What are we to make of a Gay and Lesbian advocacy group launching an ad campaign like this?
Common wisdom would suggest that this is precisely the message that HIV/AIDS educators have been trying to eradicate. HIV/AIDS may disproportionately effect the gay community, but it is also increasingly plaguing women in the black community. Being heterosexual doesn’t protect you from infection. Only safe sex or abstinence can protect you from infection.
Doesn’t this ad perpetuate myths and stereotypes about HIV/AIDS and homosexuals? Well, maybe it is a little more complicated.
In Los Angeles, the data are very clear: though gay and bisexual men make up less than 7% of the population, they account for more than 75% of those living with HIV and AIDS. The hugely disproportionate impact of the epidemic on our community is undeniable and unacceptable, and has been so for 25 years.
For a variety of reasons, we’ve stopped talking with one another about HIV and as a result have disempowered ourselves—and future generations—from envisioning and working toward an end to this epidemic. In fact, we believe that our complacency has already led many in our community to accept the growing epidemic as a community norm. This is happening at the same time that the use of crystal methamphetamine and other drugs has skyrocketed, fueling new HIV infections.
The L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center aims to break the dangerous silence regarding HIV with the launch of an ad campaign this month targeting gay and bi men. The message: “HIV is a gay disease. Own It. End It.”
What do you think?
I don’t know, I hope it works for them. The community did such a great job in the 80’s and 90’s about awareness and about forcing the government to pay attention and push the need for research. Over time, as it seems human nature, they lost the urgency of their message. More people began surviving for longer periods of time. Why look, Magic Johnson is still with us and looking very alive, isn’t he? I would suppose newer generations of gays didn’t see their friends dying in droves and wondering if the funerals would ever stop or even slow, as I and so many of us “oldsters” did.
Aids is an everyones disease. But I guess whatever they need to do to bring back some serious concerns to the gay community is worth a try.
It is always hard to convince the “young” or the newly “out” in the gay lifestyle that they are NOT immune or invincible. I think we all harbor the idea that it can’t happen to us, and that is anything and everything including aids. To control passions with common sense is always a challenge, isn’t it.
My first instinct is in line with Anna’s.
I don’t question their motives, nor do I think the message is terrible when it is aimed directly to the gay community.
But it is actually DISinformation for the non-gay community, and it perpetuates a stigma that a lot of effort has gone into stamping out.
I dunno. It’s complicated.
I was thinking along the lines of Shirlstars. Gay men are heavily over-represented in the AIDS population and if the urgency has gone out the AIDS fight in that community, then I can see why an effort is being made to jumpstart the AIDS fight.
Here’s an odd thought. When a person’s family is affected by a deadly disease, sometimes survivors in that family assume the fight against that disease as an important part of their identity. As time goes by and some family members inevitably move on to other concerns, the family members who strongly indentify with the fight feel like the family is abandoning a defining element of the family. Maybe that explains the motivation behind the ad and its lack of concern with how it plays outside the “family”. Just a thought.
i think this is an idiotic use of very powerful words.
i cant believe they cant find another way of getting their message across.
As a Bi person I have to agree. There’s gotta be tons of ways to get the message across without having to give the religious bigots the axe and point at our own necks.
Eeeexpecially in this Folical (Foley) climate and with the Republicans thinking long and hard about possible purges.
You know, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this so called “Ad- Campaign” weren’t some conservative trumped up excuse to fling red meat before the base.
Don’t we all agree that the timing of it stinks?
My first reaction was this had to be some kind of sick goddamn joke. This is just plain wrong in so many ways to say nothing of it simply being false. End it my ass.
Plus as has been said this gives all the homophobic crazies something to point to and say ..see even G/L group believe this is a ‘gay male disease’..and now a whole new generation of young straight kids will continue to believe they can’t possibly get AIDS…jesus this just fucken sucks.
Religious bigots already have the axe and it’s been pointed at our necks since time immemorial. No amount of advertising is going to change those people’s minds. Their brains shut down in childhood during Sunday School, and they are a lost cause. This ad isn’t aimed at them.
