Regular visitors to This. That. No Other. know that my brand of cranky activism owes a huge debt to the likes of Larry Kramer and Michelangelo Signorile. Y’all also know of my affection for and admiration of my rockin’ New York bloggerbuddy Eric Leven. Well, tomorrow afternoon, two generations of queer/AIDS activists meet on Signorile‘s SiriusOutQ radio show and I know what I’ll be doing at 3:30PM (EDT).
Eric’s paying Mike a visit to discuss the current state of activism in general and the efficacy of HIV-prevention education in particular, most notably the fine line which educators must tread to send a forceful message without fear-mongering. Leven’s had that charge leveled at him for his spectacularly-effective PSA, “Second Date”:
Terrific, huh? Get a chill down your spine or a punch to the gut? Good. A depiction of fear is not fear-mongering. It’s reality. We should be fucking scared. I’m wondering whether the fear that’s being mongered is solely in the minds of those who recognize themselves continuing to make the mistakes in Eric’s advert, and I wonder, too, whether we react with fear because we stopped fucking talking about HIV and AIDS in an appropriately-aggressive fashion.
To have it so effectively portrayed speaks more to the need for increased dialog at a number of levels than to constantly question the efficacy of each, individual message. Bring ‘em all on.
But then, this is a charge that’s been leveled at Signorile, too — by assimilationist homos over the years, who balked at his inyerface reportage in the early ’90s. He spoke plainly about homosexuality as if it was nothing of which to be ashamed, and he was excoriated by the very same homosexuals who claimed to want a life of no shame — and all that that meant — but apparently weren’t prepared to live it all quite yet.
There is no perfect, universal message to deliver. It doesn’t exist. We need a chorus. Of facts, of hugs and of confronting harmful behaviours.
Anyway, it’ll be an interesting discussion, to be sure. Go to SiriusOutQ and sign up for a free trial, and tune in to Channel 109 tomorrow at 3:30PM (EDT); check your time zones! (I experienced problems using a Hotmail account to sign up, so if you have another email account, you might want to try that one.)
Addendum: What a rock star That Leven Boy is. Seriously. Can’t wait for his next visit to Signorile’s show.
3 comments
It kind of doesn’t give me a punch in the gut/chill thing, but… I don’t relate to it, I guess. I don’t have casual sex (note: am not criticising people who do, here, it’s just Not My Thing and never has been), but if I did I’d use all the protection I could get.
I was born in 1980, so I grew up in the post-AIDS-epidemic world. I had the good fortune to be educated at a school, in an area, in a country, where abstinence-only education wasn’t considered to be the way to go; we got taught about contraception, and our tests included which ones could or could not prevent the transmission of various diseases, including HIV.
The message, fundamentally, was along the lines of: “You are, right now, too young to have sex. Seriously, guys, wait a while.” (We were 12-13 when we started learning.) “But when you do, this is how you can try not to get pregnant, and this is how you can try not to get incurable diseases that could kill you.” A year or so later, an HIV-positive homosexual gentleman came and gave us a talk about HIV and what it’s like to live with it. (Combined message about not stigmatising it, and also about But Seriously It’s Pretty Much Preventable Kids.)
My generation is lucky – we were born after the first wave of it. We haven’t watched our friends die of it – it’s somewhat medically containable these days, as I understand it, but more than that, we got the chance to know the risks before we started sleeping around, the odds of getting it by blood transfusion are much lower, all that stuff.
We’re lucky we got that when we were young, but I just don’t fucking understand the people who, now, when everybody can know this stuff, know it and ignore it. Older people who did see the worst of it and don’t take all the care they can to avoid it, younger people who grew up with the knowledge that HIV was Out There and don’t take the precautions that we all fucking well know we should.
I don’t know. When I was younger it seemed like the general message we got was “HIV is fucking scary, HIV will kill you, HIV is out there. If you’re going to have sex, be safe.” And we just don’t seem to get that message any more at all.
Sami: “We’re lucky we got that when we were young, but I just don’t fucking understand the people who, now, when everybody can know this stuff, know it and ignore it. Older people who did see the worst of it and don’t take all the care they can to avoid it, younger people who grew up with the knowledge that HIV was Out There and don’t take the precautions that we all fucking well know we should.”
Brava. I think the mistake HIV/AIDS education groups might be making is to be oversensitive (to a fault) to the feelings of those living with HIV. It’s possible to stigmatize the disease without stigmatizing the people living with it. It takes creativity and guts (and the participation of PLWAs), but… aren’t we homos supposed to be the brave, creative ones?
I think you are very much right. It’s not like being HIV makes you a bad person, and it wasn’t necessarily your fault.
But, if nothing else, the rate of infection of people who were just really unlucky would be lower if there were fewer people getting infected because they were stupid, because HIV wouldn’t be out there as much.
That “HIV Stops WIth Me” poster ELeven blogged about is a great example of the kind of thing that should be done, and done a lot, I think.