In a few weeks, Americans are going to the polls to determine the next occupant of the White House and, on the other side of Pennsylvania Avenue, the composition of Congress. This election is of critical importance to us and to our friends around the world.

Allow me to explain.

It’s not just that Barack Obama is, in my considered opinion, the best President this country has had since at least Dwight Eisenhower. Or that something feels deeply right about a man of color sitting in Abraham Lincoln’s chair, in a house built by slaves. Or that I love my country enough to want to see it respected, not just feared, around the world. America is, for me, not just some spot on a map with a flag and a theme song; it is my home, and above all, an idea, that all men are created equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights, among them the right to pursue happiness as we see fit. The mother of exiles, as it says on that statue down in the harbor.

No, it is also the simple fact that, for a gay man with HIV, this administration is both the most compassionate and most competent to serve since, well, ever. This matters to you more than you may think, even if you’re not an American. And if you are, you might want to consider that what America does impacts lives far beyond our borders, whether we appreciate that fact or not.

In terms of HIV and AIDS policy, this administration has taken steps that are simply unprecedented. To begin with, thirty years and counting into the epidemic, the United States actually has a National HIV and AIDS Policy, NHAP, executed out of the Executive Office of the President. In an age of economic discontent and shrinking budgets – and an unhinged opposition party, one might add – the billions of dollars this government spends on HIV and AIDS, for treatment, prevention and research, are being well spent.

As an aside, Ronald Reagan didn’t even see fit to utter the word AIDS until a year before he left office, all the while the epidemic raged unchecked on these shores and abroad. How many lives might have been saved if it had been otherwise, personally, I’d prefer to not even think about. Such a small word, and he couldn’t say it.

In retrospect, of course, we know why; because that little word was ‘just’ killing off undesirables; homosexuals, drug users, the poor, people of color, in this country and abroad. So what if the killing accelerated and took millions of lives, if those lives don’t have any intrinsic value?

Barack Obama is different. On his watch, gay, lesbian, bi and trans Americans – people – have advanced faster and further towards equality than ever before. This President is not going to let people like me, or you, die like flies – because for him, we have that intrinsic value. This President believes we should be able to get married; unobjectionable in a civilized country like Canada, a bit more politically hazardous when you and Alabama use the same passport. There are openly gay members of Congress, Federal judges, heads of cabinet departments, ambassadors, U.S. Marines. Tasty U.S. Marines, but I digress.

And while this is all very well and good, and of piece with a flawed society learning to accept its sexual minorities, in terms of HIV, it also begins to chip away at the foundation of stigma that to this day is the root cause of the epidemic. To be sure, there is still hate; but there is less of it, in part because it is no longer sanctioned from the very top of the proverbial food chain.

I say above that what America does matters, and this not because myopic flag-waving is my thing. But turn on your television, open your medicine cabinet, go to the grocery store, and we’re there. The world has an interest in seeing America becoming, in fits and starts to be sure, a more progressive and tolerant place – because we export our values along with our TV shows, ARVs and fighter jets.

This November, keep your fingers crossed that we decide this kind of progress is what we want for another four years. Because it will make your life better if we do.

There are three challenges to writing about HIV, that is, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, the underlying cause of AIDS, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.

One, you have to decide whether to use the raging language of the apocalypse (for the uninfected), all the better to scare the kids straight, no pun intended, on the danger of it, or (for the infected), the soothing tones of love, hope and survival.

Two, you have to decide whether to write about the medicine of it, the politics, the demographics, the support system, the brave folk battling the disease every day, your inevitably uplifting personal story (mine's here), so many options.

Lastly, if you write about it as often as I seem to be doing these days (three major pieces in the course of a week), you have to force something fresh out of your bleeding fingers even as your keyboard seems to be giving you, though how it does that remains unknown, an accusatory look. I suspect there's an app for that, Steve Jobs' late, lamented genius for perfection being what it was.

But KosAbility is a series about disabilities, more specifically, about how Kossacks live with them. Legally, I am disabled – not because of the virus, that's no longer sufficient, but because I had a real, red-blooded-American AIDS diagnosis at one point, which is. In actual, non-legal fact, I'm a man in his prime with the full panoply of physical and mental abilities the healthy male body provides. How that came to be, you can find out over the Orange terrorist-fist-bump Eye of Sauron.

