These days, there’s not much that makes me really angry. I guess the older you get, the more you’ve seen it all before and can let it go like water off a duck’s back. Oh sure I get irritated and positively grumpy at times, especially at perceived injustices, but I'm never really angry to the point of rumbling, blood boiling rage. Then a rather frail, 85 year old man said something that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and made me angrier than I have been in years.

He was born Joseph Aloysius Ratzinger and is now Benedictus XVI, the 265th Pope, head of the Catholic Church and spiritual leader for millions. He also happens to be at best misguided and at worst, a mean-spirited and hate-filled politician who has deliberately chosen Christmas to condemn individuals in a section of society, by denying their right to love each other.

Now I’m not a person of faith; any faith. In fact, I take pleasure in smiling sweetly at door-to door evangelists and informing them that I’m a devil worshipper. That said I’ve never felt that my atheism is any more valid than anyone else’s firm belief in a one and only deity. I went to Sunday school as a kid, granted under duress, but I liked the tunes and was confirmed as a member of the Church of England. But as soon as I could make a decision as to whether this was anything for me, I dropped it and got into hippy New Ageism and eventually Cynicism instead. I was shocked when my parents, who had forced me to go to church, confessed later that they didn’t believe either but at least I made my choices, having seen a bit of how it all works.

I’ve never personally understood how LGBT people can be believers in any faith either (hedonists don’t count). Since the eighties, I’ve always believed that if that was a God at work during the worst of the plague years, then it was a cruel and vengeful deity and I wanted nothing to do with it. Then again, many LGBT people are religious and hold deeply held beliefs and who am I to criticise? I suppose we can only speak for ourselves and in my case, there’s no room for religion in my life.

So, most religious leaders' speeches have left me cold. The papal rejection of condoms since the Fifties, which resulted in Third World famines, poverty and death due to over-population and later HIV, were shockingly unjust but that brought not much more from me than a shake of the head over the breakfast table. Notwithstanding, by 2012, I assumed that common sense and reason had taken a stronger role and even in large, traditional Catholic populations, condom use was seen to be the sensible thing to do. Abortion began to be accepted as a recognisable need for some women, even in Catholic countries, and pragmatism seemed to have taken hold. 

Unfortunately the Catholic hierarchy has also noticed the influence of the Church being eroded to the point where several sacred taboos have become acceptable. LGBT relationships in general and gay marriage in particular are increasingly being seen as a basic human right and spreading (however slowly) across the world. The Church sees this as a huge challenge to its moral authority and has begun significant moves to re-establish the status quo.

"Well now Ratzinger and his cronies have stepped over my own personal line and if I could, I would take him to the European Court of Human Rights and have him charged for discrimination and the spreading of religious hate."

We should not underestimate what the people in the upper ranks of church hierarchies are capable of. At that level, they are top politicians first and clerics second.This organisation has had hundreds of years to fine tune its tactics and make no mistake, the Vatican is a well-oiled political propaganda machine but hey, as long as they left us alone, right! Well now Ratzinger and his cronies have stepped over my own personal line and if I could, I would take him to the European Court of Human Rights and have him charged for discrimination and the spreading of religious hate.

A couple of weeks after the latest school tragedy where a very disturbed person took his mother’s guns and took his frustrations out on the innocent, the Pope has taken the opportunity to sow the seeds of hate in the minds of huge numbers of people across the world. Who knows what sort of unstable character may take his words as being visionary and wreak vengeance yet again in the name of the Lord! Extremists across the world, whether Islamic, revolutionary, Christian or any other group who feel they have divine permission, only need a trigger and hopefully the Pope has not provided one.

It does no good to scream and shout at these people; the Catholic church has had centuries of getting its own way, however understandable and the protestations of its target demographic will just confirm their opinions and their prejudices. You can rage against the machine but in this case, the machine has centuries of experience of suppressing dissidence (ask the victims of the Inquisition).

Let’s begin by contradicting what many people think in that this was the text of the Pope’s Christmas message from St Peter’s. It wasn’t, it was an annual address to the Vatican big-wigs, the Curia, in the Clementine Hall at the Vatican and in a way this was far more important than the message to the world’s Catholics because he was rallying the generals for the fight ahead. It’s building up quite nicely because a week ago he again took on gay marriage, in his annual ‘peace’ message:

 "...abortion, euthanasia and gay marriage bring 'irreparable' damage to world development, peace and the environment".

Last month, the Vatican launched the first salvos after three American states approved gay marriage as a result of a democratic vote. It’s not difficult to see the trend and the political machinations behind all this and in many ways, you can almost understand it. The church is clearly in panic; watching the world slowly but surely move towards acceptance of LGBT people as equals in society. Same sex marriage (or at least civil partnership) is legal in Spain and Portugal and France may not be far behind. In South and Central America, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Uruguay, Costa Rica and Mexico (in the capital) all recognise single sex partnerships or marriage. These are traditional Catholic countries and former bulwarks of the religion and it must be a thorn in the Catholic hierarchy’s side that this has seemingly happened under their noses. The rest of the world may well laugh and say ‘ha, too late!’ but the Pope is still spiritual leader of 1.8 billion people and should never be underestimated.

