Visual AIDS
AIDS
We value some lives more than others →
AIDS Walk New York 2015 →
We walked so that people infected HIV can have access to much needed services. NYC TriState area is in the top 10 of highest rate of new infections in the U.S. Money raised through such events like AIDS Walk New York will help fund Outreach and Prevention services. Again, we are all living wit HIV so, find out what you can do in your local community and/or learn more about HIV awareness and prevention.
It’s in the male...
This month… 13 years ago… Three letters changed my life… it wasn’t a doctor that told me… I learned of it by reading a life insurance rejection notice I received in the mail along with my deposit refunded to me. Two weeks later my doctor confirmed what the notice stated.
A new life began with one sentence… a death sentence, it was never.
So it's National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day. I have a lot feelings about this, because, i feel like it's fucked up and necessary and fucked up that it's necessary. Here's the tea: This shit is plaguing our community and has been for ages. Most of that is about historic and current systemic and structural violence aka inaccess to resources/knowledge/power necessary for healthy living/survivial/thriving. Another part of that is our proximity to in/externalized white supremacy, heterosexism, heteropatriarchy, femmephobia and the like. Here's the other thing, HIV meds can cut transmission by 96%, add that to a condom (if used properly) and that's cut by another 76-98%. No one can get meds without being tested, but in many states being tested for HIV and being found positive, is grounds for losing your right to have consensual sex. In most states, if you're HIV+ and have consensual sex, despite disclosing your status, you can be criminalized as an attempted murderer, bioterrorist, sex offender or biological weapon among other things for simply having sex---without transmission of HIV. So if you're a young, sexually active person of color, getting tested becomes scary as shit. You got your physical life on one hand and the threat of further criminalization and your sexual-social life on the other. The struggle is real. So before we start hollering about disclosure, remember that sometimes, disclosure means death...Jim Crow Prison style.
HIV-Positive and As Sexy As I Want to Be | Tyler Curry →
Now, before we begin, you can go ahead and unravel that tight wad your panties have wound themselves into. This blog post is not intended to promote the transmission of HIV, and in no way is it meant to glamorize HIV/AIDS. Is it even possible to glamorize such an abysmal disease? I think not. But I have noticed that when an HIV-positive man takes a public stance without the “woe is me” pretense, that is the general dissent. Glamorizing HIV would be like trying to Photoshop a picture of the Holocaust: No matter how you manipulate it, the ugliness remains. However, I am not HIV itself, and it’s time that people who are HIV-positive stop wearing the face of the virus as if it were their own.
Sometimes life can deal you a hand that can make you feel like you will never win. Being diagnosed with HIV is just one example. But unlike some other unfavorable traits that we carry in our deck, being HIV-positive can seem like the only card you have to play. READ MORE
On HASA and You're a Student?
Here’s something that your HRA Caseworker probably has not shared with you.
Did you know that HRA (aka Dept of Social Services) will reimburse your public transportation costs for each day that you are in attendance? They may even prorate the amount.
Go to your assigned HRA office and ask for form W-700D it’s a 2 page form (front and back or copied on separate pages) Get your attendance records for the semester, and past semesters. Make blank copies of the W-700D (you will need to fill this out and submit at the end of every semester (you can also do it once per month) and submitted to your HASA Caseworker or Financial Worker (best to submit it to your Caseworker), and make sure copies are made and that your sign and you are given your proof of services received every time you visit HRA.
It could take a month or two but the money will be available through your EBT (SNAP) card.
Be sure to ask your Caseworker if there are any other allowances for students whether it’s an accredited college, technical training, or trades trades training institution you are entitled to these benefits.
You don’t have to be on Public Assistance forever… The fact that you are in school shows that you looking to make a change and you deserve all the assistance you can get!
Get it!
Christian is a FLRT - UrbanLand Media →
Christian Ledan (aka.Christian V. l’Aviance) is Freely Living Real & True = FLRT
We identify courageous individuals who authentically share their life stories and are demonstrating what it means to Freely Live Real & True. Freely Living Real & True™ (FLRT) is a developing concept, that when realized, will convey the message of empowerment across the globe. By using a fun yet thought-provoking acronym our goal is to bring people together through the universal desire to freely live one’s life to the fullest, living through truth, and facing life challenges through empowerment.
