HIV: Not Fabulous

[Guest guest]

This letter was sent to me by a friend. I wonder what everyone thinks.

Dear Editor:

After repeated recent assaults, it's time for Fab! magazine to stop its affront on the HIV-positive community by carrying offensive, impractial "HIV prevention" advertisements.

I refer to the ubiquitous and profoundly insulting "HIV: Not Fabulous" campaign, which purports to support HIV prevention when instead it just promotes stigma. Who designed these? They allow absolutely no compassion to those living with HIV -- and they insult the memory of all those who have died from AIDS and the people who loved them. Ads that grotesquely depict men with facial lipoatrophy, diarrhea, and abdominal lipodystrophy do nothing to address the practical issue of promoting "staying negative" by actually applying condom-to-penis in male-to-male anal intercourse. These ads feature abstract, indirect depictions that don't actually say anything to encourage basic safer sex behavior among young, at-risk gay men. Instead, they just encourage the entire HIV-negative gay male community, especially young men, to avoid, shun, ostracize, and stigmatize HIV-positive men, especially those who are older or unattractive. These ads ignore the fact that HIV-negative gay men can safely have relationships and even frequent sex with HIV-positive partners if simple precautions are taken with a few specific sexual acts. Instead of preventing new cases of HIV transmission, ads like this merely create a schism within the gay male community and promote an atmosphere where HIV-positive men are seen as dirty, useless, diseased pariahs of no value to the larger community, when actually there are plenty of HIV-positive men who would make wonderful friends, boyfriends, partners, and even sexual partners to men of both statuses.

In my work as a psychotherapist specializing in gay men, I see many single, HIV-positive men throughout the week. All of these are bright, charming, handsome, accomplished men who would make wonderful partners to all, yet many of these clients complain of being rejected by HIV-negative men, sight-unseen, merely due to their HIV status. Others fear disclosing their status in early dating because of the knee-jerk rejection reaction from some HIV-negative men. How many have seen, in online profiles, "HIV-negative -- UB2?" Or profiles that equate severe drug addiction with HIV-positive status, such as "Drug and Disease Free?" In other words, no matter what else HIV-positive men have to offer in a relationship -- looks, stability, charm, humor, companionship, love, and even good sex -- some men are rejecting them because of vague, irrational, exaggerated fears of contagion that are fueled by ads such as these, that teach men to fear and avoid HIV-positive people, not limited high-risk sex acts. Irrational fear of contagion, and the HIV stigma that goes along with it, should have been a thing of the past literally decades ago after the HIV virus was discovered and it was ascertained that a few simple safer sex procedures will prevent its transmission with astounding mathemetical reliability.

Speaking as an HIV-positive man myself for over 16 years (and partnered to an HIV-negative man), I have experienced first-hand the conditions of facial wasting, abdominal bloating, and diarrhea depicted in the ad campaigns, and learned to cope with them. I have also "climbed mountains" as an HIV-positive person, as "those pharmaceutical ads" have so controversially depicted. Both "extremes" of the HIV-positive experience have been true with me. No one wants additional new cases of HIV, and public health efforts and campaigns to promote awareness and prevention are important. But I also know, from over 16 years of working with gay men and with various local AIDS service organizations, as well from a review of academic literature that studies what types of public health campaigns lead to behavioral change, that "scare tactics" as HIV prevention do not work. Instead, gay men need supportive reminders, usually sexually graphic ones, of the importance of safer sex. They need practical, realistic, culturally-specific information that draws on the Harm Reduction Model that promotes healthy behavioral change and risk reduction (some of which are described intelligently in Without Condoms, the new ground-breaking book by legendary New York gay male psychotherapist Shernoff, LCSW). But of course, in this age of the profoundly stupid, renegade and offensive W. Bush, ads partially or fully funded by the federal government (US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and LA County Office of AIDS Programs and Policy (funded by the federal US Department of Health and Human Services)) are not allowed to depict graphic sexual themes, as one would find in HIV prevention campaigns in France, Germany, the Netherlands, or other sexually evolved countries of the world. Instead, the current U.S. government is more than happy to fund HIV prevention campaigns that denigrate and stigmatize HIV-positive men and create plenty of judgment and shame around HIV, gay male sex, and people of color.

It is time that our local gay male community receive real, effective, practical HIV prevention campaigns from the agencies funded to provide this, not offensive assaults. It is time that our local gay press stop accepting advertising from agencies like AHF that seem to despise the very constituency of patients they are funded to serve (with our tax dollars), and who bully our local publications by holding them hostage with their much-needed advertising revenue when the publications can't alter the ad content. It is time for HIV-positive gay men, and the people who love them, to demand more respect and dignity from the publications that "serve" us. And, once and for all, after 25 years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, it is time to end irrational, uninformed HIV stigma and start loving -- and protecting -- each other as a united gay male community.

Ken , LCSW

Regards, Vergelsalvagetherapies dot org