The Daily Agenda for Tuesday, December 1

Jim Burroway

December 1st, 2015

TODAY’S AGENDA:
305943_10152291838655603_104958559_nWorld AIDS Day: Everywhere. Today is the day set aside to increase awareness, fight prejudice, and improve education about HIV/AIDS. Worldwide, it is estimated that about 35 million people are are living with HIV/AIDS. The good news is that the rate of new HIV infections worldwide are still declining, as have AIDS-related deaths. Where access to antiretroviral (ARV) medications are available, AIDS changed from being a fatal disease to a chronic one, albeit a very serious one. Those who are on ARVs can now expect a nearnormal lifespan.

Not only that, but there has been increasing recognition that when those who are undergoing treatment and have an undetectable viral load, their ability to transmit the virus on to others is greatly diminished. The probability isn’t zero, but it’s surprisingly low. “In fact,” says the CDC, “the rate of HIV infection for the HIV negative partners was 96% lower if the positive partner was on ARVs. While we don’t know for sure whether HIV medications will have this huge benefit in preventing HIV transmission between men who have sex with men, or between other types of partners, we think it will. Having said that, it will never be 100% protective for all couples.”

So that, by itself, is not the silver bullet that we’re all looking for. But that fact combined with the growing acceptance in the gay community of PrEP (Pre-exposure Prophylactic, typically in the form of the anti-retroviral drug Truvada), we may have an exciting possibility to significantly reduce the number of new infections. Some studies have shown an effectiveness for preventing HIV from 92% to as high as 100% for those on a daily regimen of Truvada. It’s possible that 100% figure is a fluke, and many studies have noted that it’s been something of a challenge getting men to take the drug daily.

Neither approach represent a cure, which is still the holy grail of the AIDS battle. But treating those with HIV to get their viral load down, when combined with making PrEP available to anyone at risk of infection, together could be the one-two punch we’ve been looking for. Ending the transmission of HIV would be the next best thing, and that is something that we now have the medical capacity to achieve. But access is still a problem as many doctors are reluctant to prescribe it, as Timothy’s frustrating quest for PrEP has shown. And he has insurance with Blue Cross/Blue Shield, which is not exactly a fly-by-night outfit. The CDC agrees that not enough doctors are prescribing PrEP, and has recently recommended that about 25% of sexually-active gay and bisexual men should be on PrEP.

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

AIDSSafetyPin-TWN1987.10.21

From The Weekly News (Miami, FL), October 21, 1987, page 5.

AZT became the first FDA-approved drug to combat AIDS in March of 1987. Beyond that, there was nothing else in the arsenal besides safe sex messages. But given the reluctance of the Reagan Administration and Congress to allow funding for organizations which provided clear and direct safe sex information, exactly what “safer sex” meant was still often left unspoken. If you didn’t know any better, would you be able to figure out what “safer sex” was supposed to mean from reading this ad that appeared in Miami gay newspaper? The word “condom” doesn’t appear anywhere. In the nearly three decades since then, we’ve learned that safety pins don’t work, and preaching about condom use is little better among a generation that has grown up with condom fatigue.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Connecticut Passes It’s First Sodomy Law: 1642. “If any man lyeth with mankind as hee lyeth with woman, both of them shave committed abomination, they both shall surely be put to death. — Levit. 21. 13.” If it’s any consolation, the same penalty also applied to adultery.

Miami Reinstates Gay Rights Ordinance: 1998. Miami first passed a gay rights ordinance more than two decades earlier (see Jan 18), but it was overturned following an acrimonious campaign led by Florida Orange Juice spokesperson Anita Bryant (see Jun 7). That victory led Bryant to spearhead campaigns to overturn similar ordinances in St. Paul, Minnesota (see Apr 25), Wichita, Kansas (see May 9), and Eugene, Oregon (see May 23). That tidal wave reached its high-water mark in 1978 when voters in Seattle turned back a Bryant-inspired attempt to rescind that city’s anti-discrimination ordinance (see Nov 7). That same day, California voters turned down the Brigg’s Initiative, which would have banned gays and lesbians from working in public schools.

In the decades that followed, eleven states, 27 counties and 136 cities had passed anti-discrimination laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in housing and employment. But gays and lesbians in Miami, where the anti-gay backlash against such legislation first became a major political force, remained without those protections. That changed in 1998, when the Miami-Date Commission voted 7-6 to approve an ordinance barring discrimination in housing and employment. The vote came after more than four hours of public debate while opponents of the measure prayed on their knees outside.

“It says that we’ve grown up,” said Carlos Hazday, a local gay activist who spearheaded the campaign for the ordinance. “We’re not perfect, we still have differences, but we’re learning from our mistakes.” Miami Beach mayor Neisen Kasdin welcomed the vote after arguing that an image of intolerance was bad for the area’s tourism-dependent economy. “Greater Miami is no longer a provincial, backwater town,” he said. “Let’s not retreat from our destiny as a major international city.” Reporters seeking comment from Anita Bryant tried leaving messages on an answering machine at her theater in Branson, Missouri. They were apparently unaware that she had been forced to close her theater and declare bankruptcy.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Matthew Shepard: 1976-1998. I’m not sure what to say about him that hasn’t already been said. He has become so much larger in death than he was in life — except, of course, to those who knew him. For the rest of us, he’s an icon, not unlike the golden images venerated in Orthodox churches of impossibly heroic saints who suffered their unimaginable tortures in stoic silence. Most of what we know about him can be summed up in a simple creed: he suffered, died, and was buried. One popular description of how he was found — tied to a fence with his arms outstretched — took on religious significance, even if the image it portrayed was inaccurate. Judy Shepard, Matthew’s mother, has always been uncomfortable with the deification.

