Prilozen je dobar clanak koji sam nasao na netu povodom dana side. B
Today, December 1st, is World AIDS Day. Now, for the life of me I have never understood a disease, a predominately sexually transmitted preventable disease, getting its own day. We don't have World Syphilis Day, World Chlamydia Day, World Hepatitis Day, or even World Flu Day. And the fact is that more children die of preventable diseases like Measles, Smallpox and Pneumonia each day then die of AIDS.
In the United States a person is 50 times more likely to die of a heart disease than AIDS, according to a November 27 th, 2006 Time Magazine story on fear yet we don't have National Cholesterol Day.
Now, as someone whose partner was HIV positive for our entire relationship, 11.5 years, as someone who went through every emotion, every drug study, every heartbreak, as someone that lost a generation of friends to AIDS and has seen the disease go from a death sentence with only AZT to help to a chronic manageable disease with a life expectancy of at least 24 years from date of infection according to recent studies I have put my time in the trenches with AIDS. I want a cure. I want better treatments. I want pregnant mothers to get drugs that can prevent the disease spreading to their children. I want access to drugs for those that cannot afford the very expensive protease inhibitors and other drugs as they become available. And yes, the AIDS crisis in sub-Sahara Africa is beyond despicable and has gone ignored by the civilized world far too long and yes, thank God for Bill Clinton and all he's done to bring that struggle to the forefront.
But politics, including AIDS, begins at home, and as I sit on World AIDS Day watching every TV station tripping over themselves to find a photo or video of a dying African child, I can't help but wonder, where have they been for almost 30 years as gay men died in America? And why now, almost 30 years after the start of the epidemic, are we, gay men, still fighting about whether or not it is a "gay" disease in the United States?
Recently the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center came under attack for their billboards that read, "HIV Is A Gay Disease. Own It. End It." The outcry from the gay community was immediate. All the work they had done for years to make sure it was not labeled a gay disease was being struck down, and I, for one, couldn't have been happier.
Because in the United States it is a gay disease, and that's just the statistical truth. True, that's changing quickly, but for the most part, it is. And it is a disease that certainly effects gay men more to date in the United States, so it is in the community, and thus, is a gay disease. But no, don't say that. Why? Simple. Gay men have always feared that if the disease is labeled gay that no one will care, that no on will want to spend millions of dollars on research, that no one will want to put an end to it. And, given the coverage of World AIDS Day and how gay people are missing on most networks, they're right. But two wrongs don't make a right.
I have no problem with AIDS being a gay disease in the United States, or at least one seen as a problem in the gay community. Because I believe it is one worth solving and that gay men don't deserve to die more than anybody else. Just as certain anemias only affect Blacks or TB can run rampant in immigrant communities, all needing to be addressed and treated, AIDS in America (which is part of the world) has devastated the gay community an it is time we own it and cure it.
Let's be real, any gay man over 21 that contracts HIV in 2006 deserves it. And that's what no one wants to say or admit. But, quite frankly, unless it's through contaminated blood, rape, or some situation out of their control, there has been enough information in the gay community for decades to where any gay man over 21 knows how to prevent it. It's a hard virus to get and easy to prevent. But there's a prevalent attitude that there's a cure, and there's not. Younger gay males think if they get it it won't be so bad and they're just plain wrong. The pills are horrifying, and can cause heart attacks, liver failure, and a host of other problems while treating the HIV. But how would they know? In the gay community the face of AIDS is healthy, active, geared to go, hell, damned sexy in some cases. Drug companies use very healthy models in their AIDS drug ads in the gay press, there's even competitions for HIV positive men, beauty pageants of sorts, to be crowned Mr. This or Mr. That.
In fact all the ads in the gay press talk about how healthy, happy, how active and handsome you can be if you take this new drug. Of course, it takes two pages for the ads, one for the photo of the healthy active man and the other page for the eight point type of possible horrifying side effects.
It's hard to find any mention in the gay press of the devastation of AIDS. Everybody is living with it, healthy, active, surviving. Except that's not the truth. The truth is the drugs wear out. The truth is that when they do, there's nothing, there's no where to turn. The truth is for gay men in America, when they exhaust what the medical system has to offer it is still a terminal illness. It's an inconvenient truth, but one nonetheless.
Yes, in America, it's a gay disease. And we should own it and cure it. If we had years ago, if our leaders had dumped as much energy in to owning it and curing it instead of running from it, trying to "share" it with the nongay community, who knows where we would be now. If we had closed the bathhouses in the 1980s, if we had treated this disease like a medical one and not a social condition, who knows where we'd be on this World AIDS Day. Perhaps we wouldn't even need one.
