Oldie
but goodie
I am in great need
of your help. I had saved an article from years ago from Positively
Aware that was I believed titled, “To Tell or Not To Tell.”
The article is at least six years old, I do believe. I had
made copies to use and give to people who were in need of
info on this matter. I have since run out and did not make
any back-up copies. Is there any possibility that you can
e-mail me a copy? I have a few guys here who can use this
article at this time with their life right now. Anything that
you can do would be greatly appreciated.
TJ, via the internet
Editor’s Note: No problem.
It’s good to know we made such a difference.
Pep
talk
Life is beautiful.
Even with AIDS, lupus, hep C, and whatever lurks in my body
undetected. Pity sucks. I live, therefore, I am alive! Thinking
is an option, not a necessity. I can opt to think about the
interferon treatments [for hepatitis] that almost cost me
my life, along with Zerit and Ziagen that did the same. But
I opt to think about my kids, trees (yes, trees!), the ocean
(any ocean), and the Higher Power that most definitely be.
I smile, tell jokes, dance, roar with laughter and sometimes
when I’m real lucky I have sex! Life is God’s gift and He
is the only licensed I-take-it-back gift giver. So I suggest
all PWAs and HIV Lifers buy into my option plan. I guarantee
you, “It does a HAART good!”
Peppi P. Davidson, Philadelphia
New
reader
I just discovered Positively
Aware and find it very interesting. I tested positive in 1995
with this deadly virus. While waiting for a cure I take Sustiva,
Zerit and Ziagen. No side effects as of yet! I go to support
groups—too many at first. Now I have to stop going everywhere
like a wild person. My children know I’m positive and deal
with it in their own way. I want to speak out. I did not smoke
or do drugs. All I can say is a person should get tested no
matter what sexual activities they were in. All I can do is
take my medications and live.
Name withheld, Newark, New
Jersey
Two
to tangle?
This letter is in response
to one published in your Jan./Feb. 2001 issue, “Sex Ethics,”
which in turn, was in response to an article not named [see
“Give Us Morality or Give Us Death,” September/October 2000].
Let me first say that while it may take “two to tango,” it
only takes one to transmit, and therefore the original writer’s
premise is far from false. However, granting Mr. Carson’s
summation of human nature as wallowing in the need for “acceptance,
love, kindness, dignity, and respect,” I would add that those
needs might certainly cause the uneducated, the unwary, or
simply the uncaring, to exercise his or her “right to have
unsafe sex.” But, please, again being brutally honest, the
consequences of that behavior are not just for the one or
two to accept or not, but for the whole of society. We have
seatbelt laws and strict drunk driving penalties, and because
they work, we not only see fewer horrific casualties on the
road, we have fewer grieving families, lower auto and health
insurance rates, and our tax money can be used to fund health
care for youth and the elderly, not intensive care for the
reckless and impaired. And just as we as a society, through
our legislators, reached an agreement on the rules of safe
motor vehicle operation, as a society of gay and straight
people, we have an obligation to further the debate surrounding
safe sex and to come to some universal conclusions. I am a
pharmacist working as an HIV/AIDS specialist, and I can assure
Mr. Carson that enormous effort and resources are being allocated
to find better, faster, safer ways to kill the virus. But
that solution may be years, even decades away. In the mean
time, people suffer and die and the only way we can hope to
get the upper hand is to simply prevent transmission, human
nature being what it is and all. Does Mr. Carson think that
the healthy gay population is just lucky? Does he think that
his HIV status somehow confers upon him the wisdom to dismiss
the ideal of responsibility toward our fellow humans? Or is
it, as I suspect, his anger at the partner who infected him
and then left him to face the consequences alone speaking?
We haven’t taken all the cars on the road to the crusher because
a few unlucky souls perish in them, but we have made a concerted
effort to make them safer, and to educate drivers about their
responsibility when they get behind the wheel. Don’t we owe
the same level of concern to our partners, our lovers, and
our children? Barebacking, circuit parties, party drugs, indifference
and misinformation are the vessels carrying this virus, and
as a case manager, Mr. Carson would be better serving his
clients if he kept that mantra in mind.
Barbara Renthal, Phoenix,
AZ
Prison
damned
I am writing to you
from the Dixon Correctional Center where I am an inmate, with
AIDS, serving a 20-year sentence. I think your readers and
young people with HIV/AIDS, who may be prone to incarceration,
should be aware of the problems associated with being in prison
and having these diseases. People like us are double-damned.
The Illinois Department of
Corrections operates a managed healthcare system that goes
to the lowest bidder. It is a gross exaggeration to label
it “minimal standards of health care.” The prison system is
not obligated to treat or prescribe medication for illnesses
not considered life threatening just to make you more comfortable.
Because the medical and professional staff is contracted,
the quality of the services is literally the “bottom of the
barrel,” in other words, these people work here because they
can’t work anywhere else. They have neither the commitment
nor the compassion of private healthcare providers.