As for the non-insane portion of the general public, I’m sure they’ll come around… eventually. A lot of people will die needlessly between now and then if we just wait for that to happen.
In the meantime, as the demographic overwhelmingly affected by HIV, we can turn the tide by engaging in safer sex practices, educating our peers, and generally taking responsibility for the things we can control. I’m not sure this ad is the best way to communicate that, but then again, it will certainly get people talking in its target audience. I can’t see that as a wholly bad thing.
From the website:
The world is not comprised entirely of Los Angeles, nor is the experience of Angelenos necessarily typical. Why (mis)represent the information in this way?
Does the message take priority over accurate communication?
The message in this case is not aimed at heterosexual Africans. And arguably, the lack of attention to the African HIV problem is driven by:
That issue is so far out of this ballpark that it’s not surprising that an ad aimed at the American gay community doesn’t try to address it.
You forgot to add the lack of profits for pharmaceutical companies in selling ARV drugs to impoverished African nations.
Seems to me they’re doing the work of the “religious” right: culling themselves from the rest of the herd, making their concerns separate from everyone else’s, making themselves the primary vectors of a plague that endangers everybody. Slick graphics, incredibly clumsy message. These are not the times to give ammo to those who already promote the meme that gays are a disease to be eliminated.
AIDS in the African American community has spread because of:
Let me know if I’m wrong.
It’s considerations like you outline that make me think this ad campaign can be harmful to the non-gay community. If a woman is looking at that ad on the subway and she thinks, ‘my man is straight’ she will get a false sense of security.
And, while it is a message that the gay community probably needs to hear reiterated, it will be read by straight people as confirmation of their prejudices.
I think Anna put it well. It’s sloppy. DaveW also put it well. It’s gay-centric, and tone deaf to how it plays in the non-gay community.
I agree. I didn’t mean to give the impression that I think it is a good way to get the message out. Only thing I can guess is that they want to make the gay community angry enough to pay attention, because that is surely what their message will do. . .produce anger. To produce that anger in a way that encourages the homophobes to grow and sustain their prejudices is not very smart in my opinion. . .but then, I am hardly anyone in the mainstream of gay community and can’t really imagine how they came to this choice.
This ad is offensive because it’s a lie that puts too many people at risk.
Back when we first learned about AIDS, it was a Haitian disease, then it was a gay disease. Now it’s an African disease – all we ever hear about the horrors of AIDS is Africa and Asia. It seems to me that if the gay community should “own” anything it is their common humanity with the rest of us.
This looks like a bid to be further marginalized and dissed by the elitist classes.
Do you know what i have to say about this? Here’s my poster:
They’re very wrong to imply that the disease is exclusive.
United States:
An estimated one million people are currently living with HIV in the United States, with approximately 40,000 new infections occurring each year.
70 percent of these new infections occur in men and 30 percent occur in women.
By race, 54 percent of the new infections in the United States occur among African Americans, and 64 percent of the new infections in women occur in African American women.
75 percent of the new infections in women are heterosexually transmitted.
Half of all new infections in the United States occur in people 25 years of age or younger.
In the USA , most reported HIV infections among 13- to 19-year-olds were among women and girls, and most of them were infected heterosexually.
This is the worst ad campaign I have ever seen!!!! As a gay male who has worked in HIV and AIDS Awarness since the early days of the disease, this will undo years od damn hard work!!!!
My first thought: I didn’t involve myself in needle exchange, as an active junkie, because I believed HIV/AIDS to be a gay disease.
I did, in fact, get into needle exchange & did not contract HIV while active.
Geeky biology input:
We’re doing some research in my lab regarding the human vaginal microbial community. It is clear that the microbes present help keep the pH low (acidic). This effect drastically lowers the infectivity of HIV. HIV is killed extremely quickly by pH ~4. bacteria from the genus Lactobacillus appear to maintain this low pH stably. We have samples from different racial groups, and the african-american women have a higher proportion of a community dominated by a different bacterial group. The speculation around here is that different community type makes african-american women more susceptible to HIV simply due to manitenance of higher vaginal pH. No real knowledge yet about why african-american women tend to be more likely have this different community, could be allele frequency differences (e.g. MHC antigens) in the population, health practices (e.g. douching…). Who knows. This pH factor may also contribute to the high risk of anal sex; neutral pH there.
