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GAY
MEN'S HIV/STD Prevention Task Force
Here's What People are Saying About the Community Manifesto (Part 2): • About time! Personal responsibility is something that's been sorely lacking in most of modern society... and the implication that to be a part of the gay community you have to embrace some wanton 'free love' philosophy, to accept STDs as inevitable, is just as oppressive to gay individuals as prohibiting gay marriage or sex; it takes away the individual choice and makes lifestyle obligatory. Peer pressure of the lowest common denominator must not be allowed to rule the gay community, or to define it. 10/10/03 • I applaud the manifesto and endorse it! EH 10/10/03 • I think we need to back up here. HIV stands for Human Immuno-Deficiency Virus, not Homo Immuno-Deficiency Virus or Fag Immuno-Deficiency Virus; it is not just a gay disease. HIV is spreading in all circles of human life and I think it is ludicrous to blame only one sector of the population. This is not a discriminating disease; it cares not who you are or what color you are or what your sexual orientation is or even what age you are. Here we go with discrimination again and this time it is gays against gays. Until so called straights and Christians admit that it is their disease to and not just a gay disease not much is going to change. Stigma is running rapid among the population and as stigma increases for gays, or gays with HIV or gays who want to be in a committed relationship which society condemns, including the president of the United States, there is not going to be any significant change in stopping STD's until society admits that it isn't an exclusive homosexual disease and everyone gets on the band wagon for prevention. Stigma is going to prevent people from being tested for STD's and send them straight back to the closets that they were finally coming out of from the fear that this causes. I sure hope you realize what this manifesto means, it is not prevention, it is Draconian in its concept and will scare people away from being tested. FD 10/13/03 • Thank you for sending a strong signal to the community, from the community. People need to be honest, responsible and committed to this message. Harm Reduction, information and clear steps for prevention are powerful tools to stopping the spread of HIV. Thank you. JK 10/13/03 • People shouldn't even have to be told to be safe. I'm sorry we have to, but this needs to be heard. Again. JC 10/13/03 • Thank you SK
10/13/03 • Thank you NT 10/13/03 • I applaud your effort. Two specific suggestions: 1) It would help to note that unprotected oral sex with multiple partners, although much less risky than unprotected anal sex, can still transmit HIV; hence, people who do it should be tested twice yearly for HIV and other STDs. 2) Your term "general heterosexual population" is odd and confusing. Depending on which statistics you're using, you should either refer to the general population--which includes the gay and straight populations--or to the heterosexual population, which (like the gay population) is a subset of the general population. I would also recommend that you urge online cruising sites, such as www.manhunt.net and www.m4m4sex.com, to link prominently to your manifesto. These sites are virtual bathhouses, and have a responsibility to help promote safety. GD 10/13/03 • This manifesto is definitely a step backward. It shows what happens when people become professional activists and create problems in order to perpetuate the crisis that they are supposedly trying to eliminate. There is a price to be paid for our personal freedoms in this country. That price is personal responsibility. And anyone who has been around for a while and kept his eyes open will understand that there are some irresponsible people out there -- people who are not going to change no matter how many manifestos like this one are written. It follows that the only thing this manifesto can really accomplish is take freedom away from people who deserve that freedom because they do take responsibility for their actions. This manifesto is the first step down a slippery slope that will ultimately result in a reduction in personal freedom in the gay community. Rest assured, laws will be passed. The victory we recently won in the Supreme Court -- which made consenting homosexual sex legal though out the land -- will be short lived, because homosexual sex will become illegal on the grounds that it transmits AIDS. Do you think that this couldn't happen? Wake up!!! You are contributing to a climate of hysteria that might well lead us down this path. And it's not as if we haven't seen this happen already. Bathhouses were closed in San Francisco and New York (thanks to activism by gays, not by straights) in the mid-eighties because they supposedly "spread AIDS." But interestingly enough, bath houses stayed open in other U.S. cities and in Europe, and the "AIDS Holocaust" that they were supposed to cause never materialized! So do you think you could tell this to officials in San Francisco right now and get them to reopen the baths? Not a chance. Once a freedom is taken away, it is gone pretty much for good. I would be the first to support this manifesto if there were no other way for people to protect themselves from getting AIDS. But you know and I know that that is not the case. Gay men in the eighties did something remarkable and unprecedented: they took responsibility for protecting themselves -- not demanding that the government or their sex partners do this job for them -- and AIDS in the gay male community dropped precipitously (I am speaking of the white gay male