Great thread. So many interesting points you all raised. I am constantly amazed at the ignorance regarding HIV. The rise in HIV rate in over fifties does not come as a surprise to me. I live in north London that unfortunately has it's fair share of 'new born' single men in their fifties and hence are old enough to remember the 80s who quite infuriatingly treat HIV and AIDS as something that happens 'over there'. It's not part of their world. Many think safe sex is asking their potential partner if they are 'clear'...and then foolishly trusting their answer. Experienced this far too many times to believe the blanket level of sheer 'ignorance' to the real situation. Condomless sex to many, and I won't say all, is still the norm.
On the other end of the spectrum, this is a counterfoil to last years claim of the rise in HIV cases in 18-25 years old age bracket. The number of gay men of the 'me me me the trilogy' generation who think by the power of the internet that HIV is curable is also shocking. 'Hot baths and lots of coconut milk'...my ex told me. I feel this can only be a result of false info that many of you have pointed out is so freely published.
I'm disturbed yet not surprised by the lack of real straight-talk and preventative outreach in London, especially the unwillingness to address separate age groups with separate risk factors and lifestyles in directly relatable terms and vocabulary.
Somehow I'd have thought the UK would be at least a little more cosmopolitan in its approach. But when it comes to sex in general and gay sex in particular, anglophones just seem to do a shitty job of effective communication on these subjects.
In the 90s, for instance, then-Surgeon General
Jocelyn Elders was fired by President Clinton after she publicly suggested that public school health classes should discuss masturbation as a means of safely releasing sexual tension without the risks and complications of actual sex, including pregnancy and HIV infection. It actually got much worse in the two GWBush administrations, which considered "abstinence only" the only proper line to take as regards prevention efforts.
This squeamishness about frank discussion of sex leads to a vacuum which is then filled by superstition, ignorance and lies, and it effectively perpetuates the stigma of living with HIV/AIDS. This stigma leads to many people delaying testing, spreading the virus unwittingly; it also complicates treatment, as many aren't aware of their status until it's become "full-blown" (ugh! I hate that term) when it's much harder to treat and results in needlessly early deaths.
The one anglophone place where at least some things are better (more frankly and pragmatically) handled is Australia, where their needle-exchange policy has been proven to actually reduce the spread of HIV among IV drug users. I will provide links regarding this if requested. I have no idea what Australia's other informational and preventative efforts are like, but would presume that they are frank, direct, clear and free from the squeamishness that prevents such efforts as being even plausible in the UK and in the US. I have seen nothing regarding such efforts in anglophone Canada, though the posters I saw everywhere in Montreal (in French) during my frequent visits there (96-03) were coy and clever but not highly informative.
There seems to be some misguided notion that the actual mechanics of infection are known universally, when in fact they are not. The fact that there are still far too many people living with HIV/AIDS who insist they were infected by sucking cock dismays me: this is a huge issue over at AIDSmeds.com where a small but vociferous minority insist that that's how they were infected, contradicting much peer-reviewed scientific data showing how ridiculously rarely/non-existentially such in infections actually occur. This, again, goes back to stigma, this time about being an anal bottom. As such arguments are counter-productive and ultimately futile, I no longer engage in them.
Although slightly off topic just thought it is worth bringing up the shameful lack of knowledge and moreover 'wrong information' regarding HIV and AIDS that exists in 2010. Nigh on 30 years after Rock Hudson.
^^See above.^^
You are both so right about "I'm clean" when people say that to me, I always ask if they enjoyed their bath or shower, now tell me about your last visit to the sexual health clinic, what's your HIV status? I hear it all the time, "I'm clean mate"not just adults but young people too very very worrying
A really good friend of mine (and I want to kill him because of his stupidity) had sex with someone who had just been to the sexual health clinic and everything came back negative - great eh? No not really, he was in the 12 week window period, my friend and this man had unprotected sex and well you know the rest he's now living with HIV and been ill ever since, straight onto antivirals.
"He said he was clean, now I've got HIV"
Oh, how did that happen??????
Personally I would never take the risk, but I also never believe anyone I have sex with when they tell me they are clean, it's condoms condoms condoms or nothing at all
Brinz
Two things here:
1) I am strongly insulted by the use of "clean" as a synonym for HIV negative. It comes, I believe, from the same verbiage that means that "clean" is "drug-free" (ie: clean & sober), and I know that in nearly all cases it is not an intentional insult. Nevertheless, it
is an insult, and one that bristles me especially (and I'm pretty thick-skinned, all things considered); when I see it written on this board I am always there to correct them immediately.
2) The only person responsible for anyone's sexual health is that person him/her self. Condomless anal or vaginal sex, regardless of whatever the person may say (or even believe) outside of a strictly monogamous relationship, is a risk for infection with HIV. In
another thread which I started last week, I wrote:
My rule when discussing STDs with HIV- people tends to make me sound very conservative, but frankly it is the best way to protect yourself: a minimum of 18 months monogamous commitment should be mandatory before any discussion of condom-free sex makes sense. Then make joint appointments and sign all necessary disclosure documents and get a full-panel screening (including HPV and Herpes): have the results discussed only in the presence of each other (no private consults). Never trust anyone who would not agree to those conditions: this is an issue of trust-but-verify, not privacy.
