The activist event organized by the CUNY graduate center took place on March 21st, 2016. The objective of the event was to attract attention to the problem of HIV/AIDS among the LGBTQ community. The participants of the event and speakers in particular tried to initiate a shift in the existing stigma of HIV/AIDS for the purpose of showing the wider public the wrongfulness of their stereotypic perception of the problem.
The moderator of the event was Sarah Schulman. She has been engaged in covering AIDS since early 1980s. Currently, she is taking an active part in conducting several projects: she is a co-director of the ACT UP Oral History Project, and co-producer of United In Anger: A History of ACT UP (CLAGS). At the event in question, Sarah Schulman was the one who introduces all invited speakers. All of them are distinguished researchers of the HIV/AIDS issue. The speakers were Steven Thrasher, Ian Bradley-Perrin, Linda Villarosa, and Viviane Namaste.
The first speaker was Steven Thrasher, a writer-at-large and a senior opinion columnist at the Guardian US. Steven Thrasher’s report started with a reference to Michael Johnson’s case as a vivid illustration of the fact that there is stigma of HIV/AIDS. Michael Johnson was arrested for transmitting AIDS and trialed. As a result, he was sentenced to a 30-year service in one of the Missouri jails. Thrasher attracts the audience’s attention to the fact that a second-rate murder would have imprisoned Johnson for only 27 years. Thus, the whole case was a pure stigma. Steven Thrasher asserts that Michael Johnson was arrested, trialed and convicted because he was a black male and because he was a gay. Statistics says that the white are rarely arrested under the same circumstances. And if they are, they are often released without any charge.
The second speaker was Ian Bradley-Perrin. He has worked “as a community organizer in Montreal for the past seven years, co-founding four organizations dealing with social justice and HIV/AIDS health disparities through direct action, frontline service, and public education” (CLAGS). At present, Ian is also doing a research for his PhD degree in Sociomedical Sciences and History at Columbia University. Ian’s report made an emphasis on the role which pharmaceutical companies play in the aggravating the problem in question. He says that instead of promoting preventive measures and products of safety, they aim at creating new consumers that will assist in increasing their profits.
Linda Villarosa was the third speaker at the event. She is a New York Times editor and she has frequently written front-page articles covering the problems of HIV/AIDS. Throughout her career, Linda has presented numerous” lectures, workshops and training sessions for dozens of colleges and universities, national foundations, government bodies and journalism associations” (CLAGS). At the event, Linda’s report was a kind of an insight into the history of the problem. She has been writing about AIDS since the early 1980s. So, she is aware how the things have been changing and for what reasons. She points out the fact that despite the existing stigma, the first 5 cases of HIV in the USA were white men, not black ones. Only later the disease got entrenched in the black community because the disease was not manageable for poor black people, and especially for black women. Linda says that the year of 1996 was the changing phase of AIDS, though the government was trying to make the disease seem invisible in the USA shifting the focus of attention onto Africa. Linda sums up saying that the saddest thing about all this is that people continue to die from the so-called manageable disease and that is the problem that should be solved.
Viviane Namaste, the fourth speaker, is “a Full Professor at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, and Research Chair in HIV/AIDS and Sexual Health, Concordia University” (CLAGS). In her report at the event, Viviane called for rethinking the stigma of HIV/AIDS for the purpose of overcoming it. She underlines that the main problem is silence about the issue. This silence is kept by those who are inflicted with the disease because they are afraid to make the fact of their illness known. And this silence is also kept by those who are not ill because it is a convenient position – to ignore and, thus, to avoid worrying. Viviane asks her audience to turn the problem from being explicit into being implicit. She says that the purpose of her work is to persuade people to speak. And she believes that if she has managed to convince at least one person to stop that silence, she has done her job well.
Works Cited
“Shifting the Stigma of HIV/AIDS.” CLAGS. Center for LGBTQ Studies, 2016. Web. 28 Mar. 2016.