Or whatever we're calling that..   thing... these days.

The simple fact is that, yes, I am infected with HIV, and probably have been for a decade or so. Am there, have that, literally own the t-shirt. Wore it in Providence, come to think of it. What always strikes me, however, is how much of a bigger deal this wardrobe choice, and the assumptions it creates, seems to be for everyone else than it is for me.

And yes, of course I'm going to start a post about a global pandemic by talking about clothes.

There are expectations, mind you. One of them is, to appropriate Joseph Chamberlain, of the weary titan, staggering under the too-vast orb of its fate – that one spends every waking moment consumed with the thought of this unvanquished disease slowly eating away, unseen, much as Dorian Gray was consumed by his portrait withering away in its hidden attic. Flowing presumably from this is the idea that, as one of the few gay men in the progressive blogosphere publicly out of the closet about my status – really, the sheer irony of it boggles the mind – I'm naturally qualified to be an information source, cautionary tale or poster boy.

It intrigues me that some people should think any of that. To be entirely candid, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about HIV. I don't have the funereal mindset this would require or the distance to see the subject dispassionately. If anything at all, I lose sleep over the kids, many or most of whom don't have my support system, my loving family, devoted partner, great circle of friends. As far as I'm concerned, however, as I live it, this virus is a routine, more an annoyance than a burden; large amounts of blood drawn every three or six months, a pill before dinner, done. HIV, for me, has receded into the background.

At first glance, not all that terrible, is it? And really, it's not. Which is maybe why....

Being positive, in my world, among my friends, is the new normal.

[HIV prevalence 2009, New York City by ZIP code, Source: aidsvu.org]

The picture above is a map of the five boroughs of the City of New York. See those purple areas? Going clockwise, they're the West Village, Chelsea and Hells Kitchen (the main gay areas), Harlem, The Bronx, and central Brooklyn. They correspond quite neatly to the main demographics HIV affects: gay men and African-Americans of all genders, and agonizingly, far too many young people of color to even contemplate.

Estimates vary, but I hear about one in four gay men here at home, the City of New York, carry the virus. Nationwide, the numbers at least in urban areas are similar, and we – men who have sex with men – are the only demographic that sees an increase, year over year, every year for now over a decade. Some statistical evidence suggests that new infections are occurring at a rate comparable to what it was before the advent of miracle drugs.

Why?

Among other reasons, because a lot of guys are fucking without condoms. It's called barebacking, and in my experience at least, is either already normative behavior or becoming such. Combined with the dramatically increased life expectancy of men like me and several other factors, it is a mathematical certainty that the absolute number of HIV-infected gay men will rise, even dramatically so, as will our share of the larger gay male population. We are living decades longer, and every year, every day, every nine minutes, more join the ranks.

And that's where we get to HIV Normal.

On the surface, for me at least, this new normal is tolerable. I know I'm not going to die, certainly not any time soon. I have the kind of killer body you get from going to a gym every day. Those baby blues are still sparkling, and I look a decade younger than I am. This year for Pride, I marched down Fifth Avenue, with ACT UP, in underwear and combat boots; quite spectacular, if I do say so myself. The side effects from the drugs - actually, the drug, singular – are few, if any. I know there is stigma out there; I just haven't experienced it. Only one in four HIV patients have the virus under control; I do. Even my blood pressure is perfect. As I said: I've been lucky.

Of course, t'was not always thus. That first year after the diagnosis was, not to sugarcoat anything, a living hell. I suspect it's the same for everyone who gets that new chapter turned, no matter what the heading is; if something can kill you, odds are, puppies and unicorns aren't going to be first to mind. For me, it fucked up my career, and slapped me in the face with the idea of my own mortality. The five stages of grief – been there, done that. There is a 'before', and now, there is 'after'.

The biggest problem, though, wasn't anything external, it was the film running through my head. All those awful pictures from the eighties, the dead friends, the funerals – great, my turn. Damaged goods, the one mistake I'd never be able to fix. In the crushing loneliness of that test result, you question every choice you've ever made. At that point of the journey, not a few people commit suicide.