Because that's where we, the gay and lesbian community, went wrong. We allowed everybody to treat this like a social disease and not a medical one, and we did that ourselves. By our very nature of wanting to classify it as gay or nongay, we bought in to the social implications of the virus instead of the fact that it is simply a virus, a virus that flourishes in the gay male community. Somehow even we thought there was something wrong with a virus that flourished in our community first, somehow we felt that was in some way a scar, a stigma. No, it was simply a medical fact. The AIDS virus liked the unprotected sex and weakened immune systems of gay men that liked to party. So what? Let them die? Ignore them and tell people that it's not just them that are at risk, but your nice, god-fearing 17 year old children?
I'm gay, and I deserve to live. My gay male counterparts deserve to as well. If a disease rears its head, one that likes my community, it needs to be cured and cured right away. I don't need to care about AIDS more because it's killed a generation of people in Africa, I've watched it kill or affect the lives of most of my friends in America, and that's reason enough for me to cure it. On World AIDS Day I don't need to see a young African child, I have a friend with Kaposi's Sarcoma legions on his leg
But U.S. AIDS activists now get a major "I told you so.." Because as in Africa, AIDS in America is now also a Black disease. That's right, while gay men need to own it and cure it, the African American community now gets a franchise on our ownership. Of course, many of those African Americans are gay men. Here's a breakdown according the an AIDS Fact Sheet from the CDC.
• Racial and ethnic minorities have been disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS since the beginning of the epidemic, and minority Americans now represent the majority of new AIDS cases (71%) and of those estimated to be living with AIDS (64%)
• African Americans and Latinos account for a disproportionate share of new AIDS diagnoses and of new HIV/AIDS diagnoses in the 33 integrated surveillance states.
• Almost half (47%) of all those living with HIV/AIDS in the U.S. are African Americans.
• African Americans have the highest AIDS case rates of any racial/ethnic group, followed by Latinos, American Indian/Alaska Natives, whites, and Asian/Pacific Islanders. The AIDS case rate per 100,000 population for African Americans was 9.5 times that of whites in 2003.
• Despite declines in HIV infection rates among men who have sex with men (MSM) since the early years of the epidemic, they continue to be at high risk for infection, accounting for an estimated 57% of AIDS diagnoses among men in 2003. Studies indicate that risk behavior continues among MSM and that they are at significantly greater risk for HIV infection than other groups in the U.S.
So will we care in the United States about AIDS now that it's also a Black disease? Will there be calls from Black Americans to "Own It, Cure It?" Probably not, but it is a shame that people of color on another continent seem to be getting more education and more help on this World AIDS Day than people of color in the United States.
The fact is there are many diseases that need our attention in the U.S. and the world, AIDS being just one of them. Let's not have one day to worry about one disease, let's start making people proactive to live healthier lifestyles every day. Let's make sure everybody has clean water, food of some kind and access to basic medical care. Let's take care of everybody, gay, straight, Black, White, every day, not just December 1 st. As gay people, let's do claim ownership to AIDS in America and join those in the Black community who now have a sublet to find a cure, to find treatments. Let's present the real face of AIDS in the media, not just a Black one, but a gay one, and not just the happy happy joy joy stories, but the truth: people still die from this disease, the drugs are not a cure, and their side effects can be devastating.
Let's at least have the truth about AIDS on World AIDS Day: the truth that it's a medical disease not a social one, that every one that contracts it deserves treatment even if they were responsible for contracting it since most illnesses are diseases of choice. Americans are eating themselves in to heart disease every day, but we still care for them, they're smoking their way to lung cancer, but we still help them. And gay men, enough already. Zero transmission, period end. Zero transmission. You know how, the information is out there. Zero transmission, DO YOU HEAR ME? Lead the way, show the world we learn from decades of suffering, ZERO TRANSMISSION. Because if we can do that, and we can, we can then lead the way and turn this epidemic around. Gay men can lead the way to a cure, lead the way in education if we strive for ZERO TRANSMISSION. Safe sex works, so, to borrow a phrase from Project Runway, "Make it work."
And to Black America, learn from gay American's struggle with the disease. Don't stigmatize those with it, embrace them. And get the word out there to everybody in your community as to how to prevent it. Spend as much time on TV talking about AIDS Rev. Jackson and Rev. Sharpton as you have about Michael Richards.
One day, on December 1st, I'd like to have a party for World AIDS Day to celebrate zero transmission. It can be done and before we strike out in the "world" for that, let's start in the United States. When we can boast that, then we can reach out. World AIDS Day: Will There Be A Party? Huffington Post by Charles Karel Bouley