community; I do not know enough about the communities of gay males of color to say anything about them). Information on safer sex is widely available in the mainstream gay community, and it IS possible for people to protect themselves even without knowing the HIV status of their sex partners. As long as they do this, they will be safe and we won't have BIG BROTHER coming down on us and running our lives. Are the professional activists (who are living to a large extent off of MY tax dollars) satisfied with this? NO. The less AIDS we have in this country, the less justification there is for paying them money. So they are taking the AIDS crisis to a whole new level by appealing to people's emotions in a particularly vicious and slanderous way. They are -- in effect -- slandering the entire gay male community based on the actions of relatively few gay males and giving loads of ammunition to the religious right. The bottom line is that we should do what we can to reach and educate the relatively small subset of the gay male community addressed by the manifesto. But we should also realize that not all of them are going to respond positively to our efforts. Which means that the best advice anyone can give for those who seek to protect themselves is to do just that. Practice safer sex. Don't assume your partner is HIV negative or believe him when he says he is. AT 10/13/03 • The Manifesto
is right to call for personal responsibility and an end to barebacking.
Unfortunately, the drafters of the Manifesto have completed omitted
any discussion of non-anal alternatives. I head an organization
of men who have sex with men and who do not do anal sex. Today
the Washington Blade published a "viewpoint" piece by
me titled "Rethinking Gay Sex." • This seems
to be an excellent and long-awaited approach. For so long I have
felt like some kind of traitor--like some kind of right-wing sell-out--because
I thought it was outrageous that so many gay men lack basic respect
and just human decency for their fellow gay men (not just with
regards sex, but also generally). Moreover, it has been my experience
that criticism of this less-than-gentlemanly behavior is not allowed.
It saddens me to think about what might motivate someone to put
another at risk, but if public education and, dare I say, condemnation
of this outrageous behavior can make people give a damn and treat
each with a bit of respect, then I'm all for it. RP 10/14/03 • Thanks to the visionary sponsors of the Manifesto. You have my support and encouragement. TH 10/14/03 • As any good communist will tell you, manifestos work best when they manifest the will of the people, not some health department administrative contract goals. Early prevention efforts succeeded--despite a full understanding of transmission--because they were grass roots. You folks would do well to read some Paolo Freire: "Education has to be a critical process, a struggle against fatalism. Change is difficult, but change is possible." MB 10/14/03 • Awesome forward thinking! Thank you! MA 10/14/03 • For gay men of my generation it is understandable that news of rises in the rates of new HIV infections would confront us and produce a range of emotional responses. We share a desire for future generations of gay men not to be defined by and through illness and disease - or to go through what many of us have been through. However, I think your manifesto and the thinking which underpins it is more reflective of the emotional impact of rises in new HIV infection on us, and unfortunately not a response based on sound health promotion and education principles, effective social research, a detailed knowledge of HIV transmission science and epidemiology, a knowledge of the important differences between STIs (you call them STDs) and HIV education and prevention, the importance of the involvement of people with HIV and the next generation of gay men in planning and implementing health promotion campaigns, and the changed relationship between "gay" and "HIV". Let me illustrate a few areas that I think are highly problematic. In your manifesto you comment on the need for "up to date, relevant information" and "loud, clear messages of health." Then later on you give some summary messages to "all gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men". Let's evaluate some of your messages in terms of your "relevancy, up to dateness, loudness and clarity." criteria. No 1. If you have multiple sex partners, use a condom for anal sex and get tested regularly for HIV and STDs. This directive assumes a HIV-negative reader. HIV-positive men do not need a HIV test. We learnt as a core principle in the 1980s not to exclude HIV-positive and HIV-negative audiences and to recognize their differences. Given that so much of your manifesto locates responsibility with people with HIV in its assumptions it is counterproductive to explicitly exclude them in your first message. Having regular sexual health check-ups is one of the core STI education messages but STI screening and sexual health check ups do not just involve testing - and giving it equivalence to HIV testing in this recommendation only adds to the myth that HIV and STI prevention are the same. This message fails on clarity, utility and relevance. 