And then, it gets better. Maybe because the very real distinction between 'automatic death sentence' and 'chronic disease' kicks in. Maybe because of some small kindness you give or receive. Maybe because a random hookup turns into such cinematically epic sex you walk funny for days and can't wipe that grin off your face. Maybe it's the realization that you're now a part of something much bigger than yourself, this grand tragedy, bitter and sweet, that is mankind's struggle with this newest plague, and that you have some fucking responsibility to those who came before.

Whatever it is, you realize that 'before' and 'after' don't need to be all that different.

So that's where I'm at – stage five, acceptance. Yes, there are changes. I take a much closer look at nutrition (that single pill, awkwardly, sucks calcium out of your body like a two-dollar hooker), get lots of exercise and sleep. My sex life is still – or rather, again – the stuff that mere mortals only get to dream of, and though I confine myself to men with my serostatus, that's still a big pool with many tasty, talented fish. My sense of humor is still quite intact, thank you very much, and I haven't gone off to find God. I'm both more kind and more skeptical than I was a decade ago, though still as insufferably full of myself as ever.

Of course, my glittering life in the Imperial City could be built on quicksand. People do still die. We have no idea what the long-term effects of those fabulous pills are, or if their efficacy has a shelf life. The political and societal environment could change beyond recognition.

But right now, at this moment in time, life is good.

--- The End --- .

This article first appeared in The Daily Kos/KosAbility. Republished with permission.

Facebook is the oldest – if we choose to forget for a moment the embarrassment that was Friendster or that other site whose name presently escapes me – and largest of the social media platforms. Despite its relatively weak recent initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange, it is the most popular boy in the room, with 900,000,000 users worldwide. Not a typo – nine hundred million. As of May 2012, so the number today is, no question, higher. These users tend to be (slightly) older and more educated than those on Twitter.

Of them, 224,000,000 are in North America. The market penetration rate in the United States and Canada respectively is roughly equal, at about half the total population; in other words, one in two people is ‘on’ Facebook. The web metric provider Alexa ranks the site as number two in total traffic, again worldwide.

The site was launched by some students at Harvard in 2004 as a way to share stuff that college students tend to like: where to get hammered, who’s dating who, pictures of pets, pictures of your ex they may or may not ever want to see the light of day. As I said: fun. There are some things you really don’t want to post, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

So, all the dry statistics aside, what can you do with – pardon, on – Facebook, especially as a member of the HIV community?

Individuals and organizations use the site in distinctly different ways. Personally, I have a few loosely related goals. I’m very politically active, so I use it to share content that reflects my generally leftwing views, spreading them to friends and family. ‘Friends’ in the sense used on Facebook, by the way, is a broader term than in meatspace; my Member of Congress,one such friend, God bless her, is probably not going to drop by the house for a slice of cake and a chat about girl things. There is, however, a certain utility for a blogger to know the powerful, and vice versa, in especially as you tend to acquire new friends via a process of osmosis; you know X, they know Y, and Y and their friend Z may want to be your friends as well.

That, and I plaster my page full of pictures of hot guys [NSFW], cute pets, articles I just published, or whatever mercenary content I think will drive my Klout score up higher than most print journalists in this state. Which it is, but your mileage may vary. As a general rule of thumb, not least because there’s always a little thrill when folks react to something you’ve posted, take some time to engage in conversation on your page and elsewhere; it’s only polite and one reason why we call this field ‘social’ media in the first place. There are very few technical limits as to what you can post; photos, video, audio, text, graphics, animations – pretty much anything that will render on a computer or smart phone. Oddly, though, animated GIFs are not supported – yet. A really cool thing: you can make video calls or host video chats, too. Less cool: if you go ‘visible’, i.e. let your friends see you’re online, some of them will be pests and hit you up for an IM chat. You don’t need to be a humanity-hating misanthrope to find that annoying, especially at work, so check your visibility settings.

Most of all, however, I use Facebook to tell my daily personal story, and that includes HIV. That was my personal choice, not the easiest thing in the world to do, and you may (of course) choose otherwise. I would merely suggest, veering off-topic for a moment, that stigma doesn’t go away when you let yourself be stigmatized. Transparency has its own unique power.