Anything less than complete and consistent application of safer-sex procedures is consent to possible HIV infection: period.
OK, I heard this from my health science teacher. Don't ask me the source. It might be a rumor. A professor from U.C Berkeley, I don't know his name, stated that he could live with any kind of virus including HIV/AIDS without showing any symptom or sign of the disease as long as he avoid alcohol, narcotic drugs, cigarettes, ecstasy, stimulants, etc.,
This is pure, unadulterated bullshit. There are millions of men, women and children living around the globe who are living with and dying from HIV/AIDS who have little or no contact with any of those things. This is yet another attempt to spread stigma on the HIV+ by associating their health condition on what are perceived as "vices" of "personal choice".
It also suggests (albeit obliquely) that the anti-bodies in the immune system activated during infection and continuing because of HIV (the viral load) are the result of the use of such substances. That's not science, it's polemic, nasty, vile polemic.
Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!
The homo-sexual community HAS been openly verbal about it for quite sometime now. They opened up several doors in the FDA to hasten the available new drugs to be put onto the market and to make the costs more affordable through past protests. Not pointing fingers here but the notion that AIDS as still being a homosexual disease still exists along with other stereotypes.
The first part of your post refers to the activism associated with
ACT-UP, a group which started in NYC and spread rapidly throughout the country in the late 80s:
AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (
ACT UP) is an international
direct action advocacy group working to impact the lives of
people with AIDS (PWAs) and the
AIDS pandemic to bring about legislation, medical research and treatment and policies to ultimately bring an end to the disease by mitigating loss of health and lives.
[1]
ACT UP was effectively formed in March 1987 at the
Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in
New York.
Larry Kramer was asked to speak as part of a rotating speaker series, and his well-attended speech focused on action to fight AIDS. Kramer spoke out against the
Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), which he perceived as politically impotent. Kramer had co-founded the GMHC but had resigned from its board of directors in 1983. According to
Douglas Crimp, Kramer posed a question to the audience: "Do we want to start a new organization devoted to political action?" The answer was "a resounding yes." Approximately 300 people met two days later to form ACT UP.
[2]
I did some limited work with the Boston branch until I moved to Paris in 1990. Their tactics were directly confrontational and were highly controversial at the time. The eventual demise of ACT-UP was three-fold: many of the organizers died; a certain AIDS fatigue settled in (not the health condition, rather a certain kind of apathy born of depression and a sense of futility); and the eventual arrival of Protease Inhibitors (PIs) ("cocktails" as the combos with other meds like AZT and DDI were originally described). The advent of PIs and the subsequent "Lazarus Effect", when people literally on their death beds got up and restarted their lives, all lessened the perceived crisis of HIV infection.
In the place of ACT-UP, Big Pharma, the medical profession and certain HIV-specific media all began preaching a kind of "AIDS minimalism" with comparisons to Diabetes. I've already discussed that earlier in this thread and my feelings regarding the harm such thinking has done to both prevention efforts and the harm to many living with HIV/AIDS for whom the meds simply never worked right, or who couldn't tolerate the terrible side-effects these early meds required be endured. Though the death toll certainly diminished, it never went away, and the few additional friends whom I lost during the early "miracle" stage of PIs and cocktails were especially bitter. It was a lesson I've never forgotten.
I, myself, live with permanent damage as a result of my having taken early versions of the PI cocktails, including a shredded digestive system and having, as one doctor put it, "the arteries of a man in his late 70s" when I was 48. Lipoatrophy, a condition where all the subcutaneous fat was eventually drained from my face, neck, arms, legs and torso has dramatically changed my appearance over the last eight or so years. I wrote about that
here. What I didn't mention in the last-linked thread is that most of that fat went into my arteries, pancreas and liver.
The second part deals with the still-common stereotype of HIV/AIDS as some kind of "gay thing". Though MSM (men who have sex with men) are still the largest single demographic of those most at risk for infection of HIV, there are many others. Women of color and Latinas have extraordinarily high proportions of HIV infections relative to their actual percentage of the population due to many reasons, including a high frequency of IV drug use among their male counterparts and the lopsided rates of incarcerations due to asymmetrical application of drug laws in the US. Latinas, especially, are much less likely than their black or white counterparts to insist on condom use, in part due to the enduring Machismo aspects of Latino culture.
Because of differences in the physiology of women, and the relatively new increases in females living with HIV/AIDS (heretofore considered mostly a man's disease, whether gay or straight), they cannot always benefit from the experience and knowledge gained over the years in treating HIV/AIDS in men: they tend to receive inadequate care because their unique requirements are either unknown and/or poorly understood. They also tend to die more quickly than men living with HIV/AIDS.
And, because of the continuing stigma and stereotyping, they are frequently not even diagnosed until care becomes more "salvage" than maintenance: even today, they are far less likely to even be tested than men, despite the far greater risks inherent in their sexual role as receiver (exclusively) unless known to be either sex workers or IV drug users.
These women do not receive the kind of overall positive press that men do regarding their struggles in coping with HIV/AIDS (not that such press exists in large quantity anywhere). They are less likely to discuss their condition with family and friends and remain the ultimate pariahs in a demographic consisting of nothing but pariahs.