"We can expect far more nasty sound bites to emerge from the Vatican in the years to come."

The church’s fight-back may seem to be a little late and behind the times but you can be assured that now they have woken up to the threat, the huge Vatican propaganda machine, with unlimited financial resources, is now getting up to full steam. We can expect far more nasty sound bites to emerge from the Vatican in the years to come.

Some people are saying that the Pope didn’t actually specify LGBT people in his address but you’d have to be naive to miss the message. He claimed that people have abandoned their God-given identities to suit their sexual choices, thereby damaging the ‘very essence of humanity’ in the process. So, with just a few words, our humanity is being thrown into doubt and our very being and existence is being de-validated in his heterosexual world. As I said, Vatican script writers have whole libraries of experience to draw on; they know how to mask meaning behind masked meaning and still leave nobody in any doubt who their target is.

We’re well used to the ‘family values’ tag being used against us. The world has just watched another great propaganda machine, on the political right in the USA, base their election chances on exactly this; they failed. The Pope has always maintained that the family is the basis of society and the absolute rock on which the Catholic Church is built. Same sex marriage, abortion and euthanasia are anathemas to the idea of the family and actually destroy it, according to the Church. What they fail to realise is that the nuclear family has long been on the skids and society has moved on to a veritable cornucopia of accepted relationships and family structures.

Since the 1^st and 2^nd World Wars, people have begun to realise that the traditional family structure based on fidelity and child-bearing is very often not a practical option and other structures are more fitting to circumstances. The idea of procreation within a formal structure is not exactly pertinent for LGBT people but the acceptance of one-parent families, or unmarried heterosexual partners with children, has enabled LGBT people to also establish their own relationships as being ‘normal’. The increase in LGBT couples having children shows that many people were just waiting for the climate to change to fulfil their dreams and create same-sex relationships including children. It’s over ten years since the Netherlands was the first country to legalise same sex marriage and adoption; the world has not ended and at 29% surprisingly the largest religious group in this country is Catholic.

In a bid to sway opinion in France, where same sex marriage is a political hot potato at the moment, the Pope quoted the chief Rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim as saying that the campaign for gay marriage and gay adoption is an assault on the traditional nuclear family:

"The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man's fundamental choice where he himself is concerned," he said.

Pope Benedict quoted Bernheim as deploring how a new thought process behind sexuality has emerged, whereby sex and gender are "no longer a given element of nature that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society."

Pope Benedict said: "When freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God."

He also said God had created man and woman as a specific "duality" and "an essential aspect of what being human is all about."

So in this case we are accused of denying our nature which was defined by our genders when we were born. The Church is now saying that we are rejecting what God gave us in favour of making selfish sexual choices. It’s so ridiculous it’s almost laughable but this is the Pope’s line. Using a chief Rabbi from the country where the next battle front will be fought is a double barrelled attack. The Pope is actually saying; ‘see, even the Jews think like we do.’ The fact that Judaism in general is far more tolerant of same sex relationships than most other world religions seems to have passed him by. LGBT people can get married and adopt children in Israel!

It’s ironic that despite all, he seems to expect LGBT people to decide they’re oriented toward the opposite sex, if they want to belong to the family of man and that’s not a complete denial of nature right?

This Pope is known as a hard-liner and was a tough and intractable Cardinal who worked his way up the Vatican ranks until the Papal throne was within grasp. He was feared in the Vatican’s honeycomb of corridors and people crossed Cardinal Ratzinger at their peril. It’s in his nature then to be uncompromising, fiercely conservative and determined to rule with a rod of iron. That however, is no excuse for singling out a group in society and throwing the full weight of discrimination, demonization and threats of hellfire at them.

T"he seasonal message is peace on Earth and goodwill to all men, unless you are LGBT"

In the same speech, he calls for world peace and resolving of conflicts in Syria, and elsewhere in the Middle East, as well as other conflicts across the world. Preaching love, compassion and peace as well as hate and discrimination in the same speech is a carefully thought out tactic. At Christmas, the Catholic world is concentrating on the birth of Christ and all that that has meant. The seasonal message is peace on Earth and goodwill to all men, unless you are LGBT. We may curl a cynical lip but there are still millions of people who hang on to the Pope’s every word, especially at such an emotive time of year.

The dichotomy of his message is reflected in the official Catholic line regarding LGBT people. Homosexuality is ‘intrinsically disordered’ yet non-heterosexuals should be treated with compassion and dignity. Shake our hands and stab us in the back, why don’t you! The history of Popes suggests that it was always thus!