Facebook has four distinct components: a newsfeed (where you see whatever it is that your friends are up to, and the default landing page when you navigate to the site), a personal page (your daily diary, as it were), groups, and what we could best call entities. The latter could be companies, not-for-profits, record labels, movies, whatnot, the entire gamut of human society that is not a single person.

Your personal page is your main point of entry. Somewhat annoyingly, Facebook changes the layout of it capriciously, but the main elements are: a top banner, a user picture (spend the money and get a good one), biographical information, your friends, two sidebars with friend activity and availability, and things you ‘like’. Regarding the latter, you will find little ‘Like this on Facebook’ buttons spread all over the internet; when you click on one of them, this is where it shows up. As an aside: it’s generally not a good idea to post things on your page you wouldn’t want an employer, a reporter, or your mother to see; that includes basic things like, say, felonies (including recreational drug use), a blow-by-blow of that recent drunk night, your sexual history, or anything that could even implausibly be considered bigotry. People have gotten fired over these (and other) things, so use basic common sense and never post under the influence. By default, your page is only visible to people you allow access, but again: your mother could read that.

Group pages are a fantastic thing. Check out this New York-based page for HIV. If there’s nothing like that in your area, you can start one, in fact, you can start – or join – as many as you like. If you do the former, you’ll be what’s called the group administrator, with despotic powers over your domain: access to usage statistics, the ability to purge other users (but only from the group itself), and some other fun things. Groups can be public or private. Activity from the latter does not show up on your personal page, by the way.

Entity pages (which is my own term, feel free to use your own) can be literally anything. They’re quite useful, on a personal level, if you’re the kind of Facebook whore (not my own term) that gets near or crosses the maximum number of friends or likes, 5000. Lady Gaga, for example, has fifty three million. Pro tip: if you have under twenty five likes, Facebook will assign you a random jumble of numbers and letters as your URL. If you have more, and it’s free, you can choose your own custom URL. Which is kind of neat, especially if you’re trying to brand something. PositiveLite.com crossed that threshold, so the magazine has a branded URL.

If you’re running a page like that, there are some basic rules of thumb. As noted, don’t post anything offensive or stupid; the laws in your jurisdiction will apply to whatever you do on Facebook, and the site has been known to remove content it finds offensive or that crosses legal boundaries. A non-exhaustive overview is here. Standard practice is to post two or three times a day, to keep your page fresh, and if someone engages with you – leaves a comment, posts something, whatever – to engage them back within a reasonable time frame. Similar to Twitter, on the other hand, don’t spam someone’s timeline unless you have something that you have a good reason to believe is worth their time. If you’re really that prolific, consider buying an ad; they’re not inexpensive (CPC or cost-per-click in the U.S. is about $1.15), but you can target them with an exquisite precision, based on the huge amounts of data Facebook collects. You can even target just one single person, but that might be considered harassment in some places. I hear it’s fun, though.

Lastly, privacy is a legitimate concern. As noted, the amount of data Facebook (and third-party apps) collects is astonishing. On that subject, there are no rules of thumb; my suggestion would be to read the privacy section closely.  By default, however, no one you haven’t authorized – ‘friended’ – can see the content of your page, other than the immediate header. Everything else, with some practice, you can control.

So there you have it. Go make some friends. 

Welcome to Part III of my series on HIV, Aids and Social Media. It occurs to me that I haven’t really discussed why this should be of any importance to anyone, unapologetic nerds aside. So let’s look at that.

I start with the assumption that AIDS is a political issue and a human catastrophe. These two aspects of the epidemic are interwoven like vines on a wall. To be effective politically, however, requires several things: one, a clear message, two, the channels to distribute that message, and three, people to effect that distribution.

Twitter (along with other platforms), I’d argue, is almost custom-made for that purpose, if used with some clarity and consistency. There are no barriers to entry of the kind that characterize the traditional – or as we nerds call them, the dead-tree – media. The cost, obviously, is negligible. These factors, in combination, have already effected a revolution in our media universe, one that I’d hazard to guess has by no means run its course. Perception is reality, and if you can change perception, you will form reality itself. Implied in that statement is something else worth discussing some other time, namely the question of power, what it is, how you acquire and use it, but again, that’s for some other time.

