notes from norwich

Want to Prevent HIV? Then Don't Terrify Us; Help Us to Heal.

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 17:51:43 -0500

Trying to terrify gay men to use condoms, as New York City's controversial new HIV prevention campaign attempts to do, has failed since the tactic was first used at the start of the 30-year-old epidemic. Not only that, but it undermines the health of HIV-positive men by falsely implying that anal cancer, dementia and osteoporosis await anyone foolish enough to become infected.

The department’s TV and YouTube spots, featuring ominous music and the kind of voiceover usually used to market horror movies, depict frightened young men. Warning that “When you get HIV, it’s never just HIV,” flashing images of broken bones, cancerous lesions and confusion, assault the viewer.

The reasons some gay men may choose to have unprotected sex—intimacy, pleasure, a shortage of self-respect caused by years of being told we are sick, sinful and second-class—are never acknowledged.

This type of fear-based campaign was first used in San Francisco in the early 1980s. The earliest AIDS prevention posters featured the stark and frightening image of a Kaposi’s sarcoma lesion on the foot of Bobbi Campbell, a nurse who was the first person with AIDS to be public about his illness. Another poster in the city at the time depicted an hourglass dripping blood with the caption “Time is Running Out.”

From the start, prevention educators disagreed over whether it was more effective to scare gay men or to provide information that would respect and support their ability to make their own choices. A 1983 poster from the San Francisco AIDS Foundation depicted two naked men embracing, with the caption “You Can Have Fun and Be Safe Too.”

When I interviewed HIV prevention educators and researchers last year for an updated edition of my AIDS chronicle Victory Deferred, I heard repeatedly that the only truly effective way to get gay men to have safer sex is to build and buttress our self-respect.

Kyriell Noon, director of San Francisco’s Stop AIDS Project, told me, “We can hand out condoms forever, and we will as long as people need them. But the greater impact would be to end the things that lead to transmission in the first place—homophobia, social isolation, poverty, homelessness. If we could correct some of that, we’d probably see changes in the numbers around HIV, particularly with communities of color.”

For now, we have a lot of wounded men on our hands. Can anyone honestly be surprised when men whose ability to make healthful choices is weakened by depression, social isolation and the steady assault of messages condemning them simply for being “different”?

I myself learned at age 47 that, after years of negative HIV tests, I had tested positive. As someone who had reported on AIDS for 20 years at that point, I “knew everything” about how to avoid infection. Would I have engaged in behavior that put me at risk if I hadn’t lost nearly all the friends of my young years and had to face middle age feeling as lonely as I did?

But funding for programs that address the “drivers” of risk behavior is scarce. Kyriel Noon said funders, such as New York City’s health department, are stuck in what he called their “silo-thinking.” Rather than backing initiatives that would make a real difference for gay men—by addressing our overall health, well-being, community, leadership development, homophobia and racism—we get another terror campaign.

It’s bad enough the campaign aims to inspire fear rather than hope. But its most insidious effect may be to instill hopelessness in those who already have the virus. By suggesting that all of us who are positive will develop cancer and the other horrors associated with untreated HIV infection, the campaign willfully ignores the fact that antiretroviral therapy has dramatically diminished these outcomes. It is willing to risk the lives of HIV-positive gay men by implying we are powerless to protect ourselves by choosing to get appropriate screenings and treatment.

Rather than “When you get HIV, it’s never just HIV,” a better message would be “When you engage in unsafe sex, it’s never just sex.” Why not help us to heal and be whole instead of trying to frighten and hurt us? We’ve already had lifetimes of too much fear and hurt.

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John-Manuel Andriote, author of Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America, has been reporting on AIDS as a journalist since 1986, and living well with HIV since 2005.

Five years since my personal d-day

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 11:08:18 -0400

Five years ago today, on October 27, 2005, my world was turned upside down. I was living in Washington, DC. I had just finished a complete, top-to-bottom renovation of my 1924 condo in the Kalorama area. It was still small, but it was beautiful now. My communications consulting work had taken me for a second time to Africa (Zambia), and I had a week’s vacation in Rome just afterward. I had recently spent a magical weekend (his words) in New York with a man from Connecticut I’d met in Provincetown, and liked a great deal.

