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WORLD AIDS DAY - Others say it isn’t our problem - An appeal to LGBT community

San Francisco medical students affirmed that AIDS is everyone’s problem, marching Saturday on World Aids Day from Japantown to City Hall for worldwide means to end worst health care crisis of the era
Photos by Bill Wilson © 2007

BY BILL WILSON

Sentinel Photographer

World AIDS Day was marked in San Francisco yesterday by health care workers tin cupping the world to end the worst plague in modern history.

They implored a $20 billion increase in AIDS funding in the United States, $8 billion spent on training and retaining health care workers overseas, and an end to programs advocating abstinence.

More than 25 million people have died of AIDS worldwide since the epidemic began in 1981.

About 39 million people are now living with AIDS, according to the Global Media AIDS Initiative.

UNDER AGE 15

Supervisor Tom Ammiano addresses a crowd of the next generation of activists

Jennifer Albon, Dr. Sophy Wong

Dr. Michael Ehlert Flavio Casoy, Dr. Visal Patel and Paige Hatcher

Earlier, Charles King, Founder and President of Housing Works, spoke poignantly to the LGBT community.

Charles King

“The sad and damning truth, my friends, is that while many of us merrily pop our pills every morning and go on with our lives as if the crisis had ended, we are still loosing that battle against the AIDS epidemic in the United States and the pandemic around the globe,” King began.

Ruth Brinker, recipient of the Grove Award for Community Service and Tom Nolan, Executive Director of Project Open Hand, in attendance

“Standing here as I am in San Francisco, pulsing with the heartbeat of Gay America, I’m moved to ask why so much of the gay community, my community, has given up on the fight against AIDS. …Why has so much of the gay community walked away from the battle against AIDS?

“I hope none of you think I am romanticizing those horrible days. And I don’t want anyone to think I am discounting the great number of lesbians and somewhat smaller collection of straight allies in our midst.

Reverend Maureene Bass, Unity Church of San Francisco

“But for gay men, it was inevitably a different experience. To be sure there was a lot of love, and even a fair amount of sex. But all to often the guy who had lead the charge, or who had told the funniest stories sitting up in jail cell, showed up at the next week’s meeting with those horrible purple lesions that inevitably spelled death …and we tried not to pull away even as we looked furtively at our own bodies to make sure we had not yet been tagged by the reaper.

“In the 90’s the time for marching seemed to have at least faded if not going completely away.

Daniel Ripley of Daniel Ripley Catering prepared hot soup for the event

“The government spigots had begun to open, as had private pockets, to an unparalleled degree. We had a new challenge. Many of us who had manned the barricades felt called to undertake the challenge of building organizations to serve our own, and then to serve others who had been left out. Some of us built housing or expanded services, while others went to work in health care and n research, or even in the bureaucracy of government, all still seeing our every day’s work as a critical part of the same struggle.

Shannon Day’s vocal talents were enjoyed by the crowd

“Even as we were building new careers, we told ourselves we were still a part of bringing AIDS to an end.

“Maybe it occurred earlier, but I still see Andrew Sullivan’s article “When Plagues End”, published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine on November 10, 1996, as the turning point.

“Perhaps he was only verbalizing the sentiment felt silently by many others when he declared, ‘For me the Aids crisis is over.’ But those words, whether spoken by Sullivan or only heard in our on minds, gave permission for thousands of gay men and our lesbian comrades, even those of us living with the virus, to abandon the battlefield, secure in the knowledge that, for us, at least, the crisis was over.

“There is no denying that a material change had taken place. I remember in 1989, going with Keith Cylar, my now deceased partner to get his test result after a bout of thrush.

“Though he lived until 2004, the threat of death never lifted. When I, on the other hand, sero-converted shortly after the turn of the century, it was already clear that I would have a full range of options that would allow me to manage the virus well into my senior years.

“But I have to admit that I am also in an extremely privileged position. Not only do I have great health insurance and personally know some of the best AIDS specialists in the world, but even if I lose my job I live in a state that guarantees that I will always have access to health care, including the most expensive AIDS medications.

“It wasn’t just individuals who moved on once HARRT (Highly Active Antiretroviral Treatment) became available.

“Rather, it seems that sometime in the late 90’s, the entire organized gay and lesbian community voted by a clear majority that it was time to move on from AIDS to more pressing issues.

“I think you and I know why the gay community moved on once HAART became available.

“Let’s face it, Andrew Sullivan was right. For the vast majority of white gay men of even moderate income in the United States, AIDS ended as a crisis once the drugs came on line.

“We no longer had to watch our friends die or live ourselves in fear of the plague. In fact, whether because we heeded prevention advice, or because we were just lucky, the statistics suggest that more than 75% of us are HIV negative. And because we often travel in packs that look like ourselves, AIDS for many of us is no longer even personal.