In terms of the human catastrophe, having recently done quite a bit of reading on the early days of the epidemic, the what-if strikes me: what if we had had the tools we have today back in, say, the eighties? How many lives might have been saved, how much miserable, useless death avoided? We’ll never know, of course, but speaking strictly for myself, I do believe we have a positive moral responsibility to tell our stories. Because if we don’t, someone else will.

Which brings us to the meat of the matter: which stories do we tell? The following is based on materials from the New Organizing Institute in Washington, D.C., and represents some theoretical backbone to keep your social media message on target.

The Story of Self

Everyone has a story to tell. What I want to talk about here is how to turn your story into a narrative, to take that narrative public, and then to use it to change hearts and minds.

We understand our world by two means, with our heads and our hearts, or, if you prefer, rationally and emotionally. To change opinions, you have to communicate on both levels.

We don’t think our values; we feel our values. Often we don’t realize what we value in the world until we hear a story or witness an injustice that stirs emotions within us. Emotions inform us of what we value in ourselves, in others, and in the world, and they enable us to express the motivational content of our values to others. Because stories allow us to express our values not as abstract principles, but as lived experience, they have the power to move others to action.

Public leaders often encounter individuals or groups where mindful action is inhibited by inertia, fear, self-doubt, isolation, and apathy. The job of a leader is not to tell people to stop feeling this way but rather use storytelling to move people from feelings of stagnation to feelings of motivation - urgency, hope, YCMAD (you can make a difference), solidarity, and anger. The language of emotion is the language of movement—they actually share the same root word. Stories mobilize emotions of action to overcome emotions that inhibit us from mindful action. […]

Just as with a story of self, key choice points in the life of a community—its founding, crises it has faced, or other events that everyone remembers—are moments that express the values shared.  Consider stories that members of your group have shared, especially those that held similar meaning for all of you.  The key is to focus on telling a specific story about specific people at a specific time that can remind everyone – or call to everyone’s attention – values that you share. Telling a good story of us requires the courage of empathy – to consider the experience of others deeply enough to take a chance at articulating that experience.

What does this mean in the context of social media, where you have a very narrow space, both in terms of the amount of material you can broadcast, and of the time this material will be visible? Remember, Twitter only gives you 140 characters, a text message all of 160, and on Facebook, you’re best off with a maximum of 400. All of these platforms, of course, have timestreams, and you’re competing with other agendas, quite possibly worthwhile on their own merits, but they’re not your job. Your job is to tell your story, not mine, you have two seconds to do that, and are competing with hundreds or thousands of other users for my attention.

First, you’ll want to use unambiguous emotional terms: ‘anger’, ‘love’, ‘hope’, not more timid verbiage like, well, ‘like’ as a verb. Think of it in terms of theater: your words are setting a scene.

Once you’ve set that stage, go with action words: ‘click’, ‘check out’, ‘read now’, ‘breaking’, and provide something your readers can do. That’s usually a click-through to something, and you want to test that link before you send it out; sounds deceptively simple, but you’d be surprised how often that gets fouled up. Psychologically, being presented a non-working or worse, misleading link does one thing: it pisses people off, because you’ve just wasted some of their time, which you obviously don’t respect.

Create a sense of urgency, and don’t be afraid to tug at the heartstrings; we as a species have them for a reason.  If I don’t click on your link right now, I’m going to miss out.

Let me close with a final thought: I’ve been writing, tweeting, facebooking (yes, that’s a verb), about HIV for about two years now. The most difficult part of the process, assuming you have at least some gift for the language, is taking the first step and saying, “Yes, I write from the perspective of being affected”. And I’ll freely admit it’s not for everyone.

But the simple fact remains that the virus is here to stay, and is a relevant topic. The LGBT rights movement, at least here in the United States and to its pronounced discredit, has fallen largely silent on the subject.

So it’s up to people like you and me to change that. Allow me to suggest that the only way to do so is to never shut up. So find your story of self, and tell it.

#HIV – Twitter 101 for people with HIV

(This is Part 2 of a series on social media and HIV. Read the first installment here. Part 3, Twitter 102 – Twitter as an information channel, coming soon.)