The current Vatican approach doesn’t only deny us our own nature and essence of humanity because we don’t marry, breed like rabbits and stay together for life; it strips us of our ability and right to love. This Pope is saying that LGBT people cannot possibly love each other because that destroys the purpose God has already created for us. If you are a man, you should love a woman and vice versa; anything else is unnatural and against the will of God. If you deviate from that then your essence of humanity doesn’t exist anymore. Any love you might feel for the same sex is negated, doesn’t have validation and you will be excluded from the Kingdom of God. That makes us somehow less than human then, a sort of untermensch (and I choose my word carefully). If just a million of the 1.8 billion Catholics across the world believe this, this will set LGBT rights back a decade in many parts of the world.

That’s why I’m so angry with the Pope’s current singling out of LGBT people as being responsible for the breakdown of marriage and the family. Really Benny, heterosexuals have been doing a great job of breaking down the institutions of marriage and family for decades now – without LGBT input I might add. If he wants to focus on marriage and family then he should be looking at the reason why straight relationships break down so easily these days and why the divorce courts are full to over-flowing. He should be picking up the spiritual pieces for kids who are abandoned in the divorce courts, or are used for slave labour in Third world sweat houses, or who become victims of abuse in all its forms. Save them and you may save the Church as an influential institution for another century. Attacking LGBT people who just want to prolong and extend loving relationships is both hypocritical and short sighted. This Pope and his Curia are victims of centuries of super-glued dogma that means they can’t modernise, move with the times and adapt. We know what happened to the dinosaurs, don’t we!

Someone should make an example of Benedict XVI in the courts, if only to persuade him that he needs to think again, in 21^st century contexts. Nobody will. The European Court of Human Rights, in whose jurisdiction he sits, just wouldn’t dare because of the influence of millions of newly resurrected Catholics in Eastern Europe. That, by the way, is another worry facing the Vatican: Russia and many eastern European states are part of the Orthodox Church and are suddenly very relevant. The Vatican must be shivering in its boots at the idea of another renewed centuries-old, power struggle with the Byzantines of the Orthodox Church. Under Communism they could be ignored but freedom has suddenly created another huge religious faction to question the Vatican’s edicts. These people can be relatively intense in their belief, if only because, after years of repression, they can! Look to the East Pope Benedict; or to Islam, or Confucianism and Buddhism, or Hinduism because that’s where the philosophies and belief structures of the world will be formed in the future.

All this makes it even stranger that the Catholic Church is mounting such a vehement and stigmatising campaign against LGBT people. Granted, the ‘war’ for souls is also being fought again abortion and euthanasia but we seem to be disproportionally targeted. Actually, it’s a story as old as mankind itself: the people with power are predisposed to making sure that that power is both maintained and unquestioned. Gay marriage, abortion and euthanasia are all questions of choice; the Vatican wants to remove those choices by claiming as they have always done that God wants it that way. Well sorry guys but that sort of argument just doesn’t cut it anymore and we don’t buy it. Luckily, it seems that more and more people across the world aren’t buying it either and are granting basic civil and human rights to LGBT people.

There is so much still to be done and so many minds of all beliefs that need to be changed but the ball has started rolling and may not be able to be stopped, even with the might of the Vatican against it. We’re not asking for the Earth, and many of us aren’t particularly interested in the kingdom of Heaven but we are asking to be treated the same as everyone else, both legally and morally. Hopefully, the Pope’s latest diatribes will be seen as out of touch and unrealistic in the modern world and that eventually he will see that as well but I’m not holding my breath.

This article originally appeared on the CATIE website here.   

Une version française est disponible ici.  

All epidemiological information is approximate, based on the best available data. The data contained in this fact sheet comes from the 2011 Estimates of HIV prevalence and incidence in Canada, published by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC). More information about this data source can be found in the section “Where do these numbers come from?” at the end of the fact sheet. 

The number of people living with HIV in Canada (prevalence) is increasing. 

According to 2011 national HIV estimates: 

An estimated 71,300 Canadians were living with HIV at the end of 2011. 

This represents an increase of 7,300 people (11%) since 2008. 

One quarter of people living with HIV in Canada are unaware that they have HIV. 

According to 2011 national HIV estimates: 

An estimated 17,980 people living with HIV remained undiagnosed in 2011. 

This represents 25% of the estimated number of people living with HIV.

Almost 25,000 people living with HIV have died since the beginning of the epidemic. 

According to 2011 national HIV estimates: 

By the end of 2011, an estimated 24,300 people with HIV had died due to an HIV-related illness or other cause. 

The HIV epidemic in Canada is concentrated in specific populations. 

According to 2011 national HIV estimates, people living with HIV include an estimated:

35,490 gay men and other men who have sex with men (MSM). This represents 50% of all people living with HIV in Canada. The estimate includes 33,330 men whose HIV status was attributed to men having sex with men and 2,160 men whose HIV status could be attributed to either men having sex with men or injection drug use (MSM-IDU). 

14,200 people who used injection drugs (IDU). This represents 20% of all people living with HIV in Canada. The estimate includes 12,040 people whose HIV status was attributed to injection drug use and 2,160 men whose HIV status could be attributed to either men having sex with men or injection drug use (please note that these 2,160 men are the same as those noted in the bullet point above). 