2. Know your HIV and STD status, disclose your status to sex partners, and ask them to disclose theirs to you. There is no such thing as an "STD status". This is a total misrepresentation and misunderstanding. There are dozens of STIs and they are not the same. For some bacterial and treatable STIs - where the infection has been diagnosed - there are periods where the recommended behavioral guidelines include a short time of abstinence. For some viral STIs such as CMV which has a seroprevalence of over 80% in most inner urban gay male communities and where CMV infection only has consequences for people with HIV who are CMV- or gay men who may come into contact with CMV- women who are pregnant then the reasons for giving a 'CMV history" is very unclear to me and what actions you take on the information even more unclear. For some STIs such as Hepatitis A and Hepatitis B the core message is not disclosure but get vaccinated if you haven’t been previously infected. In relation to STIs this "disclose STD status" message is seriously flawed and reflects a lack of understanding of STI prevention and education principles. Now let's examine the problems associated with a reliance on HIV disclosure - or in reality HIV-posiitve disclosure - as the central HIV prevention strategy in your manifesto. Social research in Australia identified that close to 80% of HIV-negative men expected that their HIV-positive sex partners would disclose their positive HIV-status. Yet about 70% of the same men would reject those partners and the consequences of those rejections we could speculate could be very injurious to the emotional health of people with HIV and understandably diminish their motivation for disclosing in the future. Asking HIV-positive men to disclose without at the same time educating HIV-negative men about how to deal with the disclosure of a positive HIV-status is - in the moral and ethical framework you have chosen - an act of gross irresponsibility. But the problems are more than that. The reasons for encouraging positive disclosure is a belief that it is gay men who know their HIV-status who are driving rises in HIV infections. Yet there are numerous references in the literature about the key role of people with very recent HIV infection in propagating ongoing and persistent rates of new HIV infections in gay male communities. It is probable that the source of most recent new HIV infections in Seattle is people who themselves have been recently infected. People with recent HIV infection are highly infectious - including just before any seroconversion illness if they have one - and often unaware of their actual (or soon to become) HIV-positive status. A strategy based on HIV disclosure misses these people... and the impact of two negative men disclosing is not well thought out in your strategy or in an overall prevention strategy relying on disclosure. For people with HIV, disclosure is not simply about type of sexual activity - and a reduction of it to only this dimension - again trivializes and misunderstands people with HIV and their key role in prevention. A reliance on positive men disclosing lets HIV-negative gay men off the hook. It locates responsibility somewhere else (with positive men), set up totally unrealistic expectations (100% disclosure) and it is premised on the false assumption that it is people with known HIV infection solely responsible for new HIV infections - which is simply not the case. This message fails most of your own criteria. I am not going to evaluate the rest - some of them are impractical, wrong and not useful for sexual contexts. Aside from the problems in technical information and assumptions, and simple failure of program logic, there are huge problems in adopting the moral and ethical framework you have. My observation from afar is that sadly you have been locked into the binary opposites of 'good gays' and 'bad gays'; 'responsible gay men' and 'irresponsible gay men'; of 'moral' versus 'immoral'. The problems with binary opposites and "moral truths" is that they lock you into simplistic understandings and do not equip you with a framework to understand the complexities and diversities of gay men’s behavior, sexual contexts and lead you to clues about how to assist people with the skills and knowledge’s appropriate for their contexts. The problem with an approach that is so driven by anger and emotion and by a polemical tabloid net rag is that it is read as trying to reimpose "health crisis" on communities of gay men. Many gay men have rejected being defined through illness and disease. There are now far wider diversities of doing and being gay - including explosion in the use of the Internet. Moralism simply won't cut it. It might make you feel better - but it seems to me that simply ain't the point. Norms can't be invented, developed by "outsiders" and imposed - and adopting Moralism and an understanding of a relationship between "AIDS", "health crisis" and "gay" that simply no longer exists automatically locates you as 'outside' for many of the current participants in gay male sexual cultures - and will lead to an immediate rejection of the values you are so emotionally espousing. Announce them as you’re own norms if you like...but as gay men we have experienced how we respond to "outsiders" trying to impose their moral values on our cultures. It doesn't work - and never will. Norms can be influenced and worked with - but only from inside, and it's a process of negotiation - not pronouncement. Time to get off the high moral ground me thinks and get back to earth. 10/15/03 • This is perhaps the most exciting collection of words I have read in years! The Manifesto contains all of the elements of a caring and compassionate effort to restore health to the community of men who have sex with men. I will help to share these words, and will pray for them to lift the spirits and hopes of any who read them. JB 10/15/03 • I think this is an incredibly positive action to be taken. Holding people accountable for their actions is integral in making sure the spread of disease stops. JN 10/16/03 • good work.
