need a condom." That's the crux of the issue to me. And it's a bit dissapointing that Eric didn't choose to bring it to the forefront.
But I do, however, like the focus on the anxiety that gets produced in the testing process - and the process of remembering and reconstructing that gay men experience in those moments. I don't think we've really paid adequete attention to that. In my view, I think that a lot of these anxieties are irrational for those guys who use condoms. They're the product of an internalized stereotype that all gay men eventually test positive - and of poor sex education that doesn't give young gay men much useful information about how to stay negative. That's why I would have liked the video / PSA to explicitly state that they didn't use a condom. Because if they did - and he's freaking out anyways - then he's really just confused about the difference between the possibility of infection and the probability of infection. That's what I talked about many moons ago in my piece on HIV Panic.
That said, Eric's moving in the right direction. I'm happy to find other fellow travellers! You can find his blog, KnuckleCrack, here.
A new article in the Bay Area Reporter (San Francisco's LGBTQ weekly newspaper) uses my editorial as a launching point for an article about an alleged community-wide discussion on HIV prevention and social marketing slated for February or March. Yea, I won't hold my breathe! You can read the article, here.
I heard about this campaign a few weeks ago, but I didn't realize it would draw so much ire! CNN.com has a video up today on the *homepage* about LA Gay and Lesbian Center's new HIV prevention campaign, "Own It. End It." I'm actually okay with the part about HIV being a gay disease. I think that the media has really overblown the average risk that most non-IV-drug-using straight folks face from potential HIV infection to create a kind of unnecessary hysteria. Gay men, particularly gay men of color, continue to make up nearly 50% of new infections in most communities (when they may only make up 2-5% of the population).
The issue I have with this campaign is the last sentence in this blip at the bottom of their bus campaign posters:
"And it continues after 25 years because we haven't stopped it." This is the kind of shady public health messages that implicitly blames gay men for HIV. It's ridiculous and makes it seem as though gay men had not, as a community, made any effort to combat this epidemic. When the reality of the situation is that new infection levels are down to the lowest levels they have been in MANY many years (this, of course, varies slightly geographically). New infections among gay men have plummeted since 1982 largely due to the efforts of gay men. And Lorri Jean's (former NGLTF E.D.) organization has the gall to come out and blame men for not stopping it. As a gay man, it infuriates me.
After my BAR editorial of 2 weeks past stirred quite a bit of trouble here in San Fran, I was interviewed by SF Weekly - who was doing a story on HIV Prevention and its effectiveness today. They've done a nice job - minus this wierd picture of me online that only includes my forehead! I think they're going to fix it.
Busy school life prevents much updating - but I thought I'd shared that in the next few weeks I've got an article coming out (the cover story!) for the East Bay LGBTQ Pub, the "East Bay Alternative" as well as a guest opinion piece in The Bay Area Reporter - the most significant San Fran LGBTQ pub.
East Bay piece is called "In Defense of Gay" and talks about gay vs. queer identities.
BAR piece is about that heinous billboard above Cafe Flore in the Castro that reads "New Year's Resolution: I Won't Infect Anyone This Year." Gross. The piece is called "New Year's Resolution: Defund HIV Prevention" and is sure to draw some ire from public health folks.
Check 'em out! I'll post links to a scan of the East Bay pub soon - and a link to the BAR piece online.
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