If you’ve spent more than a few minutes online – and if you’re reading this, odds are you have – you’ve probably seen it: ‘Follow me on Twitter’, or ’Follow us on Twitter’. Usually, those words link to another web page, one usually hosted on, you guessed it, Twitter.com.

Following in this instance means something different than trailing hot boy/girl X around the bar. What it means is, simply put, that you sign up to receive short text messages – coincidentally limited to 140 characters – whenever that person or organization deems fit to send such a message. Those messages are cutely called ‘tweets’. If you call them ‘twits’, by the way, you’ll be kicked off the Internet.

Tweets are, in the online universe, a haiku next to the Iliad of, say, The New York Times. They are, of necessity, short; there are roughly half a billion users who send a total of one hundred and seventy five million tweets a day. That’s maybe twenty five billion characters a day; by contrast, the Bible has only three and half million. In short, you’re looking at an enormous amount of data, enough to require a biblical lifespan and then some to read them all. That being unlikely, you’ll need to edit and choose what you look for. More on that in a bit.

So how do you use Twitter, especially as a person with HIV or AIDS?

If you already have an account, you can skip this step; if you don’t, click on over to Twitter and create one. You’ll need a valid email address and a good, memorable password.  Many people use their full name or a recognizable nickname; if you value your privacy, that’s perhaps not the best idea. Personally, while my main handle (that’s what these accounts are called), @MichaelBouldin – is indeed my real name, for a while, I had a separate handle just for my HIV tweets. You should keep in the back of your mind that tweets are public, unless you affirmatively choose otherwise by deleting them outright or ‘protecting’ them, which simply requires that you approve whomever wants to follow or read you. If you do decide to tweet under your real name, it’s a great idea to have a profile picture of yourself; that will make your virtual presence more real and relatable to other users.

One you have that account, you’ll see several new and interesting things. The first is your very own Twitter page that lets you do nifty things: add custom backgrounds, post a short bio, your web site, and put up that nice head shot. If you take a look at my Twitter page, you’ll get the idea. And remember, none of this is rocket science. Twitter’s audience is, statistically, less well educated and younger than that of Facebook, for example, and the technology reflects that awkward fact. On the plus side of that ledger for advocates, however, is the simple fact that we really do want to be talking to younger people.

For that, Twitter is perfect.

To get started, you might want to look for people you know who are already on Twitter; friends, family, the usual drill. Then you can get more granular and do a subject search, say, for HIV, or gardening, or your hometown, whatever interests you. Odds are, there are quite a few people you’ll find just that way. The Twitter site itself has, at the top of the screen, several options to help you; they’re titled ‘Connect’ and ‘Discover’ respectively, and they help you do exactly that. These are geo-tagged, in part to help users discover one another.

The next step is to follow whomever you’ve found, and presto, your stream – that is, the tweets you’ve signed up to read – will begin to fill up. Pretty soon, you’ll want to wade into the conversation and send your first tweet; to lose your Twitter virginity, as it were. Trust me, it’s not quite as bloody painful as the other kind, and takes less time and effort.

So, now that you have your account, some followers, and are following some folks yourself, it’s time to go pro.

One of the first things you’ll discover is that the Twitter site is not satisfactory for more than extremely casual use. So you’ll want to get what’s called a Twitter client, i.e., a standalone piece of software that you can run off your desktop, your smartphone, laptop, tablet, whatever. Two Twitter clients are Tweetdeck and Twitter’s own stand-alone app; both are free. With Tweetdeck – and many other clients – you can manage your Twitter, Facebook, and God alone knows how many other accounts, all in the same interface. A word of caution: if you maintain different accounts for different purposes and audiences, make sure you send the right content to the right destination.

Another thing you’ll notice is that there are odd number signs – # – attached to a given term. Those are called #hashtags, and are very useful when you want to participate in a very specific discussion – such as on #HIV or #AIDS. To use a hashtag, just type it into the body of your tweet; some clients will even autofill a hashtag or suggest popular content-related tags. A great place to discover popular tags – on a scale from global to neighborhood – is TrendsMap.

