Editorial
Editorial
Get on the Bus
It
has been a long time now since AIDS was the tragedy holding us together
and tearing us apart. Since the pandemic has reached across the globe
mostly in heterosexual interactions, there has been a concerted effort
to divorce the gay community from the image of the disease.
Okay, there were good reasons
for that, then. It was the second phase, after the beautiful boys died,
the young men at too early an age, their needs neglected by a government
and corporations too willing to look the other way because, after all,
it was just queers and druggies and they "deserved" their fate.
Now AIDS is a "manageable"
disease, like diabetes they say. Well, not exactly. Few diabetics are
fired for their condition. Few are taunted or denied housing because of
having a disease. But despite continuing discrimination, HIV/AIDS now
seems to get merely a more – or less – sympathetic shrug of
the shoulders, even within our communities.
But there's no reason now to let our
communities' health needs, or our risk to contract HIV/AIDS, be ignored
and made invisible once again. Yet it’s happening everywhere from
Burlington to Brattleboro to San Francisco to Kansas City to Houston and
Miami to Washington, DC. Everywhere programs are being turned away from
the proven safer sex, condoms, and harm reduction strategies that have
lowered the numbers of new infections over the past decade, and toward
ideologically driven "abstinence only until marriage" messages,
gay men's needs for information and assistance are being made invisible
once again.
Everywhere that programs are
being cut because the Ryan White Care Act has not been fully funded, gay
men's needs are being ignored once again. Soon, there will almost certainly
be no funds for case management, to pay the salary of the person who helps
clients actually get the services and medical attention they need. Soon
the pool of ADAP funds — providing access to expensive drug treatments
that are keeping alive people living with HIV/AIDS and helping them be
engaged in their communities — are likely to shrink again. These
cuts leave more of our neighbors, friends, and lovers to fend for themselves
in an often unfriendly healthcare system (that has become a nearly wholly-owned
subsidiary of the pharmaceutical industry), to become ill again, to teeter
on the brink of health crisis after health crisis.
Unless...
Unless we all get on the Bus.
The Bus is just the most visible and
concrete effort of the Campaign to End AIDS. Nine Buses will be wending
their way toward Washington DC to make clear, practical, and do-able demands
of legislators and pharmaceutical CEOs. One of those nine Buses is leaving
from St. Mike's College on Friday, September 30 (it's actually an RV,
but it might as well be a bus), carrying Vermonters who have HIV/AIDS,
Vermonters who work in agencies that serve PWAs and try to prevent the
spread of the disease, and Vermonters who work on state and national policies
that affect the agencies, their employees, and the people they serve.
The Bus is actually a caravan.
And we can all join it: by supporting Vermont CARES, ACoRN, the AIDS Project
of Southern Vermont, the Vermont People With AIDS Coalition, and other
nonprofit organizations with our dollars and our volunteer time and energy.
We can join it by writing letters
to the mainstream press and our legislators protesting the underfunding
of the Ryan White Care Act and the subversion of prevention funds from
proven strategies into impotent compulsory marriage programs.
We can join it by paying attention when
a friend tosses off a remark about his lost weekend on meth.
We can join it by spending a day –
or even part of a day – with the actual caravan at its stops in
Johnson, Hardwick, Montpelier, and White River on September 30.
Get on the Bus: our lives are still
at stake.
Information
on the Vermont Campaign to End AIDS (C2EA) is available via email to vtc2ea@yahoo.com
Check out the national campaign at www.C2EA.org
Euan Bear
Editor