23,170 people whose HIV status was attributed to heterosexual sex. This represents 33% of all people living with HIV in Canada. Of these, 10,640 people (15% of all people living with HIV) were from a country where HIV is endemic (primarily countries in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean). 

600 people whose HIV status could not be attributed to sex or injection drug use. This includes people who likely contracted HIV through blood transfusions or clotting factors, transmission from mother to child, or needle-stick injuries in the workplace. This represents less than 1% of all people living with HIV in Canada. 

6,380 Aboriginal people. This represents 9% of all people living with HIV in Canada. 

16,600 females. This represents 23% of all people living with HIV in Canada. 

The number of new HIV infections in Canada has remained stable in the past several years but is not insignificant. 

According to 2011 national HIV estimates: 

An estimated 3,175 people became infected with HIV in Canada in 2011. 

This is comparable to or slightly lower than the estimated 3,335 new infections in 2008. 

The number of new HIV infections (incidence) may be decreasing among people who inject drugs, females and Aboriginal people. 

According to 2011 national HIV estimates: 

An estimated 435 new HIV infections (14% of new infections) were attributed to injection drug use compared to an estimated 565 new infections in 2008 (17% of new infections). 

An estimated 755 new HIV infections (24%) occurred in females compared to an estimated 865 new infections in 2008 (26%). 

An estimated 390 new HIV infections (12%) occurred in Aboriginal people compared to an estimated 420 new infections in 2008 (13%). 

Aboriginal populations are over-represented in the HIV epidemic. 

Despite the decrease in new HIV infections, Aboriginal people are still over-represented in the HIV epidemic. According to 2011 national HIV estimates: 

Aboriginal people accounted for an estimated 12% of all new HIV infections in 2011 despite accounting for only 4% of the Canadian population in 2006. 

The estimated HIV infection rate among Aboriginal people was 3.5 times higher than the HIV infection rate among non-Aboriginal people. 

The number of new HIV infections (incidence) may be stable among MSM, MSM-IDU and people exposed to HIV through heterosexual sex.

According to 2011 national HIV estimates: 

An estimated 1,480 new HIV infections (47% of new infections) were attributed to men having sex with men compared to an estimated 1,470 new infections in 2008 (44%). 

An estimated 80 new HIV infections (3%) were attributed to men whose HIV status could be attributed to either men having sex with men or injection drug use (MSM-IDU) compared to an estimated 90 new infections in 2008 (3%). 

An estimated 535 new HIV infections were attributed to heterosexual sex in people from a country where HIV is endemic in 2011 (17%) compared to an estimated 540 new infections in 2008 (16%). 

An estimated 645 new HIV infections were attributed to heterosexual sex in people born in a country where HIV is not endemic, including Canada, in 2011 (20% of new infections) compared to an estimated 670 new infections in 2008 (20%). 

People from countries where HIV is endemic are over-represented in the HIV endemic.

 People from countries where HIV is endemic and whose HIV status is attributed to heterosexual exposure accounted for an estimated 17% of new HIV infections in 2011 while people born in an HIV-endemic country accounted for only 2% of the Canadian population in the 2006 census.

 The estimated new HIV infection rate among people from countries where HIV is endemic is 9 times higher than among other Canadians.

 Key definitions 

HIV prevalence—The number of people who are living with HIV at a point in time. Prevalence tells us how many people have HIV. 

HIV incidence—The number of new HIV infections in a defined period of time (usually one year). Incidence tells us how many people are getting HIV. 

Where do these numbers come from? 

All epidemiological information is approximate, based on the best available data. The data contained in this fact sheet comes from the 2011 HIV prevalence and incidence estimates published by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC).  

Estimates of HIV prevalence and incidence 

National HIV estimates are produced by PHAC and published every three years. Estimates of HIV prevalence and incidence are produced by PHAC using statistical methods which take into account some of the limitations of surveillance data (number of HIV diagnoses reported to PHAC) and also account for the number of people living with HIV who do not yet know they have it. Statistical modeling, using surveillance data and additional sources of information, allows PHAC to produce HIV estimates among those diagnosed and undiagnosed. The most recent estimates available are for 2011. The next set of estimates will be available in 2015 and will pertain to the year 2014.

 Acknowledgements 

We would like to thank the Surveillance and Epidemiology Division, Centre for Communicable Diseases and Infection Control, Public Health Agency of Canada for their helpful comments and expert review of this fact sheet. 

References 

Public Health Agency of Canada. Summary: Estimates of HIV Prevalence and Incidence in Canada, 2011. Surveillance and Epidemiology Division, Professional Guidelines and Public Health Practice Division, Centre for Communicable Diseases and Infection Control, Public Health Agency of Canada, 2012. Available at: http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/aids-sida/publication/survreport/estimat2011-eng.php 

Author(s): Challacombe L

1994 AIDS Action Now demonstration, with Tim McCaskell on the megaphone. (Liz Mashall) 

This article by AIDS ACTION NOW!’s Tim McCaskell originally appeared on the website of Socialist Worker here. 