Life was feeling good after so many lean years as a “struggling writer.”

Then my doctor called. I’d been seeing him, mostly for my annual check-ups, since the early nineties. We had this annual ritual down pat: cholesterol, normal; still watching that slight anemia; HIV-negative; great shape for your age.

Three weeks to the day after my forty-seventh birthday, marking the birthday that day of my late, beloved friend, mentor and “sitto” Rich Rasi, my doctor’s call this time changed my life forever. “I have bad news on the HIV test,” he said.

In the five years since my diagnosis, I’ve written about my experience as one who reported on the HIV epidemic for twenty years as a gay man, who had been personally affected by the deaths of friends and colleagues—as I myself remained HIV-negative.

Suddenly, I was one of the people I reported on. Now I would be forced to learn from the “other side” lessons that people I knew with HIV had also been forced to learn—lessons such as recognizing what stigma looks like in practice, or resisting others’ expectation that you will quietly allow them to exclude you while patting themselves on the back for their charity and compassion toward the “ill.”

When I was finally able to stop crying all the time, and realized I wasn’t likely to die soon because my medications were working, I did what only made sense to this reporter: I “came out” as HIV-positive in a Sunday commentary in the Washington Post. I was also interviewed about “my news,” as I called it, on National Public Radio. One of my fellow guests for the ‘On Point’ show was none other than Helene Gayle, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention’s HIV prevention program.

It was jarring to be asked, on live national radio, in such formidable company, “How could you, knowing all there is to know about HIV, still get infected?” Talk about needing to think on your feet!

I finally told Tom Ashbrook, the host, “I’m human, that is how I got infected.”

Dr. Gayle came to my rescue and pointed out that no matter how much anyone “knows” about HIV, or anything else that can harm us, head knowledge doesn’t always translate into protective behavior all the time, every time.

Five years later, I can say I am more confirmed than ever in my view that HIV is nothing shameful. It’s a virus, not a moral condition. Viruses and so many other potentially harmful things in the world are nothing more, nor less, than the challenges that face us as physical beings in a physical world. Humans attach meaning and significance to microbes rather than admit it is fear of death that makes us stigmatize and shun those who remind us we, too, will one day die.

Five years later, my health is good. I have had some joint issues, but the challenge for my doctors is to figure out whether anything I might have is caused by my being fifty-two years old, by HIV itself, or by the highly toxic chemotherapy I have to take every day.

Five years later, I’m aware of the limits having the virus puts on my choices. If I want to move somewhere else, I have to first consider my medical needs. Until I can finally switch to a new health insurance policy—not until 2014, when health care reform will finally prevent insurance companies from discriminating on the basis of a pre-existing condition—I have to rely on the continued funding of the federal-state AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP).

Five years later, I can also say I have never felt as full of life as I do now. It’s painful and sometimes exhausting to live with eyes wide open all the time to the beauty and sorrow of life. Having HIV has intensified my willingness to assert myself and finally draw proper boundaries with others in all sorts of relationships. This intense awareness of life’s fragility and shortness means I don’t have (or continue for long to make) time for people who drain rather than help recharge my battery.

Five years later, I live as a survivor, surging with life, who has seen far too much carnage on the battlefield of the global AIDS plague. I saw too many handsome, educated, passionate, young men die from AIDS--and far too much wrong, immoral, unjust neglect and abuse perpetrated against them. I, too, am a wounded warrior. Unlike so many others, though, this warrior will share his and others’ stories because silence equals death, and action—including the act of sharing what we have seen with our own eyes, experienced in our own bodies—equals (and can help save) life.

Skunk in the road

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 12:59:28 -0400

I ran over a skunk around 1:30 this morning, driving home from a friend’s.

It was standing in the middle of my side of Boswell Avenue as I rounded a corner. Before I realized what was happening, as I tried to steer the car so I would pass over it, I heard a sickening crushing sound. It seemed to happen in slow motion.

I started to cry. I was horrified at what I’d done. “I’m so sorry,” I repeated, aloud, to the skunk that couldn’t hear me and to God who maybe could. I’ve never struck an animal before, and would not intentionally inflict pain or suffering upon any sentient being.

