“Everyone deserves compassion. Everyone deserves dignity. Everyone, everyone, everyone deserves love. Why am I telling you this? Because the AIDS disease is caused by a virus, but the AIDS epidemic is not. The AIDS epidemic is fuelled by stigma, violence and indifference.”

Here is the link to the video.

Bob Leahy: Trey, thank you for telling your story to PositiveLite.com.  Now you're climbing Mount Kilimanjaro.  That’s Africa tallest peak at 5,895 metres (or 19,341 feet). That’s an impressive feat, but more so for someone living with HIV. I’ve been reading your blog and I don’t see any mention of any previous climbing experience, am I right?

Trey McCrary: Oh god yes. The biggest mountain I have ever climbed would be the hills in between port wine houses in Portugal earlier this year. I did the whole summer camp hiking thing as a child, but mountaineering was not a part of the Camp Monikiwa experience. Needless to say, this is some craziness of a new found level even I did not think I was capable of!

OK, the obvious question. Why?

Growing up, I had a French teacher who without fail asked all of her students the same exam question at the end of every term. It was a very simple question: pourquoi?

All of her students always tried to impress here; magic sentences en français filled with past participles and hanging indirect objects peppered with idiomatic phrases like window licking came back to her year after year. Then I came along and gave her the one answer she always wanted, but never expected: pourquoi pas?

I guess that is what started this journey. The why not of it all.

I was going through a monthly newsletter and saw that Positive East was inviting people to climb Kili and I thought to myself, "why not?". Why not show the world what an overweight, HIV positive man could do if he put his mind to it.

So much good work was done in the 80's scaring the living shit out of people about HIV that I find a lot of people are still convinced that HIV is a death sentence. That we end up with lipodistrophic sunken faces a la Tom Hanks in Philadelphia. I guess the why not of it all is just to show just how alike a positive person is when compared to a negative person. To show the benefits of early testing and treatment. To show people what positive living looks like.

Positive East is what? Tell me what kind of work they do and where the money you raise will go.

Positive East is one of the few local truly HIV charities left in London. Whilst there has always been a very strong local community response to the epidemic here in the UK, the current funding climate and continued advances we have made in research have forced a rationalisation of services resulting in a few large national charities like the Terrance Higgins Trust and even fewer locally based ones . Thankfully for East London, we have our very own voice in Positive East.

Our main thrust here is to help positive people build positive lives for themselves. To create a safe space to deal with HIV and it's impact on the lives it touches. We also have testing programmes and education programmes, but unlike other organisations we don't just stop with a negative test. There is a real holistic approach to HIV which Positive East engenders from prevention, testing, to fighting stigma.

This climb will directly benefit the African community in East London and help to combat the  isolation, stigma, and fear that exists within this community. We have very high numbers of African HIV positive people in our community and this climb will address the different needs of this community through outreach programmes, further education, and training for the staff here at Positive East.

Tell us - and I think this is important to you - who else will be with you?

There will be 16 other climbers with me on this trek, but most importantly in this group I will have some very close friends and my husband joining me.

When I decided to climb Kili, I sent a text to one of my friends who just happens to be the Speaker of my local council asking her to join me. Imagine my surprise when not only did she agree to come, but also informed me that she was choosing Positive East as her charity for the year. This brought along her husband, which then steeled my own husband to join us as well! From there two other local councillors from the London Borough of Hackney decided to answer this challenge making this a truly remarkable team of local politicians embarking on one hell of a mental and physical challenge to support our positive brothers and sisters and the local charity that provides desperately needed services to us all.

I am quite literally moved beyond words at their generosity of spirit.

Tell me about the climb itself. You’ve called it “this ridonkulous mental and physical challenge” and I see the description on the Positive East website  is “not for the faint-hearted”  Tell us a little bit about it, Trey.