In the early 1980s, the nightmare of AIDS broke like a tsunami over gay communities in Canada’s major cities. Young, healthy gay men were suddenly and inexplicably dying. No one knew the cause of the epidemic. There was no treatment, no cure.

With medical science impotent and government largely silent, gay communities were mostly thrown back on their own resources. The first wave of AIDS activism established organizations offering support and counselling, hospices to care for the dying and, once HIV had been identified, prevention campaigns urging safer sex.

By 1987, impatience with government inaction and lack of research for treatments finally erupted in the United States. The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) emerged in New York, quickly leading to the formation of chapters across the US. This second wave of AIDS activism, characterized by in-your-face actions, drew on the women’s health movement’s considerable skepticism of the medical establishment as well as the strategies and tactics of lesbian and gay liberation, and soon had its counterpart in Canada. AIDS ACTION NOW! (AAN) formed in Toronto in 1988. Most of AAN’s activists were HIV-positive. A new “Poz” identity was emerging—one that brought together all people living with AIDS, no matter what their sexual orientation.

Unlike in New York, Canadian AIDS activism avoided a civil war between established AIDS service organizations and the new radicals. In Toronto, a rough division of labour was established. The government-funded AIDS service organizations did the support, counseling and education. That left AAN free to challenge government policies and practices, since the activist group refused to accept state or corporate funding.

The first focus of this new activism was on access to treatment. This was an implicit criticism of the Public Health approach that was so focused on prevention that it ignored the needs of those already infected. The first fights were around concrete access to new and experimental drugs. The targets were government regulatory authorities that blocked access to unapproved treatments, and then the pharmaceutical industry that refused to release experimental treatments for compassionate use.

Once the legal right of sick people to access unapproved treatments was established, the second focus was on access to information. AAN set up the Treatment Information Exchange in 1989. Over the years this project has morphed into the Canadian AIDS Treatment Information Exchange, a federally-funded body that is the national clearinghouse for information on both HIV and Hepatitis C.

By the early 1990s, more treatments were becoming approved and a third issue emerged: financial access. The new drugs were expensive. Many people living with HIV did not have medical plans. Their choice could be stark. To get a provincial drug card one had to be on welfare. That meant not working, exhausting one’s savings and impoverishing oneself. Then while people had access to free drugs they were probably too poor to adequately nourish, house and clothe themselves. From 1990 to 1994 AAN waged a relentless campaign against the Ontario NDP government demanding a catastrophic drug plan for the province. The government finally relented and the last major piece of legislation to come out before the NDP’s defeat by the Harris Tories in 1995 was the Trillium Drug Plan, which now provides access to medicines when their cost exceeds someone’s capacity to pay.

The next period was characterized by attempts to fight back and limit the damage caused by the Harris government’s neoliberal restructuring of society, with its drastic cuts to health and social services. This was a long and grueling fight with as many losses as victories.

By 2001 much of the energy of the second wave of AIDS activism had dissipated. Most of the original activists had died. But the emergence of new and more effective anti-viral treatments meant that the dying had been staunched. The worst part of the crisis seemed to be over. After a decade and a half, many in the community just wanted to get on with their lives.

The AIDS tsunami might have receded in Canada, but it continued its destruction in other parts of the world. After the International AIDS Conference in Toronto in 2006 there was a resurgence of activism, this time often focused on international issues. In South Africa the Treatment Action Campaign, with solidarity from activists around the world, led a huge struggle to demand access to treatment from an unwilling Mbeki government. When the ANC government finally backed down and agreed to a treatment roll out, a second battle needed to be fought as the international pharmaceutical industry sued South Africa, demanding that the country forgo inexpensive generic medicines and buy only name-brand drugs at inflated prices. Due to international pressure, “big pharma” was finally forced to drop its suit. A few years later the battle had to be refought as Abbot Pharmaceuticals tried to blackmail Thailand to prevent it from purchasing cheaper copies of one of Abbot’s drugs.

Now, as poverty increases due to neoliberal restructuring, the focus has come back home. AIDS has become a disease of poverty that disproportionately affects the most vulnerable. We fight to maintain services in the face of cuts, demand harm reduction strategies to protect drug users, and challenge the increasing criminalization of HIV in the “justice” system.

Back in 1989, when I was in Montreal scouting out the site of the impending International AIDS conference, a young HIV-positive man told me, “AIDS is like a lens. When you look through it you see all of society’s problems magnified.” This has never been more true than now. The barriers to ending the epidemic are structural inequities and global inequalities. AIDS will not be defeated until we see fundamental social change. The challenge for AIDS activism is to be part of that change.

Toronto’s Tim McCaskell (above right) is a founding member of AIDS Action Now! 

