Editorial
Guest
Editorial
We Deserve Better
There
is much worry, anxiety and fascination with the news from New York City
about a gay man who was found to be infected with a strain of HIV that
is both resistant to most of the AIDS drugs available and quite aggressive,
moving from HIV to full-blown AIDS in a short period of time.
Health officials, activists, and the
press are communicating not just the information about this case, but
also their own feelings of fear and hopelessness. Feelings of fear and
hopelessness are understandable in this situation. We are simply scared
and discouraged by the destructiveness of HIV and the destructiveness
of gay oppression.
HIV in the gay men's community would
be relatively easy to deal with if it weren't for gay oppression. The
effect of gay oppression is to create not just external barriers (stigma,
lack of resources, culturally incompetent messages), but also internal
barriers. Gay men are told over and over again – in direct, extreme
ways, in subtler slap-in-the-face-ways – that God hates us, that
we aren't worthy of full citizenship, that we are the sludgy, slimy dirt
at the bottom of the ocean floor, that we stink.
But these are messages coming from the outside,
right? Where this becomes an internal battle is that on some level we
believe these messages.
As much as we deny it, we simply haven't
done the work as a community to recover from these messages. We can have
gay pride marches every weekend from June to August, but if we go out
after those marches, get high on crystal meth and have unprotected sex
with each other, how proud are we really? We act as though some temporary
escape from our worst feelings about the oppression is all we deserve.
We deserve better. We deserve better
treatment from ourselves, we deserve better treatment from each other,
and we deserve better treatment from the broader community.
We deserve all the resources necessary
to fight these battles. We deserve to be cherished even when we are lost
in addiction and unsafe behavior. We should not be the scapegoats for
AIDS or the target of society's confusion and bias about sex and drugs.
In the throes of desperate feelings,
people with degrees and titles and influence are calling for everything
from HIV counseling and testing for every American to vigilante groups
interrupting sex parties.
An HIV prevention program borne
of desperation is not likely to be effective. Effective HIV prevention
comes about when people are able to reach the individuals taking the risk
– reach them where they are hurting and acting out their hurt. And
nothing is more repellant to someone feeling bad enough to have risky
sex than the misguided actions of someone acting out their own fears and
urgency.
Our greatest hope, long-term, lies
in the creation of a caring society, where people aren't made to feel
so bad in the first place. That has to be our goal. The work necessary
to create that society will require many things of us. We will have to
organize. We will have to fight. We will have to face our fears and dare
to be hopeful. We will have to feel good about ourselves in the face of
the oppression. We have to do it even if we feel we can't. We have to
do it even though we don't know how. We have to do it simply because we're
worth it, and we deserve nothing less.
Glenn Johnson
Glenn Johnson
is a gay activist who lives in Greenfield, MA and works in Brattleboro,
VT. He can be reached at mrglenn2u@yahoo.com
Production Notes: There was so much going on this month
that we had to shuffle the layout and hold two of our regular items: The
Rest of Our World and Tongue in Cheek will reappear in April. –
Ed.