awareness

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.”

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Today Is National Women And Girls HIV/AIDS Awareness Day: What You Can Do | Care2 Causes →

Today is National Women and Girls HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, a day coordinated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office on Women’s Health to encourage people to take action and raise awareness about the impact the epidemic is having on women and girls.

More than 290,000 women in the U.S. are living with HIV; in fact women now account for more than one in four new cases of HIV and AIDS in this country.

HIV/AIDS is a major health issue for African American women. A new study released last week shows the HIV rate among black women living in some U.S. cities is the same rate as that of some African countries.

Healthy Homos: Swedish HIV Prevention Campaign →

healthyhomos:

Stop Aids is an example of one of the longest running and most carefully evaluated social marketing programs for AIDS prevention in the world. Its initial audience was gay men, but as the epidemic began to expand it reached out to a truly national audience. Its most important difference was to constantly measure not only condom use, but changing attitudes toward the epidemic. Condom use among men between the ages of 17-30 yrs old, for example increased from 8% to almost 50% between ‘87 and ‘90. One product was the condom, but another product was anti-discrimination and later needle exchange. The Swiss were convinced that as long as AIDS was feared, risky sex would remain underground. The price of prevention was lower than the price of high-risk behavior, because the price of prevention no longer included the fear of discovery. In addition to condom promotion and needle exchange being promoted on radio and TV, community groups were organized, a special Hot rubber brand created for gay men, and new distribution points opened throughout the country for condoms and for counseling and testing.

Created by a joint task force of the Swiss AIDS Foundation and the Swiss Federal Office for Public Health, STOP AIDS is the longest running HIV/AIDS prevention program in the world. It was launched in 1987 as a national, multi-media campaign designed to: (1) increase condom use among Switzerland’s general population and targeted risk groups, (2) reduce discrimination against individuals with HIV/AIDS, (3) increase solidarity among those living with HIV/AIDS and with the rest of the population. Through an advertising strategy of persuasive, gradually phased in messages and mainstream imagery, and a system of constant evaluation, the program achieved successful results during the first few, critical years of its operation. The STOP AIDS campaign remains in place as Switzerland’s primary AIDS prevention program, and is one of the hallmark examples of successful social marketing.


The campaign is based on a learning strategy, the aim of which is to reinforce people’s awareness of the risk, to change their behaviour and to encourage them to take effective measures to protect themselves against infection with HIV.

The national Aids prevention campaign has never tried to get its message across with scenarios that transmit fear, threats or horror. The campaign has always sought to draw on scientific facts in order to make a distinction between situations which could potentially lead to infection with HIV and situations which are not associated with a risk.
The campaign supports the belief that it is not the task of the state to pass judgement on the sexual practices adopted by individuals, and has avoided mixing public health aspects with moral values.

Overall, the STOP AIDS campaign has been a remarkable success* as shown by a large number of indicators, some of which have been evaluated in the course of scientific studies.(Source: Social Marketing WIKI)

Check out the campaign website Love Life