By now everyone has heard about the “Elmo Scandal”. It has been plastered all over every newspaper and the internet. And from the second that (Elmo puppeteer) Kevin Clash was accused of having sex with teenaged boys, folks started taking sides. I was actually surprised at some people’s reactions. Many of the comments and blogs I read attacked (first accuser) Sheldon Stephens (below right) from all angles. Lots of discrediting information was released about him and many pegged him as a scammer trying to get money out of a celebrity. 

Then we learned that Sheldon settled and received $125,000 with a gag order. 

Now, I don’t know about you, but the first thing that popped into my head was the first Michael Jackson accusation. I remembered Michael basically using Oprah for a public relations moment. The kid and his family were paid off and everything was sort of swept under rug. No one really questioned what happened. No one was paying attention to the payoff and who paid it. I believe that Sony paid the family in exchange for getting their hands on the Beatles rights that Michael owned. This would explain how all these unreleased Beatles songs charted and won awards in the late 90’s. But by the time the second accusation came around, Sony had got what they wanted and left Michael out to dry. Remember Michael standing with Louis Farrakhan at a press conference complaining that Sony was not promoting his “Invincible” album? This left him no option but to go to court for the second case. But by this time, public opinion had been made. At that moment, he couldn’t get a hit in traffic. 

Back to Sheldon,  a couple of days after he recanted his accusing statement and signed the settlement, he announced that he wanted to recant his recant, saying that he signed the agreement under duress. Of course this went over like a lead balloon. So, like the accused in the Jackson case, the second accuser here Cecil Singleton’s (below left) accusation forced Kevin Clash to out. 

I’m not usually awake for “The View”, but I happened to catch Whoopi Goldberg talking about Clash’s resignation. The way she spoke about Clash was to the effect that all he needed to do was take the time to prove his innocence and he will come back. And then I came across a posting of a Facebook friend who is an older gay man who was defending Kevin Clash. I immediately realized that there was this weird double standard amongst older gay men who sided with Clash. They seemed to believe that Kevin Clash is the victim here, probably because he came out so late in life. They felt that this was some scheme to take him down. And one post I read said that this was just another attempt to paint the black man as a monster. 

I have to say...I was appalled! Coming from a troubled childhood myself, I know what it is to be taken advantaged of sexually. I was molested by my uncle between the ages of 7 to 10. Because I never really told anyone, it would lead to a breakdown in my teen years. Coming to terms with my sexuality and accepting myself shaped the person I am today. So, the idea that these two men who have brought their experiences to the public are being crucified really upset me. 

I reached out to Cecil Singleton by sending him a Facebook friends request and offered some words of encouragement. I can’t imagine what it must be like to read comments of folks wishing you get AIDS and die. All because of the love and affection they have for a fictional children’s character. As if the person with his hand up the puppet does not have a real life. 

The other thing I remembered was that I first heard that Kevin Clash was gay back in 1999 when I was recording my first album in Baltimore. It was the gossip of the moment that he was in therapy for his “gay episodes”. Apparently his wife was making him go get help to stop. We joked that when you have money, you have “episodes”. When you are an Average Joe, “you are just cruisin’ and sucking dick.” 

After talking with Cecil Singleton, I received a phone call from his lawyer asking what I knew about Mr. Clash back then. I could only say that I heard that he was in therapy and was picking up guys. I think the lawyer was hoping I would say that he was picking up young boys, but I did not and could not because that was not what I heard. 

To my surprise after a few messages back and forth, Cecil asked if he could call me. I guess he felt comfortable enough to actually speak to me. Immediately after we started talking we realized that we probably had seen each other when I was a DJ at Escuelita. We sort of bonded over being so young when coming out. I was surprised at how open he was about talking about his experiences with Kevin Clash. 

“We met on a chat line and he invited me out to dinner” explained Cecil. 

The interesting thing Cecil told me was that Kevin went to great lengths to keep his identity from him. It wasn’t until Cecil had been involved with him for several years before he found out his last name. A friend suggested Cecil google his name and that’s how he found out that he had been involved since the age of 15 with the voice of Elmo. He confronted Kevin and asked “Did you think that I was going to try to take advantage of you? Is that why you didn’t tell me who you are?” He had told Cecil that he worked for the School Board. "I was offended by your dishonesty!" Cecil told Kevin. 

By the time Cecil had confronted Kevin, he was 19 and I guess he was too old for Mr.Clash. So, their relationship faded. 

We talked about Sheldon Stephen’s recant of his recant. Cecil said that he felt that Sheldon made a mistake for settling. From talking with Cecil, I got the impression that he was more concerned about what Clash has been doing for years.  “How many others has he used his position to manipulate into relationships and sex?” Because at the end of the day, this man has money and power. And from the situation with Sheldon Stephens, it appears Clash was going to use that money and power to shut him up. But there are reports that Sheldon was crying when he signed the agreement. 