The Men Who Want AIDS—and How It Improved Their Lives | Out Magazine →
Tye Fortner has fine, delicate ears, a newly pierced eyebrow, and a trim beard. He’s wearing honey-colored contact lenses and a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt. “I wanted to be presentable,” he explains as a photographer snaps his portrait. “I was going to buy an outfit, but it was so hot.”
We are standing outside his apartment block in the Fordham area of the Bronx in New York City on a muggy Friday afternoon in June, a few days before Pride. A woman walks by pushing a wheeled cart from which she’s selling Italian ices. “Hey mama!” Fortner calls to her and asks for a scoop of mango and cherry that stains his teeth red. Refreshed, he leads the way up the stairs to the roof of his building, where he takes out a packet of Newports and, perched high above the city, begins to tell his story.
Fortner was 22 and homeless when he started feeling weak, with crushing stomach pain and terrible headaches. A sex worker from the age of 16, sometimes too high on crack to remember to use protection, he had been putting off the inevitable for weeks before he finally decided to get tested for HIV. The result came back positive.
“My whole world changed,” Fortner says, recalling the moment six years ago when he received his diagnosis. At first it changed for the worse as he struggled to come to terms with his diagnosis.
But then, it changed for the better.
After years of homelessness and a day-to-day existence, Fortner, now 28, was faced with the tantalizing prospect of a place to sleep, regular meals, and more thorough New York City services provided to people who reach a certain stage of the disease. First he would have to meet their diagnosis requirements; then he would receive help.
“I didn’t know about the services,” he says. “I didn’t know that once you have AIDS you’re entitled to all this other stuff.”
That silver lining was a surprise to Fortner. And while it might seem counterintuitive, contracting the virus has made life easier for other young homeless men in New York City, who in return for developing full-blown AIDS gain a roof over their heads and basic services.
This cruel paradox — having to get really sick in order to enjoy a better, more comfortable life — has not gone unnoticed. “I have experienced people [who are] grateful that they have HIV,” says Sage Rivera, a research associate at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who has worked with hundreds of LGBT youth. “It’s sort of like a sigh of relief or an extra boost,” he says. “There are a whole bunch of different names for HIV within the [LGBT] community: ‘the monster,’ ‘the kitty,’ ‘the scratch,’ ‘the gift that keeps on giving.’ So people say, ‘I have the kitty — so now I can get my place. Now I can get hooked up; I can get my food stamps, I can get this, I can get that.’
“Other people say, ‘I do not know what I would have done without the monster.’ I can think of five boys, automatically, who’ve told me this.”
And it’s not just those who already have AIDS who view it as a lifeline; some young men who test negative aspire to contract the disease as a way out of trouble. Rivera knows at least one man who planned to have unprotected sex on purpose, an attitude he sums up thus: “My life is not getting better. I need a helping hand, and it seems like the only way I can get a helping hand is by getting sick.”
For Fortner, the phenomenon of young men deliberately contracting HIV is dispiriting but not surprising. “When you’re on the streets every day — winter, summer, spring, and fall — and you find a way to have an apartment of your own, it looks better,” he says. His own experience is instructive: Once his AIDS was diagnosed, he was astonished at how much easier it was to live in New York City. “Right now the rent for my apartment is $1,150, but because I’m on the program I only pay $217, which leaves me with about $400 a month,” he says. “That’s still a struggle, but I feel gifted, because one way or another I pull through.”
So I don’t think those free condoms universities hand out suck as much as guys say they do.
Okay, but seriously. If you’re ever considering sexy times with a guy and he tells you that he can’t wear a condom there is a 100.3% chance that he is a liar, and you should definitely not have sex with him. Don’t have sex with liars. Have sex with a cute honest people that bring you ice cream the next morning. Liars do not bring you ice cream. And if they do it’s ice cream made of lies. Ice cream made of lies is very emotionally unfulfilling. Don’t trust liars or their disease-ridden ice cream.
that was the best safe-sex talk ever.
Assume always that you might catch something… protect yourself and by default you’ll be protecting your partner.
#DOMA is history! Let’s make #AIDS history!