Not all tweets are created equal. There are tweets, mentions and the big prize, retweets. The latter are when someone takes one of your tweets and simply rebroadcasts it to their own followers. Bingo, you’ve just reached an entirely new universe of people with your message. The more you yourself retweet, the more other users will notice you, by the way, because Twitter alerts its users whenever that happens.

Speaking of followers, there are several good ways to find them: for example, check out directories like Twitaholic or WeFollow. Get listed; you can even create your own lists. Topically, you’ll want to save searches whenever you can; that’ll spare you some typing and, because all of this moves at the literal speed of light, precious seconds. It also lets you find users interested in the same subjects you are (they can find you in much the same way, of course). A lot of folks, coincidentally, follow back as a matter of routine, so that’s another growth tool. A great idea is Follow Friday – a tweet with the hashtag #FF sent, wait for it, on Fridays– where you simply tweet out new followers, interesting accounts, whatever strikes your fancy. #FF is a nice way to simply acknowledge other people, the equivalent of a friendly nod on the street.

As with tweets themselves, not all followers are created equal either. Social media are in principle very egalitarian; you don’t need a fancy degree or a Swiss bank account to use them. That said, other users will judge you, sometimes rather harshly, based on whom you choose to follow yourself, and who follows you. A good discussion of this concept is here. Simply put, some accounts are spam, for pornography – on the Internet, imagine that – or just dolts who will broadcast their latest bowel movement to an anxious world. In real time. If an account like that follows you, and they will, don’t be shy: just block them.

Standard practice (and my approach as well) is to take a look at the page of whomever you’re thinking of following. Look at who they follow and who follows them. This sounds a bit snobbish, and in some ways it is, but as with all things in life, you’re judged by the company you keep.

When and where do you want to tweet? Anywhere and everywhere, but after work hours and on weekends, volume is lower, so you’ll have a greater chance of being noticed and  shaping the conversation. Statistically, your tweet will be seen in a feed for just a few seconds, so you want to make those seconds count. It’s considered good practice to tweet a few times a day, more if you’re at a special event. If that’s the case, ask around if there’s a dedicated hashtag; odds are, there will be, and people will be following it.

What do you want to tweet? There is no one answer to that question, but some basic parameters would be: tweet your blog, if you have one. Tweet interesting news stories, and do include the link (if that link messes up your character count, you can shorten it here). Quotes generally do well, as do pictures. If one of your tweets does exceptionally well, don’t be afraid to re-use it; this repetition is standard practice and not considered bad manners. Unless you do it too often, so use good judgment. Another very sound practice is to check your facts; just because something is on the Internet does not make it true, so do some basic due diligence.

How do you tweet? The first rule to remember is that you only have 140 characters. That’s not a lot (there are services like Twitlonger for the clinically verbose, but tweeting being an art as much as anything else, tweets longer than the norm are frowned on by the cognoscenti). So train yourself to be pithy and incisive. Find your own voice. Be interesting. Be consistent thematically, but leave some room for the unexpected. Use abbreviations where possible. Choose short hashtags. If you can, tweet at other users; for example, to send a tweet to yours truly, put ‘@michaelbouldin’ in your text. I will see that. It’s fantastic if you want to annoy someone.

As do all social spaces, Twitter has its own peculiar etiquette. Some of these rules are just plain common sense. For example, never beg; if you want a retweet, just let your words work their magic. Never beg for followers either (or, God forbid, buy them outright, as some services will let you. It’s a waste of money and looks awful). Don’t tweet under the influence (unless you’re very funny). Make a point of engaging in conversations and acknowledging other people; this is, again, just basic good manners. Many people, and they know who they are, think of social media as megaphones; they’re not. They’re conversations, so act accordingly. One thing you should absolutely never do is set up an auto-responder that sends some generic drivel-tweet to every new follower; that practice, while not entirely uncommon, is considered the Mount Everest of boorishness. When you get a new follower and are sufficiently excited, just tweet directly at them; it may sound like a small thing, but the devil is in the details.