“People call him a martyr, but I take exception to that,” she said. “I’ve tried very hard to keep him real. It’s unfair to make him larger than life. He had foibles. He made mistakes. He was not a perfect child by any means.

“When he was killed he was not on a victory march or a protest march or anything that you would consider fighting for gay rights. He was just living his life as a 21-year-old college student who smoked too much, drank too much and didn’t study enough. He was a college kid trying to figure out his future.”

If you know of something that belongs on the Agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

As always, please consider this your open thread for the day.

Eric Payne

December 1st, 2015

Medical science has, presumably, brought us to the other side. Obituary columns are no longer filled with the very terse 2-liners of a name,age, “after a brief” or “sudden illness” that told the complete story of AIDS to those of us who knew the man who owned that name. Nightly newscasts no longer lead with the story of some celebrity becoming ill. The titillation factor has passed… hell, it took pre-interview press releases teasing the media to garner publicity to care about Charlie Sheen’s announcement of his HIV status.

Though, of course, right after that announcement, the press pondered if Sheen had, actually, contracted through having “gay sex”, with the tabloid National Enquirer going so far as to headline Sheen was infected (using the language of the headline) by a “dead tranny”.

It’s still important AIDS be perceived as a gay thing, I guess.

I’m 56. There’s not as many 50 – 70 year old gay men out there as there should be. If an accurate accounting could be done of all gay men, and then plotted on a bell curve, I know there’d be a big dip in that age group for one reason.

They’re dead.

If nothing else, on this day or remembrance for those in our lives we’ve lost to this virological eenie-meanie-miney-moe, remember this:

Caution.

Even before the waves of death began in the early 1980s, there were those in the community who were warning gay men, publicly, of the dangers of a communicable infection gaining hold in the community. While most of those warnings concerned syphillis, gonorrhea or some other venereal disease, the fear was such an infection would “catch hold,” spread, grow and — in that growth — become resistant to the medications used to combat them.

That there would be some new, lethal, contagion wasn’t a concern, but was a consideration.

We all know what happened next. In Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco, we started dying. In 1981, we’d get a telephone call from a friend, or stumble across an obituary in the newspaper, and that’s how we found out a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend had died the night before. In 1982 and 1983 we spent our evenings and weekends visiting friends-of-friends, and then the friends, themselves, in hospitals, never openly acknowledging they were going to die; always half-surprised when they did.

By 1984, we were attending a funeral a week; come 1989, we were numb, and simply having one, group, memorial service a week.

Gay community newspapers, always geared toward keeping the party going in both appeal and content, were now also including obituary columns every week.

Network news told us, salaciously, of the deaths of Terry Dolan and Ray Cohn of AIDS… as if being closeted gay men, even posthumously, was the most important factor of their ultra-conservative lives in government.

The world-wide media salivated over a death-watch for Rock Hudson, as if his was the only face of AIDS in the world, ignoring the tens of thousands in their own hospitals, their faces ravaged by the bruising of Kaposi’s sarcoma.

Those of us in that 50 – 70 demographical grouping personally know men who drowned in their own phlegm via infetion of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, or had gone blind and become Alzheimer-like because of Cytomegalo virus.

We knew them, and buried them, when we (and they) were in their late twenties to mid-thirties. What for an entire generation of gay men are now their “party years” became for us a years-long dirge. Even today, despite the advances of medicine, we get the phone calls. Men, infected what seems ages ago, succumbing to their body’s inability to fight some new assault on their system. Long term, they could maintain, but thowing some new systemic infection causes the equation to be thrown out of balance and they die. Now, though, it’s age appropriate; there’s not much shock factor in a 50, 60 or 70 year old dying.

We’re now entering another new age… though it’s really a return to an old age… thanks to PrEP and PEP treatments. Our younger gay men seem to be eager to trash the condom because we, seemingly, now have a medication that can reduce viral load and, in the long term, make HIV undectable in a person’s body.

That’s great news… but it isn’t a cure.

We’re still, as gay men, a much smaller, more concentrated, group of persons in the larger scale of human sexuality. As such, we are still much more likely to be hardest struck by any sexually transmitted disease. It’s coming to light that just about any virus/bacteria that grows in human blood can also be transmitted via semen… it’s just a question of the concentration of that virus/bacteria in the semen, and the ability for that virus/bacteria to take hold in the recipient organism of that semen.

Of the virus/bacteria that exist in the world, science has identified those we know which are most likely to be spreadable via sexual contact. But they don’t know what else is out there.

Be cautious.

Men my age came into their sexual maturity simply knowing there was nothing like a good fuck.

If we survived, we’ve come into our physical maturity knowing a good fuck is great, but it’s not worth dying over.

Ben in oakland

December 1st, 2015

Bang on ,Eric

Eric Payne

December 1st, 2015

Ben in oakland,

Only with Bill… and because of side effects to the libido of all the cardiac medications I’ve been taking for 15 years, the banging has to be planned in advance (not to mention, in order to be able to acquire and maintain my ability to… participate… I have to go off my medications for a coupla-five days).

TMI?

Ben in Oakland

December 1st, 2015

I understand.

I had an unfortunate sinus surgery 3 years ago. Screwed up my heart, with all of the attendant difficulties and pills. Assistance certainly assists.

Mark F.

December 3rd, 2015

Great comment, Eric. I’m 55 and went through the same things.

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