There are no specialists
trained to work with HIV/AIDS patients even though a very
large portion of the prison population is infected with these
diseases. The doctors here who treat HIV/AIDS patients are
what I have come to dub “country doctors,” ones who treat
everyone for everything. It is pretty much like going to a
General Practitioner for open-heart surgery. Not only are
the medical services inadequate, there are no counseling and
support services available to help patients. We are not even
allowed to have peer counselors. Prisoners with these and
other illnesses are on their own.
Due to the quality of the
health care and the deliberate indifference of the medical
staff, it is a daily battle just to get the minimum medication
to prolong one’s life. Inmates have no voice in their treatment
for HIV/AIDS or any illness. I was placed on a triple cocktail
of Zerit, Ziagen and Sustiva. However, these drugs, in concert
with the multitude of other drugs I must take, make me violently
ill and in constant dire pain. The medical staff is unwilling
to try different drug therapies or to prescribe medication
for pain and side effects. Because of this, I recently discontinued
all my AIDS medications. The quality and comfort of my daily
life won out over the longevity of my life. This would be
quite different if I were not in prison.
Because I am a prisoner and
suffer from a mild mental illness, along with AIDS and hepatitis
C, prison officials infer that my life is not worth saving
and certainly not worth the expense it would take to properly
treat me, keep me out of pain and afford me a reasonably comfortable
quality of life. Their reasoning is, “Why should we when he’s
going to die anyway?”
It is my fervent hope that
anyone reading this letter will think twice before placing
themselves in a situation where they have no control over
their lives and where prison officials can withhold medical
treatment as a means of behavior modification. I am in hopes
that no one else becomes double-damned.
Please feel free to share
this with your staff and readers. I enjoy your magazine very
much and look forward to every issue.
Larry Harris, A61614, Dixon
Correctional Center, 2600 N. Brinton, Dixon, Illinois 61021
“Slip
Sliding into an Earlier Grave: A Response to Pickett Fences”
I was disturbed by
what I thought was an endorsement of “barebacking” in Positively
Aware, published as it is with a national distribution and
in two languages. How could an agency with such a long and
dedicated service to the HIV community disseminate such a
piece without offering, at the very least, an alternative
viewpoint?
At the onset, I acknowledge
that I admire Jim’s work, especially in his efforts around
AIDS awareness and prevention. And this is not an ad hominum
attack on him or his work. It’s a different point of view.
That stated, let’s examine the facts of Pickett Fences.
His first near unsafe sex
encounter occurred after being recently unpartnered—a time
when most of us typically feel battered and needy. He also
writes that the incident took place at the US Conference on
AIDS, where being positive quickly loses its sigma and being
positive doesn’t send potential dates running for the door.
Finally, drugs are introduced. “We get high and silly,” Jim
writes. Thus, the initial venial sin of not making a safe
sex only negotiation upfront, was contextualized in a recreational
drug atmosphere violating one of the first tenants of the
HIV prevention cannon. Stated starkly, Jim may have been negatively
impacted by his unpartnering, and presumably his isolation
from being positive, met someone who brought temporary comfort,
got high, and, what should have been an automatic action akin
to lubrication, is then artificially dropped. Emotionally
vulnerable people mixing drugs and sex is what helped fuel
this epidemic. Something we have known for a very long time.
Being part of the vanguard
of the information age and aspiring to “achieve AIDS starlet-dom”
as he terms it, Jim puts up an AOL profile to expand the sexual
delivery system. He identifies himself as HIV positive and
discovers that there are many responses to his posting, especially
from men who want unprotected sex.
As if to make these actions
somehow more acceptable from a prevention standpoint, Jim
puts up two “boundaries—never doing it [barebacking] with
a negative man and no one coming inside anyone else.”
Jim acknowledges a well documented
suspicion that unprotected sex between two positive people
probably contributes to drug resistant strains of HIV. What
he remains silent on is that his boundaries will complicate
treatment options (three drugs become four, sometimes five—with
all its attending side effects—liver, kidney, pancreas, and
coronary problems).
Additionally, he fails to
point out that safe sex, namely, the condom use that he so
readily eschews, helps control syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia,
hepatitis, intestinal parasites and a whole host of other
damaging infections. Again, treatment options become muddled
and keep on chipping away at the quality of life, putting
undue stress on already stressed organs.
Condoms are necessary nuisances—at
least for now. This disease sucks; the drugs suck; the side
effects suck; being deprived of that ultimate feeling of closeness
with a loved one, sucks. Unfortunately, this is part and parcel
of the disease.
I don’t think that he should
be admonished for his article. Jim gives voice to all those
who hate using condoms. He articulated that, given the right
conditions, even the most strident of us can relapse. I think
where he fails his readers is by not stating that his decision
is clearly personal and that the scale is decidedly tipped
in favor of condom use.
Richard Niemiec,
member, Test Positive Aware Network,
Chicago
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