“Of course the story is completely different if you are a Black gay or bisexual man.

“In that case, the odds are closer to one in two that you are infected. And you are far more likely than a white man to learn of your infection after you have had a AIDS-defining event, meaning the available treatments are going to be far less successful.

“While less dramatic, the difference is also obvious if you are a Latino gay man in the United States today.

“I know that New York, San Francisco and L.A. have all at one time or another claimed to be the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic in the United States. But a recent study underscores what many of us have known for a while now.

“The true epicenter of the epidemic today is Washington, D.C. In our nation’s capitol today, now more than one in every 20 people is living with HIV. And one more damning statistic: One out of every 7 Black men living in Washington, D.C. is infected with HIV.. and of course, the lion’s share of these men are men who are having sex with other men, whether we claim them as members of our community or not.

“The reality is that AIDS is no longer so much a gay disease in the United States as it is a disease of race and poverty. And that brings to light a dirty secret about the organized and politically engaged gay community.

“We are overwhelmingly white and reasonably well – off, and our movement is almost exclusively about rights for ourselves and people like ourselves.

“In a letter published in the current issue of The Advocate about the debate over trans inclusion in ENDA a reader wrote, “As a gay man, I am tired of being told what I should think and what I should feel just because I’m attracted to other men.

“At a gay synagogue in New York City recently a straight guest speaker actually said, ‘Because you are all gay, I know you will be able to empathize with the plight of Mexican immigrants and their fight for equality.’

“This kind of knee jerk stupidity has got to stop and assuming that because I am gay, I not only relate to but actually understand and care about transgender issues is no different.

“I don’t believe it is just a coincidence that the larger gay and lesbian community walked off the battlefield when AIDS clearly became a Black disease. It was no longer us who was perceived to be dying.

“It was ‘other’ and other is always dispensable.

“Our use of the term ‘Men who have sex with men’ and the ‘down low’ serve only to increase the distance. ‘They’ don’t claim us, so we don’t claim them.

“But imagine how different the world would be if people like Harvey Milk hadn’t stood up for people like me when I was a young person growing up in Texas, still lacking the courage to call myself gay.

“It’s not just Black gay and bisexual men and trans people that we walk away from when we walk away from AIDS.

“We’ve also walked away from many gay white men too marginalized to make it to the life boat and we have walked away from Black women and girls and folk generally marginalized by the larger society in which we live.

“The truth is, that when our community turns its back on AIDS, we turn our back on the very idea of civil rights, and social and economic justice being our cause.

IT ISN’T OUR PROBLEM

“I also want to be clear that I want the right to marry as much as the next person… and I want all the other rights that have been denied persons of LGBT experience for so long. But if what we are truly engaged in is a struggle for social and economics, it can’t just be about my rights.

WORLDWIDE BURDEN

“We in the organized LGBT community are often incredulous that so many Africans Americans can distinguish their historical struggle for civil rights from out own.

“Yet, we fail to see the devastation being wrought among African American men who have sex with men in DC, or Brooklyn or Jackson, Mississippi, for that matter, as intrinsic to us, much less to see the connection between our struggle and that of people living with HIV and Aids around the globe.

“The reality of AIDS is that it is caused by a virus: but that virus would not have created the pandemic that now exists if it were not fueled by homophobia, racism and sexism.

AIDS is a disease that persist as a consequence of economic and social marginalization and discrimination. Whether it was gay men and then Haitians in the 80’s, or sex workers and people addicted to injection drugs today, Aids has been able to wrecks its havoc because it has in the main taken the lives of people deemed to be expendable.

“And that is why AIDS continues to be the preeminent civil rights issue of our day, whether we want to own it or not.

“Even before I had the courage to publicly declare my sexual orientation, I knew to be grateful God had made me gay. Being gay, I knew early on, went way beyond just being sexually attracted to men.

“The otherness of my sexual orientation propelled me out of the small-minded fundamentalist community into which I had been born. Being gay forced me to make my own way, to think for myself instead of accepting the given truths with which I had been raised.

“Being sexually transgressive made transgendered people my brothers and sisters even without my understanding all of the complexities of gender identity.

“Being gay required that I understand that sexism persists as the root cause of homophobia.

“And it didn’t take being sero-positive for me to realize some 24 years ago that the first person I knew personally to die from the virus, an African American female sex worker in New Haven, Connecticut, died for me.

“Whether we in the gay community like it or not, AIDS is till our disease.

It is ours because the many faces of AIDS, whether gay or straight, male or female, living in Haiti or South Africa, Puerto Rico or Washington, DC, represent our struggle to survive and live out lives whole.”

THE MYTHS