Keep going! LM 10/16/03 • The message
of this manifesto resonates beyond gay and bi men and other men
who have sex with men. This message goes out to ANYONE, regardless
of sexual orientation, who is sexually active in society today.
If I have an STD (or am promiscuous) and I do not tell the person
I am about to have sex with that I have an STD (or that I’ve
had many sexual partners but haven’t been tested)... then
I am either a) a coward, or b) morally bankrupt and reckless.
This isn’t about blame, until someone who has tested negative
tests positive. Until then, this manifesto is about basic respect...
self respect and respect for others. • I think your efforts are misguided, your tone is patronizing and your intent is totalitarian. Like many other gay/bisexual men in Seattle, I know all there is to know about HIV and STD transmission. I choose to engage in sexual behavior with or without condoms based upon the (1) the HIV/STD status (real or perceived) of my partner and myself and (2) my personal tolerance for risk in light of my perceived benefit of the particular sexual activity. I think your efforts here would be better spent researching how it is that men such as myself (and there are many of us) remain HIV- and STD-free despite numerous sexual partners (our choice, our right) and despite not using condoms 100% of the time (again, our choice and our right). Also, you would do well to conduct more in-depth, qualitative interviews with the gay/bisexual men who tested positive recently in city clinics in order to find out how their experiences should or should not inform the efforts of the public health department. Going back to the manifesto, there are 2 statements in particular that I take issue with: (1) "Disclosing HIV/STD status does not negate the necessity to practice safe sex." I don't know how you define "safe sex", but if 2 self-identified HIV-, STD-free men engage in anal sex without condoms (because they've informed each other of their status and are willing to tolerate the (small) risk that one or both of them may have been infected since their last checkup) and they walk away HIV- and STD-free, that WAS safe sex!!! We're adults and we can take responsibility for ourselves and we don't need our tax dollars going to city employees who are blind to the nuances of the negotiation of safe sex among men in the community! (2) "Bare-backing is unacceptable high-risk behavior except in committed monogamous relationships between partners of the same HIV status." First of all, unprotected anal sex within the context of a committed monogamous relationship is NOT barebacking. (I think you should understand the full meaning (and the correct spelling!! no hyphen!!) of a slang term before you incorrectly use it, thus displaying once again how ignorant you are.) Whether or not barebacking is "acceptable behavior" is for the individual to decide. For you to mandate what is and is not "acceptable behavior" is ludicrous!!! Join the Vatican if you want to have that soapbox. Finally, I'd like to see my comments here added to the "What people are saying about the Community Manifesto" section of your website. Of course, I know full well you won't post them there since you're only interested in YOUR propaganda and can't stand the thought that maybe we can think for ourselves! HC 10/17/03 •I would just like to say that HIV/AIDS prevention and safe sex tips shouldn't be just for gay men or (....) but for everyone. This manifesto makes it sound like gay men are the only ones afflicted by this disease when it can infect anyone. Thank you for trying to make a difference. (The inquirer has designated that an email response is not necessary) 10/20/03 • After years of concern over the alarming increase in HIV and STD's in the Gay community, I am encouraged to find the community making such a positive and strong statement concerning personal health and our responsibility for the health of our sexual partners, friends and community. This document challenges all of us to own our actions, and to respect the lives of those around us. I find it important that the issues of substance abuse have been addressed in the manifesto, especially Methamphetamine use (but would like to see alcohol mentioned as well). This manifesto is a major step in confronting risk behaviors and personal responsibility, all the more effective because it comes from the heart of the community. I extend my gratitude, respect and congratulations to all who are responsible for this document. JM 10/20/03 |