The other thing that seemed apparent in our conversation was that Cecil is a very articulate young man. “I’m very aware that I am androgynous. I love it.” he told me. He noticed that many of the comments had to do with how he looks. I made me think about when I worked at the Tampa Tribune. I was very androgynous in my appearance. Come to think of it....I just found the City Editor who hired me and I guess he was not thrilled to read my profile and blogs. Being an out HIV+ blogger, DJ and female impersonator was just a little too much for him. I can only imagine what a hateful internet would offer a pretty boy who has accused Elmo of having sex with teenaged boys.

We talked about if he felt like a victim in this situation. “At the time when I met Kevin, I had been in and out foster homes. I was depressed and felt that I didn’t have anyone.” explained Cecil. That sounds like a total recipe for a predator to pounce. Sheldon Stephens was not from a rosy background either. Do you recognize a trend here? 

During the hour long time on the phone, I told Cecil that I was a blogger and that I wanted to  write about him. I felt it was important that he be heard in the gay media. He has done several interviews for NY publications and TMZ, but for some reason no one from the gay mags has reached out, at least to my knowledge. 

I just want everyone to take a moment and think about the fact that most child molesters and predators put themselves in positions where they have access to kids and teenagers. Classic examples are Michael Jackson and Jerry Sandusky. And now the spotlight has been pointed at Kevin Clash. I say we should listen to these two young men before anyone jumps to any conclusions. The proof is going to be in the pudding over the next few months as more information and, quite likely, more people come forward. 

To many, it must seem like the recent US elections were a great victory for the LGBT community. Not only did they bring a victory for Obama, responsible for removing a number of impediments to equality, albeit after a great deal of pushing by the community, but also a number of remarkable victories for other openly gay or lesbian candidates. 

Your mind might have gone directly to the marriage votes when I brought up those elections. Maine voters decided to allow the state to issue marriage licences to same sex couples and voters in Maryland and Washington voted to approve legislations allowing same sex couples to marry that had been passed by their respective legislatures and then challenged by referendum. In Minnesota, the victory was a defeat of a proposed amendment of the state constitution to define marriage as being between a man and a woman. 

I'm certainly not against any of those outcomes, but the processes leave me cold. 

Human rights protection is not something that you submit to a popular vote. That is the very antithesis of the protection of minorities — submitting those protections to the will of the majority. In my opinion, the best measure of how successful human rights protections are lies in their capacity to protect the rights of the most despised minorities, not those who have been able to make themselves marginally more acceptable to a bare majority of the population or raise enough money to fight extreme electoral battles that may come around again when next they can. 

How much do these four victories — or three victories and a reprieve — contribute to the marriage equality fight in the other states? Do they make it inevitable or have they set up the population for another what…41?...battles that will cost millions and whose outcomes will be far from certain? With this approach, some states with poorer LGBT communities or stauncher opponents may never extend the same protections and rights to all. It might not take long for those who have fought their own hard won battles to lose interest in contributing to and fighting for others to benefit from what they already have. 

And what about minorities who have not managed to convince a majority of voters that they are worthy of protection? If you read any of the comments on any news sites after the recent Supreme Court of Canada decisions on the criminalization of HIV non-disclosure, you can well imagine how people with HIV might fare in such a popularity contest (not very well, if you need me to spell it out). 

So yes, let's all celebrate the election of legislators and executives who are willing to stand on the side of protecting the civil rights of minorities. But don't expect me to stand up and cheer for a victory in a process that should never have taken place to submit the rights of a minority — even an apparently well-liked minority, at least for the moment — to the will of the majority. Accepting the validity of that process sells the rest of us down the river.

As you may have heard, the U.S. Presidential election is over at last, after an epic two-year slog. Now, because our Byzantine system of governance baffles even many Americans, and given the stakes – for us, our friends and our neighbors – I thought I’d explain some of the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of the system to PositiveLite.com readers. Key to understanding it is that America is not actually a democracy, it is a republic substantially devised at the end of the Eighteenth Century. Astonishingly enough, it still works more or less as originally planned.

Every four years since 1790, we have gone to the polls to fill the highest office in the land, the Presidency. In war and peace, famine and plenty, Americans have voted. None of these elections have been direct, in the sense that you vote directly for a candidate; rather, you vote for a member of the Electoral College, allocated by state under a formula that gives each one as many votes as it has members of the Federal legislature. Hence, the breathless reportage from ‘swing states’ like perennial nail-biters Ohio and Florida.

Over the decades and centuries, these elections have been of greater and lesser consequence; the election of George Washington, the first President, solidified a young nation, the third, Thomas Jefferson, stripped the office of its monarchical trappings and began the transition from an aristocratic republic to one governed by yeomen and merchants. Decades later, Abraham Lincoln steered the union through a cataclysmic civil war and extended the suffrage to men of color. Again decades later, Theodore Roosevelt broke the power of overweening capital and created the greatest jewel in the national fabric, America’s splendid preserve of National Parks. His distant cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, arguably the greatest President of the last century, won an unprecedented four terms in the White House, vanquished the Great Depression, established the foundations of the modern welfare state, the New Deal, and, perhaps most importantly, first in fits and starts and then openly, threw American power and wealth into a global war against the barbarity of fascism.