Lastly, boys will be boys, and we compulsively measure everything. A great tool to measure your impact on social media in general is Klout. If you have so much as a Facebook account, and who doesn’t, Klout has already assigned you a score from 0 to 100. This score is based, to simplify it somewhat, on the volume of activity you generate in the social media universe. So you really want to have a high score; the higher your score (and the more followers you have, of course) the more seriously you’ll be taken. Believe me, people watch Klout scores with all the intensity you might expect to find directed at young, unattended children. If you have a score under forty – the average is twenty – you’re not going to make the door in some nightclubs; I shit you not. There are more actually relevant drawbacks, but you get the idea: bigger is indeed better.

So, now you know what to do. Tweet away. Coming up next: using Twitter to find and disseminate information. Stay tuned. 

I’m currently reading ‘And The Band Played On – Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic’, the late Randy Shilts’ exhaustive – in more ways than one – chronicle of the first years of the epidemic. It’s a rather harrowing read, a story of missed opportunities, flashing red lights ignored, and how heterosexual society essentially thought, “Hey, what are a few dead f-----s among friends?”

And I’m only on page 125.

The most fertile soil for bigotry is, I think, ignorance and a lack of compassion. That may well be a defining characteristic of our human condition, but if that is so, it doesn’t mean we need to live with it. Change can happen, or, more to the point, it can be made to happen.

“But what does that have to do with me?”, you might ask. The answer is: a lot. Just one example: the poll numbers on marriage equality here in the United States have shifted in direct correlation with the percentage of Americans who happen to know a gay or lesbian person. Once you put a human face on anything, really, attitudes change.

The theory behind this is called the Story of Self. Briefly told, the theory posits that everyone has a compelling story to tell. Your story may be your experience with HIV; I use that one myself occasionally. Our individual stories, taken together, create something larger: a public narrative.

We humans understand our world in two ways: with our heads, or with our hearts. In other words, rationally or emotionally. To create change, we need to address both. And that is how you turn your story of Self into a story of Us. Communicate your values to others, find common ground, and before you know it, that sea of indifference you may think you’re drowning in becomes, instead, an environment of urgency and hope.

The HIV community and the tech sector have been building the infrastructure for change for three decades now. There are tools we can all use, many of them infinitely scalable. If you think you’re technologically illiterate, think again: these things are crafted and coded, not to put too fine a point on it, for stupid people. People like me, who can’t drive a nail into a wall without risking significant injury.

So here’s a brief primer.

Facebook

…has about one billion users. Yes, billion with a ‘b’. It’s a great way to engage with your friends and family with little effort, and beyond that, with their friends, families, co-workers, fellow students, you name it. Post pictures, anecdotes, video, anything you think your peeps might find of interest. Facebook is sometimes, with cause, viewed with a bit of skepticism owing to the company’s voracious hunger for details of your life. The flip-side of that is that you can buy ads on the site, quite cheaply actually, and target them with microscopic precision.

Twitter

A grand conspiracy to destroy the English language in my book, but indispensable for quick bits of information. To see a real-time Twitter feed is a thing of beauty; it’s as if the whole world is chatting before your eyes. Want to be part of that conversation? Get an account and start ‘following’ people. Not physically, obviously, but to be able to see their small bits of information. And then, send out your own – 140 characters max, mind you.

Blogs

The classic gateway drug. Think of them as your own personal online newspaper, or one you write with friends or whom-have-you, and the beautiful thing is: you don’t need to be objective, or even fair. Just interesting and accurate.

Email

The really useful thing about email, aside from being a great time-waster at work, is that you can scale it infinitely. There are lists with millions of addresses on them. You can reach these millions of people with the click of a mouse.

Google

… once ‘only’ the world’s biggest web search engine, now gives you a multiplex of tools – Email, custom news alerts, web hosting, video, document creation and storage – all online, all accessible instantly from anywhere with an internet connection.

Our challenge as people with HIV, or rather one of many challenges, is to educate our fellow mammals on what this virus is, what it does, and how to stop it. It used to be that only the wealthy and powerful had the ability to engage entire continents. Like all of us, they have their biases and prejudices, which have consequences. If, say, the government of the United States three decades ago hadn’t been marred by pervasive homophobia, it might have done something about that curious gay cancer thing killing gay men in New York and San Francisco. But it did nothing for years, so here we are now.

You have a voice. Use it