As I’ve gotten older and now take multiple medications to preserve my health, I cherish life more than ever. I am deeply conflicted about eating meat. I make every effort to help insects get back to the outdoors, rather than reflexively killing them for invading “my” space.

I pulled the car to the side of the road, about 20 feet behind the skunk, the blinker flashing. I sat, frozen, not knowing what to do.

I thought I should at least get the animal off the road, maybe bury it.

I fetched the small army spade from the trunk. As I approached the skunk, I was startled and sickened as it lifted its head and the front part of its body. It seemed at least one back leg was broken.

I hadn’t counted on the animal still being alive. Of course I worried it might spray me.

I got back in the car, still unsure what, exactly, to do. Run it over with the car to end its suffering? Hit it with the shovel, to put it out of its misery? Leave it to its fate? All the possibilities were hideous to consider.

I pulled the car a bit further beyond where the injured animal lay, now on the yellow center lines. Other cars passed in both directions. Would one of them run over the skunk? Absolve me of further anxiety?

I was at an utter loss. I was upset that I had caused injury, pain and probable death to an innocent creature.

Yet I hadn’t done it intentionally, and certainly not maliciously. I abhor pain and suffering. The thought of willfully inflicting them is repugnant to me.

I hesitated a while longer, frozen by indecision, paralyzed in this painful dilemma.

I realized I would be even more horrified if one of the other passing cars actually did run over the skunk. That’s when I put the car in first gear, let out the clutch, stepped on the gas, turned off the blinker, and drove away.

I thought I’d go home, search the Internet for guidance, then go back and either run over the skunk to end its suffering or recover the corpse if another had already dispatched it and give it a proper burial in the morning.

I read in the Torah about the difference between killing an animal for food (moral) versus for sport (immoral), but nothing about accidentally injuring a wild animal.

Immanuel Kant said, “Any action whereby we may torment animals, or let them suffer distress, or otherwise treat them without love, is demeaning to ourselves.”

Clearly, I had let the animal suffer distress.

But I didn’t want to cause greater harm or more pain if somehow I didn’t succeed in the mercy killing I was considering.

Had I behaved immorally, demeaning my own humanity by behaving less than humanely? Had I been a coward? Afraid to accept responsibility for the animal’s actual death? It’s fine to feel remorse, but it didn’t help the wounded animal.

The American Veterinary Medicine Association advises that “certain cases of wildlife injury (e.g., acute, severe trauma from automobiles) may require immediate action, and pain and suffering in the animal may be best relieved most rapidly by physical methods including gunshot or penetrating captive bolt followed by exsanguination (bleeding to death).”

I don’t own a gun, didn’t have a penetrating captive bolt and wouldn’t know how to use it anyway. The thought of bleeding to death, although used in the kosher slaughter of animals for food purposes, is horrific.

I stayed home. I chose to let fate take its course. I allowed the small animal to suffer and die, alone, on the road. I’m ashamed of myself.

I was trembling this morning as I retraced my pathway in the car to the scene of the accident. I had a plastic bag and a box in the trunk, and the spade ready, to retrieve the dead animal I expected to find.

As I came up over the crest of the hill, I saw the small black body, the bold white stripe down its back, lying by the opposite side of the road. Apparently it had managed to drag itself out of the way of further injury.

I got the box, bag and shovel from the trunk, and approached the dead animal. Flies flitted about its head. I was surprised, and relieved, to see no blood. There was no “skunk smell.”

But images of an innocent creature’s agony filled my mind as tears filled my eyes. I used the spade to lift the small, light body into the plastic bag, then into the box and the trunk.

I drove into Mohegan Park, thinking I’d bury the animal somewhere in the woods—perhaps the very woods where it had lived.

It’s hard to dig a hole in the ground when your eyes are clouded with tears.

I lifted the animal with the shovel, gently laid it in its grave, beseeched its forgiveness, wished it eternal rest, and buried it with dirt and leaves.