Take-home message? HIV is not a gay disease.
I can see most comments are really quite right about the extreme nature of the ad and it’s message, but there’s a reason this is such a hard-hitting campaign.
Now, I don’t agree with the premise, that AIDS is a gay disease. But if you are in the “gay” community in large cities around this country, and you meet and learn to know many gay men in those communities, you will find that gay men are just like a normal slice of Americans — to stereotype gay men as being more effete and well-educated and liberal than the mass of Americans is just no longer applicable. Maybe in 1950 or 1960 that was a bearable stereotype, but today’s gay community is composed of all types of people with all kinds of stupidities, ingnorances, uneducated behaviors & opinions. It’s an MTV generation of gay men out there now, not the activist hippie professional types who were slaughtered by AIDS in the 80’s.
The bulk of urban gay communities are young men from the post-AIDS era of the 80’s. The elders are dead and gone, and those left over are clawing onto life with their HIV meds and worrying about retirement or just keeping a cup of coffee in their hands, since we lived the “I’m free now” mantram to the fullest.
The superficial life of the MTV generation is terribly evident. I’m not condemning the younger generation, they are just a product of the culture around them, since they grew up in a much much less closeted environment than even I did (70’s). Shit, they are 18 yrs old and watching Queer As Folk! They don’t have the fear factor and repressive factor so well embedded in them (in general) than previous generations. The life-saving HIV meds and plethora of information about how to manage HIV disease and drug side effects really makes the decision to have unsafe sex much easier. It’s a type of roulette, but it’s not deadly like it was when I was coming of age. HIV is manageable and liveable, it’s not a death sentence, and the newest generation of HIV drugs are designed to minimize side effects, making the rotten event of becoming HIV+ a lot more bearable.
Still, gay men have a degraded culture from the old days of mid-century America when they lived in their own bubble culture. Gay men are just as debased and vapid as anyone else growing up in today’s supersaturated consumerist society. THEY NEED A HUGE CLOCK ON THE HEAD to get the message that AIDS is not something you want or want to PASS ON. Hence, the purpose of the ad . . .
It’s a long-winded surmision on my part, but I believe that this is part of the rationale behind this ad campaign — a dulled and unresponsive community of tv- and consumerist-inflected young men are not terribly concerned about the social implications of HIV transmission since they can always go on drugs and live out their lives mostly uninterrupted.
I’m a 46-yr old health care practitioner, I work with gay men all the time, I’m gay myself, very out of the closet for 25 years, I’m HIV+ (for 20 yrs) and have seen the AIDS crisis birth, mature and be subsumed by gay society since it’s revelation on the scene in 1981 as the “gay cancer.” No one wants to be HIV+ or progress to AIDS, but men will have sex, and will have it on impulse without caring about the consequences. It’s a bit different in the MSM world than the MSW communities. . . .
P.S. I wouldn’t call the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center an “advocacy group,” I’d call them a community center with money to spare to spend on community outreach. It’s not an “advocacy group.” that’s just a slurring of what the LAGLC really is.
I don’t understand the distinction, but I meant no disrespect.
Oh, I know that you meant no disrespect, but everyone in the media does this kind of thing — assuming rather than fact-checking. The extreme of this ends up on Fox with O’Liely and Hannity blowing everything out of proportion.
Is Booman Tribune actually media? I think so, since I come here after checking out The Guardian and Huffington Post for the latest news. I rely on this site for news every day.
The late Jonathan Mann who led the global AIDS response until his death in an airplane crash in 1998 outlined the truth succinctly:
AIDS is not a gay disease — it is a disease is spread among outcasts — poor and, in this country, mostly black drug users.
White gay guys with HIV get retrovirals; black gay prostitute junkies spread infection and die.
And yes — I am gay and live in a terribly HIV-impacted community.