Mount Kilimanjaro is the highest point in Africa! It will be a ten day climb that will entail climbing high and sleeping low so we don't end up having to be rescued along the way and being brought back down in an artificial altitude chamber by the Tanzanian park serviced. Whilst it is not like climbing K2 or Everest, for six people who have never climbed anything more than the stairs when the lift is out it will be a monumental challenge to take on.

And ARE you faint-hearted?  Because you said back in May “the thing that i know scares me the most right now is that i am not ready to do this. There is a part of me that does not think i can do this and even with all of those great people, until i have myself on my own team this is going to scare me.” Tell us how you’re feeling now.

I'm still in the shit scared stage of this whole thing. I guess, though, knowing my husband and closest friends will be there next to me cheering me on and taking the challenge themselves, I am a little less terrified. Alongside this, the response from the local community has been amazing and the support is steeling my nerves. I know that if I had to do this tomorrow, I probably wouldn't hit the the summit, but with the kind words of genuine love and support coming from all corners, I know that I will be able to not only take on the challenge, but conquer it.

Are you in good shape?  Again in your blog you’ve said “I am like a million stone overweight and we all know me and the physical activity are not all that close buddies.”  But I’m reading too that you’ve been working hard to get in shape for this.  Tell me what you’ve been doing.

I'm getting there! The calorie counting has begun and I have taken to one damn stair at a time whenever I can. I am taking the training regime slowly to make sure that I do not over do it and end up hurting myself but now that Cllr Husband is on board, the long walks and trips along places like Hadrian's wall have been put in the diary. Taken alongside a personal trainer, I have no worries that I will be in top form to take on this challenge in February and, fingers crossed, will find my 34 inch waist again!

So you’ll be staying in tents for six nights, right?  How good are you at tents?  Do they speak to you with thoughts of a romantic tryst in the wilds of Africa or “I want my bed back in Hackney – right now!”

Luckily for me growing up in Texas was filled with camping trips in Colorado and New Mexico. I might be a princess at heart, but as they say, "You can take the girl out of Texas, but you can't take the Texas out of the girl"! I'm more worried about Cllr Husband as he likes his creature comforts, but I know that the task at hand will have him enjoying washing from a bowl in no time.

You have been HIV-positive since 2003? Do you think this adventure poses special challenges for a person like yourself living with HIV?

I've always seen my HIV as an additive to my life! Whilst it is important to remember that untreated I do have a fatal condition, I firmly believe that medical science can and has put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Thanks to the great public health service we have in the National Health Service here in the UK, I am acutely aware of just how closely my health is monitored by my great HIV team at Homerton Hospital in Hackney. So not only do I think HIV will not inhibit my journey, it is adding to it by ensuring I have great medical minds watching out for me. Positive living is just that, living as positively as possible.

HIV does not restrict my life. Indeed, I am of the firm personal belief it has enhanced it!

This may seem like an odd question, Trey, but would you have made this trip WITHOUT being HIV-positive?

I want to think that I would have found the courage to do it. I really really do. But there is a part of me that knows that without HIV, I might be busy elsewhere fighting some other stigma trying to do some good.

What other blessings in your life do you attribute to being HIV-positive?

Knowledge is power. And knowing my virus has given me the peace to go out and teach others about my condition, and to show the world just how far we have come. I have met many wonderful people along my journey whose stories have impacted my life in ways that I do not think I will ever be able to quantify. Listening to the differences between a heterosexual African woman's story as opposed to my middle class gay white boy one has given me lessons upon lessons in communication skills and if it meant never being able to meet some of the amazing people I have. I wouldn't wish away my HIV, ever!

For me it is about going out there and teaching people to find their own voices again. And I know that my HIV is not just a part of my story, but now other's as well. And I couldn't take that away, I just couldn't.

I’ve read your story and you’ve gone through some tough times in your life.  But now you're living in London England, a city that you love with a man you love, and you seem blessed, am I right?

I feel blessed and I feel at home. That is all a boy from Lubbock, Texas could ever wish for.

And you are a political wife.  Me too!  Well, I’m not married to him but we’ve been together for 31 years and he’s a local councillor.  Tell me about your hubby.

