Mario Pinna Ferri

Just as the HIV/AIDS advocate community was beginning to gear up to commemorating this 24th World AIDS Day, a loud script came across my Facebook page:  “FUCK WORLD AIDS DAY … I WANT TO LIVE!”  It just blew my mind!  It stopped me dead in my tracks! I felt anger. I felt anguish. I felt rage. I felt sorrow. But it also made me think.  I started at looking at its author.

He is a young gay man, barely old enough to buy cigarettes. He is HIV Positive. He lives in a large urban area with a significant gay population.  He has never known a world without HIV/AIDS . He probably has never had a friend to have died from AIDS .  Most likely, he has never known anyone personally to have died from AIDS .  He did express a simple truth: the desire to be alive. To live! 

I always feel it is a privilege to be able to be in our nation’s capital. It serves as a reminder that I too am a citizen of this country learning how to discharge the responsibilities of belonging to one of the most powerful nations on this planet.  At this year’s ADAP Advocacy Association’s Conference the urgency of being held accountable, as an advocate for this public health crisis that has been ravaging our global community stood out as a call to arms.  This is a crisis that has achieved the deepest of depths of cataclysmic humanitarian proportions, and a war being waged by the uncaring governments that are entrusted with our well being.

Much happens outside the formalities of a conference. 

It’s the Fourth of July 2011 and I am writing this blog entry while on a flight to Washington DC to advocate our Federal legislators at our nation’s Capitol for basic humanitarian assistance for people with HIV/AIDS.  It is while sitting here, reflecting on the needs of my community that I turn my thoughts on the subject of stigma.

Stigma is a monster with many faces. A good presentation of how HIV/AIDS related stigma manifests itself is summarized on this site: http://www.avert.org/hiv-aids-stigma.htm You might want to take a look at this monster’s different faces. What follows is my own ugliest experience with stigma.

For some reason I don’t exactly feel like I should be the one writing a message about preventing the transmission of HIV, after all I am positive.  Yet, I can’t help wonder what if I had been better educated on how to best reduce the risk of acquiring not only HIV but a host of other sexually transmitted diseases.  The operative key word being: education.  There are three key points in this discussion I want to share: condoms, needles, and homophobia.  Today I am blogging about my experience with the condom.

The divides that separate our HIV community is becoming increasingly more painful to me.  Over the years outside forces have been creating lines of demarcation separating and clumping us into different groups.  In the early days of the emerging of HIV as a health crisis we were divided into gay vs. the non-gay community to wit: gays, hemophiliacs, and Haitians.  The evolution of this divide further morphed into the innocent victims vs. non-victims, to wit: children, hemophiliacs vs. gays.  As the medical community began to grasp the extent the virus was affecting larger segments of the general population, women began to emerge as another group on the innocent victim side of the divide.  As the years marched on we began to see a different sort of clumping of innocent victims and non victims:  the maliciously infected vs. the perpetrators of the spreading of the virus.