Roosevelt’s immediate successors, Harry Truman and Ike Eisenhower, cemented the American involvement in the world beyond our shores, often for good, sometimes for ill, that has been characteristic of the postwar United States. Their America, supremely confident and possessed of a sense of mission, imposed by suasion or fiat a liberal international order of free trade, an end to (European) imperialism, and supranational bodies to if not govern, then guide this new, interconnected world, with their country at its apex, Henry Kissinger’s “indispensable power”.

"American conservatism..this school of thought is in many ways not comparable to its brethren in Europe and the Commonwealth who claim the same nomenclature."

Unseen or ignored by the bi-partisan liberal establishment of Washington and New York, however, something grew within this country defiantly at odds with this new domestic and international order: American conservatism. This school of thought is in many ways not comparable to its brethren in Europe and the Commonwealth who claim the same nomenclature; its roots are rather, say, in the orbit of one Father Coughlin, a radio personality of the 1930s, vehemently nativist, distrustful even of duly elected public authorities, rigorously anti-communist, and after the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s, imbued with distinct strains of racism, misogyny and homophobia. It sought, as polemical author William F. Buckley memorably phrased it, to stand “athwart history yelling 'Stop!' “, all the while preserving and if possible expanding the historically relatively new global power of the United States.

The first modern conservative President, Ronald Reagan, was elected in 1980. Domestically, Reagan faced a liberal order grown stale and, in frankness, in many of its manifestations irrelevant to a world different from the one in which it had been built. Under his administration, the post-war liberal consensus, that government has a role to play in the life of the governed, that capitalism functions best under the constraints of common purpose and that America abroad would seek to act in concert with others, began to collapse.

Historically, it’s not entirely an accident that the AIDS epidemic first began to rage in those years; a government unconcerned with its more undesirable citizens certainly saw little cause to act on what, even a decade earlier, would have elicited a full-spectrum public response.

This conservative ascendancy, strengthened by the end of the Cold War and the September 11th terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, began to fracture as the Iraq War descended into practical defeat and cracked in 2008, when Barack Obama was elected the 44th President of the United States.

"There is a certain poetry inherent in these milestones being marked by the country’s first black President."

His reelection in 2012 may deliver the fatal blow to American conservatism as we presently know it.  It seals the legislative achievements of the President’s first term, including equal pay for women (in 2012, imagine that), the ability of LGBT Americans to serve in the armed forces, and most importantly, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), more commonly known as Obamacare, which establishes, more or less universal healthcare (and contains within it the nation’s first comprehensive HIV and AIDS strategy, along with the levers to put it into effect). There is a certain poetry inherent in these milestones being marked by the country’s first black President, one might add.

Very often in life and in art, the saying “there is more to the story” applies, and there is indeed more of note to November’s results than just a second term for Barack Obama, important as it may be.

Under our small-R republican system of government, the President is not in fact the final arbiter of the body politic. In the Cold War, it is true that the chief executive became rather more powerful than his historical predecessors in what has often been referred to as the Imperial Presidency, a term coined by historian Arthur Schlesinger in a 1973 book of the same title.

Under Article I of the U.S. Constitution, however, the power of the purse resides in the lower chamber of the legislature, and broad powers of advice and consent in the upper, the U.S. Senate. In that chamber, the election of November 2012 returned a larger (and more progressive) Democratic majority; the lower chamber, the House of Representatives, is still held by people who in some cases think Jesus rode around the state of Missouri on a dinosaur.

Obviously, this latter fact is a bit of a problem for progressive Americans, and it very much remains to be seen how consequential that problem is.

One thing, however, is clear: the sound defeat of Republican presidential candidate Willard Mitt Romney is enormously important to this country for quite a few reasons.

Chief among these is what a putative President Romney will not be able to do: cut existing public expenditures on healthcare, research and foreign aid (including PEPFAR, the program that pays for HIV treatment in the Third World). He will also not be nominating any judges to the Federal bench or get this country into any more wars overseas. Or strip LGBT citizens of every single advance in rights we made over the last four years. Or re-impose the HIV travel ban lifted by President Obama, which lets people with HIV again travel to the United States. Or “end Obamacare on day one”. Or move the embassy of the United States in Israel into the tinderbox of Jerusalem. Or establish a precedent that allows a handful of billionaires to buy a superpower.

Politics is as much poetry as prose, as much art as it is naked power, and seen from that point of view, there is something thrilling about the 2012 elections. They brought into focus an emerging new country; a place of the heart, not just of the gun, one where who you love, what you look like, where you come from, is a matter of indifference to the state. America is not perfect, never has been, never will be; but we can be better than we thought possible, a better friend to our friends and a better neighbor to our neighbors. Our fabled American Dream doesn’t have to be a nightmare for us or anyone else.

And that, at the end of a long day, is what this entire drawn-out battle was about: choices. God alone knows we haven’t always made the right ones; but this time, I think we did.