Oh, where to start? Phil has been such an amazing influence on my life that words could never pay justice to the wonderful man he is.

When we started dating, I had a tenuous grasp of UK politics, but I knew that Labour were the good guys and I had bagged myself a Labour councillor. Coming from a long line of politicians and their wives, I have first-hand knowledge of the differences between someone who wants to be in power and someone who uses power for good. It all came crashing down around me one day when we were walking by a school that had burned down in his ward and I looked over to see him crying - and they were real tears! He muttered something about the effect on the kids' lives and stability but I couldn't pay attention. I was so taken aback by this visceral reaction in him, this love of his community and ability to take on board the seriousness of the situation. He was crying because these children who needed stability in their lives (he represents one of the most socio-economically challenged wards in the whole of the UK) were going to have to uproot their frenetic lives and move into an already overcrowded school. He was crying because single parents would have to change their entire work schedules to take their kids to school. He was crying on behalf of his constituents. And it is right then and there I knew it - I knew that he was the real deal. Not some fly by night councillor after a seat in Parliament one day, Phil represents the good side of politics. Someone who wants to make our ever constantly ugly world a little more beautiful. Someone who knows what being a leader is about.

Phil has enriched my life in so many ways, but I think the one thing that cements our shared love of monkeys and sorbet is our genuine desire to serve the public. To make tomorrow better by making today easier. Sure, he is dealing with savage cuts to just about everything being made by the current coalition government, but I can truly say - hand on heart - that he is one of the good guys and I am just so proud to be a part of that story.

Ah, that's nice. Now, you sound like a busy guy yourself.  But what’s your passion? What do you like doing more than anything else in your free time?

I love to create. Either through words or paint, I am constantly finding myself trying to make sense of what is going on around me through art. I took me a very long time to realise that I am an artist, but now I am here I want to spend my life trying to make the world a more beautiful place somehow. I strongly believe that we are all artists in some form, and my art just happens to take form in words and colours.

And you’re an enthusiastic, cook, right?  Tell me if I visited you for dinner tonight - which is unlikely because I live in Canada - what would you make me to impress?

I would probably start off with a tuna sashimi stack I first encountered at the Willard hotel in Washington DC. There is something really rewarding about cutting though hot crispy potato and soft cold tuna topped with a kick in the teeth dose of wasabi!

From there, we would cleanse our pallets with some Pimms sorbet and move onto a good old fashioned rib-eye smothered in 'shrooms and secret goo. Side orders of cinnamon sweet potato and purple stemmed broccoli dancing with ginger.

As for pudding, I do not think anything beats a good old fashioned piece of chocolate cake, but being a Texan there would be a hint of heat in the hidden chillies all cooled down with some tequila ice cream.

That and copious amounts of wine.

I’m there! Trey, it’s been great learning about you and your bid to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in particular. If people want to help you folks get to the top, how can they help?

If any of your readers wish to donate to the climb, which is directly funding Positive East's African outreach programme, they can visit my justgiving page here.  If they are a UK tax payer they can even claim gift aid to give the charity just that little bit more. Any amount helps and I would be honoured to know there are people out there cheering me on! If your readers aren't able to help financially, i would like to invite them to join the journey by visiting my blog here. 

I really want to build a global community to take up the mountain with us and I want to thank you guys at PositiveLite.com for giving me this amazing opportunity to tell my story. You're good people, as we say back in Texas.

Trey – thank you – and good luck. We want to hear all about it when you get back. OK?

I can't wait to tell you all about it...

Trey McCrary was born and raised in Texas but moved to London in 1998 to chase his dreams. Finishing a drama degree, he found himself putting on corporate drag for a few years before realising that the suit and tie was just not for him. He now spends his time volunteering for Positive East trying to help other HIV positive people find their voices to live the most positive lives they can while juggling the life of a political wife to a local Labour politician.

He also really loves monkeys. A lot

Follow his journey up Mount Kilimanjaro to raise funds for www.PositiveEast.org.uk at www.mountainmonkey2013.blogspot.com  or www.twitter.com/MountKiliMonkey

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.

Fred Verdult. Photo © IAS/Ryan Rayburn - Commercialimage.net

This article by  Keith Alcorn first appeared on NAM/aidsmap here.  Republished with permission.

The views of people living with HIV and medical researchers about what makes an HIV cure desirable may be very different, and need to be taken into account as the field of HIV cure research moves forward, Fred Verdult warned the Towards an HIV Cure symposium prior to the 19th International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2012) in Washington DC.

Fred Verdult’s presentation, described as the highlight of the symposium by co-chair Dr Steven Deeks of the University of California San Francisco, explored the attitudes of people living with HIV in the Netherlands towards undesirable features of living with HIV infection and the most desirable aspects of an HIV cure.

The research was carried out after a surge of interest in HIV cure research followed the media publicity given to the case of the 'Berlin patient', Timothy Brown, who was pronounced cured of HIV infection in 2010 after a gruelling course of chemotherapy, immunosuppressive treatment and a bone marrow transplant from a donor with a rare genetic resistance to HIV infection. (See here for a full explanation of this case.)

The quantitative study recruited 458 people through an existing research panel of people living with HIV and through publicity for the survey. The vast majority were in good health; only 14% reported that their health was poor.

Rather than looking solely at the question of a cure, the research also examined motivations for accepting what might be difficult curative treatment, by asking people what they considered to be the biggest disadvantages of living with HIV.

Uncertainty about future health was ranked the biggest disadvantage; fear of infecting others and the stigma of HIV infection were also ranked highly. Other health factors such as reduced life expectancy, the risk of drug side-effects and daily use of medications were less highly ranked.

Seventy-two per cent of respondents said that they thought it was very important to be cured of HIV. Yet, when asked about four different cure scenarios, respondents found scenarios that contained progressively greater degrees of uncertainty and risk of transmission to others less and less desirable.

While 95% considered a complete cure, with no risk of future transmission or future infection, to be very desirable, a cure with no risk of future transmission which nevertheless carried a risk of future infection was considered desirable by only 41% of respondents. Scenarios that involved less-than-complete eradication proved even less desirable. Only 14% of respondents considered a curative treatment that involved regular check-ups to determine if the virus had been eradicated to be a desirable treatment.

Fred Verdult, an HIV educator and gay man living with HIV, said that for people living with HIV, psychosocial factors are enormously important in framing attitudes towards the prospect of an HIV cure, and future research efforts need to take these into account. As part of the International AIDS Society’s cure initiative, Verdult is working with social science researchers to design a multinational study that will seek to examine whether there are differences between populations and regions of the world in attitudes towards an HIV cure.

View the webcast of the symposium on the conference website.

This entry first appeared in Christopher Banks’ other blog, Bipolar Bear here. 

In the horror film series “Hostel”, men and women pay sums of money for the exclusive pleasure of sadistically torturing, maiming and ultimately killing other human beings, sometimes with graphically sexual overtones.

To become a member of this brotherhood, one must sign a contract, which includes having a logo tattooed on your body to show that you are, to follow the company’s name at the heart of this depravity, an “elite hunter”.

As the cruelty is mercilessly depicted for the viewer, the question of “why” rings as loud in one’s ears as the screams of the victims.

Not “why were these films made”, because the atrocities on display can barely hope to live up to those which have been committed by one human being against another across time and probably at this very moment.  The question is why would somebody want to do this?

For the various murderers we meet in the films, a number of reasons crop up: the forbidden nature of killing as pleasure, the adrenaline rush of intimately draining another’s life force, a chance to live out a fantasy, substitution of the victim for someone the murderer has been unable to confront in their real life.

The parallels between the elite hunters and members of the online social network Bareback Brotherhood (or #BBBH as seen on Twitter) are striking.

The brainchild of Mark Bentson, the Bareback Brotherhood is:

 “…a social group of men around the globe from all walks of life. We agree on one thing — sex between men without barriers is natural and a legitimate choice…

Fuck more. Fear less. Regret nothing.”

Before AIDS swept through communities of gay men in the 1980s with its unstoppable scythe, condom use among gay men was not the norm.  When it became apparent that the riskiest activity for acquiring HIV was via unprotected anal sex, massive behaviour change occurred in order for gay men to “fuck more” and “fear less”.  A majority began to use condoms.  Health organizations endorsed their use for survival.

Unsafe sex indeed became demonized, in the same way that other harm-causing behaviours such as smoking, drink-driving, speeding, driving without a seatbelt and drug use have been.

When behaviours become demonized, Bentson argues, people stop talking about them in a truthful and honest way.  Or, as he puts it in his own words:

 “…I do love a good debate when I can find someone with an open enough mind in which to discuss barebacking rationally.  Few people will, even though when the lights are off, condoms never come out of the packages.”

One could argue with his use of the word “never”, but how else to explain the increase in HIV infections among gay men across the Western world from 2000 on?  HIV infections had, in New Zealand at least, reduced to very low levels in the late 1990s, which coincided with both the invention of antiretroviral drugs and the uncomfortable reality that many of those who had been carrying the virus were dead.

Bentson is a fatalist.  For him, unsafe sex is no different from smoking, drinking, recreational drugs, consumption of fast food and caffeine, speeding, or other undefined things that risk your wellbeing, and we won’t stop human beings from doing any of these things:

 “A bus could kill me tomorrow. I could die of a million other things, why shouldn’t I experience intimacy I enjoy with a man? …

Everyone of us on this planet is doing stupid shit. We do it because it tastes good, it feels good, it gets us there faster, it makes us feel better, we enjoy life more…

But of all the life-risking things on this list, every single one is ultimately something you’re doing alone. Even if you’re with someone else, they’re not connected to you. There’s a disconnect. There’s no intimacy in a donut at Krispy Kreme.”

There’s also no incurable virus that destroys your immune system from the inside out.  But these things don’t matter to Bentson, who would also seem from his writings to be a nihilist: choices are choices, each being risk-equivalent.

A decision to eat a donut is no different than a decision to let somebody of unknown HIV status ejaculate fluids into your body.

We all speed from time to time.  And doubtless, it feels damn good to drive fast, especially on the motorway or open road.  With a mate in the car and the stereo blasting, the adrenalin rush and that sense of connection is exhilarating.  But would anyone respect my choices if I decided to start a social movement based around a lifestyle of consistent speeding, or the choices of those who decided to join me?  Would I not be accused of, well, asking for it?

Bentson denies that barebackers are bug-chasers (people who have sex with the deliberate intent of becoming infected with HIV), although he acknowledges that they do make up a proportion of barebackers.  He also denies that barebackers are mentally ill, saying that he personally “has no death wish” and does not want his “life shortened”.

 How then, do we explain this?

“Truth is at least once a month, I slip off a condom or use one with a hole in it. Stealthing is what I do. It’s how I fuck. Funny, the little Latin fucker at the gloryholes downtown no longer bothers with a condom with me because he knows I’ll take it off. He tries to predict when I will cum to avoid my load, but he can never tell.”

This seems nothing short of psychopathy.

Just as the victims in the “Hostel” film series are lured to their deaths through a honeytrap of freewheeling sex, drugs and good times; at least some of Bentson’s partners are drawn into his web through phantom definitions of “intimacy”.

And there are no shortage of stealthers and the deluded on the Bareback Brotherhood site itself.  Here’s a sampling of comments from a thread entitled “What about BBing do you like?”

“Sex in any shape or form is an exchange of energy between two people and a form of intimacy. What could be more intimate than giving or taking the best of the other person. Think about it, in your cum you have your DNA, the best of you, and it is so powerfull that can create an other life!!! So taking the best of you and making it part of me is not only a pleasure but also an honor.”

“I HATE the feeling of condoms. Won’t generally fuck with them… and will try rolling it off if I can get away with it. Then that just builds up to knowing that I’m gonna mark the slut with my seed.”

“Especially love when I fuck raw at the bathhouse with someone and there was no talk about status or using condoms beforehand. Makes the situation that much hotter.”

And some more, from a thread entitled “Conversion parties”:

 “I simply went to a bath house, that I used to come to on a regular basis and let someone, who told me he was poz, fuck me silly several times. He pumped my hole full of charge seed and fucked my hole raw and his cum came out pink, mixed with my blood. I had no doubt that I converted geting fucked by him and have never regretted it for a second”

“former chaser here I tried to do a conversion party ended up just finding a willing top. Will admit it was the best sex EVER. But also the over all experience is a serious ordeal, not to be taken lightly. After I converted a friend of mine told me he was chasing and we talked about for a long time. Just saying”

“I’m not necessarily looking to convert, but if it happens it happens.”

With the Bareback Brotherhood, Bentson seems to be successfully marketing a pathology: you can even buy black rubber BBBH wristbands to “show you’re a brother”.

Bentson dismisses as a myth that barebackers carry “disease or infection”, saying they are “more likely to honestly speak about their status and engage with their potential partners in open dialog comfortably because this is part of their daily lives.”

This seems at odds with both his own words and that of the BBBH users.  It is all about the fuck.  They don’t care about their health, so why should they care about yours?

This entire discussion would be somewhat moot in a world where HIV doesn’t exist.  But it does.

In the end, we can only be responsible for our own personal choices.  A key component of real intimacy is trust, and if you are going to have unprotected sex you need to be able to trust two people: the guy you’re having sex with, and yourself.

A last word from Bentson:

“I’ve never been delusional about how the world works as well. While lacking the literal fucking and breeding, I’ve been proverbially bent over and marked through my life in many ways. And I let it happen. Perhaps my own need to breed back is my response to how society decided to use my intelligence, creativity and good will.”

Are you really doing it because it feels good, or is there something deeper going on that you need to address, before you become indelibly marked for the rest of your life?

I am writing to share some very important news and to appeal for your solidarity and support.

As the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network marks its 20th anniversary, we face an unprecedented challenge with recent news of a drastic cut in funding under Canada’s federal AIDS strategy — a cut that significantly undermines our ability to continue our work in defending and promoting human rights in the response to HIV.

For most of its history, the Legal Network has been seen by the federal government as a valuable partner in Canada’s response to HIV, given our expertise in challenging the inequities that fuel the HIV epidemic and addressing the legal questions and concerns of people living with HIV, front-line agencies and policy-makers alike. 

With previous support under the Federal Initiative to Address HIV/AIDS in Canada, the Legal Network has developed high-quality resources widely used by AIDS service organizations, public health professionals, lawyers and thousands of people living with or vulnerable to HIV and AIDS across the country and around the world. 

But it has become increasingly difficult in recent years to secure support for the human rights work that is at the core of our mission.  For example, activities to protect the human rights of some of those most vulnerable to HIV, such as access to harm reduction services for people who use drugs and for people in prison, appear to have been deemed de facto un-fundable, as has any activity deemed to be “advocacy.”  Indeed, as we have been advised explicitly in recent weeks, it now appears the government will not fund any activity that may produce a resource that could be used for advocacy.

The implications of such an approach are disturbing, to say the least. Since the onset just over thirty years ago, the HIV epidemic has highlighted starkly the role that ignorance and fear play in fuelling prejudice and discrimination, and the critical importance of empowering communities with information – including information they need to defend their human rights to equitable access to effective HIV prevention and treatment services.  The history of the epidemic has also demonstrated the crucial role of community organizations in protecting human rights and ensuring government policies support effective measures to treat people living with HIV and prevent new infections.

For the past 20 years, the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network has been dedicated to this cause.  Stephen Lewis, the former United Nations Special Envoy for AIDS in Africa, co-director of AIDS-Free World and the founder of the Stephen Lewis Foundation, has called the Legal Network “a global leader in advancing the cause of protecting, respecting and fulfilling the rights of people affected by and living with HIV/AIDS.”

However, in the latest round of Federal Initiative funding reviews, our proposal was subjected to an unprecedented level of scrutiny at the highest levels within Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada — the only proposal from a national AIDS organization to receive such scrutiny.

Finally, months after all other proposals had been reviewed (and most of them largely approved), we recently received news that only a few select activities in our proposal would be eligible for funding.  This represents a significant defunding of the Legal Network from previous years — a cut of two-thirds. 

Virtually all of the activities – including activities previously supported by government funding – were deemed ineligible for funding because the educational resources to be produced might be used for advocacy.  Even those activities which have been approved are subject to restrictions on which human rights issues may be addressed.  For example, addressing the human rights of certain communities is not permitted, even though they are recognized explicitly in the government’s own AIDS strategy as communities particularly affected by HIV.

Despite this, we remain committed to our vision — a world in which the human rights of people living with and affected by HIV and AIDS are fully realized, and in which laws and policies facilitate HIV prevention, care, treatment and support.

You can help us realize this vision by taking action.  Become a member and make a donation today.

Since 1992, the Legal Network has been fighting to ensure that all people enjoy the fundamental right to the highest attainable standard of health, as per international law.  We intervene on complex issues that affect the lives of thousands of people around the world.  We are making advances on critical human rights issues through a combination of direct support work on individual cases, big-picture thinking, and legal research and analysis, as well as awareness-raising and education. Consider what we’ve done in the past year alone:

We spearheaded the campaign to fix Canada’s failed Access to Medicines Regime, to support developing countries responding to HIV and other treatable illnesses by supplying affordable generic drugs.  This work continues in the year ahead with a new bill re-introduced in Parliament.

We’ve spoken out against the new federal “omnibus” crime bill that will ultimately result in more people with addictions behind bars, a recipe for entirely preventable damage to both individual and public health — and we continue to press the case for access to comprehensive HIV prevention services in prisons.

We’ve intervened on the landmark “D.C” case to the Supreme Court, fighting against the unjust criminalization of people living with HIV. “D.C” is one of the women we spotlight in our groundbreaking new documentary on the issue: “Positive Women – Exposing Injustice” .

We’re working, with partner organizations across the country, to deliver dozens of workshops for front-line workers and produce educational resources answering the many legal questions they confront in their work. 

We’re regularly in the media, addressing important questions about HIV and challenging HIV-related stigma and discrimination. 

But the major cut to our funding represents a significant blow to the sustainability of our work, at a time when the need is greater than ever. People are counting on the Legal Network to defend and promote sound public policies, rooted in evidence and human rights, to help curb stigma and discrimination, to promote access to care for those living with HIV, and to help stop the epidemic.

We ask, therefore, that you stand with us in solidarity by becoming a member and making a donation to our work by 15 August 2012.

If you were previously member but haven’t yet renewed your membership for 2012/13, please take a moment now to do so.  If you are not currently a member, please join us in defending and promoting human rights by visiting www.aidslaw.ca/joinus.  

Whether or not you are a member, you can support us by making a donation. Simply visit www.aidslaw.ca/donate.

Canadian NGOs are facing a difficult time, especially those who tackle important public issues and speak out for human rights.  Funding cuts put many at risk of closing their doors.  We will be using this opportunity and our 20th anniversary to bring together a united group of individuals, foundations and other supporters who understand how important it is for the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network to continue its critical work towards fully realizing the human rights of people living with and vulnerable to HIV.

But we cannot do this without your support.  Please stand with us today.  Take the first step — become a member, make a donation and learn more.

Our 20th anniversary is a pivotal moment for the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network.  With your help, we will be able to keep fighting well into the future, on behalf of those who depend on the Legal Network and our commitment to human rights for all.

With appreciation for your support to date and in the future, 

Richard Elliott, Executive Director

David Eby, President, Board of Directors