Kant said that “violent and cruel treatment of animals is . . . intimately opposed to a human being’s duty to himself . . . for it dulls his shared feeling of their suffering and so weakens and gradually uproots a natural disposition that is very serviceable to morality in one’s relations with other people.”

I came home and gave an extra helping of affection to my cat, feeling grateful I can keep him safe indoors.

I feel miserable that I left the skunk to die alone in the dead of night. I feel miserable at my own helplessness.

If there is good to come of this awful experience, I expect it will be in this painful reminder of how much I truly do value life and respect the lives of my fellow creatures.

I pray there will be no further reminders in this lifetime that come at another creature’s expense.

Libraries = museums of the mind and heart

Mon, 31 May 2010 10:44:24 -0400

Libraries are part of the foundation of a community. I'd add that they are among the most important bedrocks of civilization itself.

A bold assertion, I know.

But you often read it said that more knowledge has been lost in the destruction of the world's great libraries--Alexandria, Egypt is the best-known--than we possess now. Libraries are the keepers of the world's recorded knowledge and wisdom--from simple how-to-do-it books, to the biographies and memoirs of the greatest thinkers and leaders the human race has produced.

Libraries are a filter, if you will, because not every book, video or photograph published is allowed into the collection. Reasonable, very smart and informed people determine what is likely to endure and be of interest to readers in the future. As a culture we more-or-less agree that professionally trained librarians are informed, unbiased people with critical thinking skills.

Of course we can’t presume that smartness or information played any real role in the Texas School Board’s recent selection of that state’s “officially sanctioned” school textbooks. The state buys so many textbooks that its order determines what publishers offer the rest of the country, too. For years Texas has pumped its conservative religious agenda into the rest of the country through our children’s textbooks.

None of the school board members was qualified to determine for millions of American school children how this country will speak of something that is seared into the American memory and continues to haunt our efforts to live as a people whose skin color doesn’t determine how “American” we are: the African slave trade.

For the Texas School Board the shameful blot on America’s history in which human beings were enslaved to make white men rich, the degradation heaped upon the descendants of those kidnapped, enslaved ones, required a little linguistic sleight of hand. “Slavery” is too . . . indelicate for their delicate Christian sensibilities. Their brilliant solution to make it not quite so discomfiting for Caucasians? Call it the “Atlantic Triangular Trade” instead of slavery.

We see in the Texas School Board prime examples of people whose minds have clearly not benefitted from the use of public libraries. Their personal biases and religious preferences have clouded their ability to see beyond their limited experience and professional expertise.

I use the Net all the time, for everything--whether getting the weather, recipes, news, video, or doing research for my work. But I am experienced at sorting out what is credible vs. dubiously credible information. I know who the great authors and thinkers are because I find history, etc. very interesting and so have read much about it before I go to the Net. I read newspapers, too, and make sure I get my information from a variety of credible sources.

But not everyone yet has the ability to sort out what is important to know to be a well-informed person.

Libraries give people the skill to decide for themselves what is credible, what is garbage--and where the difference is between the two. Critical thinking. Necessary to a clearly thinking people in a Democracy.

Libraries also give people a bigger view of the world--a telescope, so to speak--to see beyond the city walls of a place like Norwich.

Young people need to be guided and given the chance to look at the 'outside world' (as so many locals call it)--and imagine their own place in it.

You can take the skills that libraries help you develop onto the Net--and you will be a better educated user of the Net, and a better-informed, independent American citizen, too, because you can think for yourself.

All that because of libraries.

I say this: Keep them, fund them and nurture them. They are our museums of the mind and heart of humanity.

For the love of writing machines (aka typewriters)

Fri, 14 May 2010 11:04:05 -0400

I’m an Apple.

No I’ve not turned into a Macintosh, much as I enjoy picking and eating them.

But I am “keyboarding” this article on the IMac I use and enjoy using these days for so much more than writing.

As a boy I poked with two fingers at my first typewriter, a bright blue children’s 1960s Petite Feather Touch II with its own carrying case.

In a “personal typing” class in high school, tall, stern, white-haired Earl Potter would hold my fingers in the correct position on the keys of the old manual typewriter I learned on.

My ability to type helped me make a few bucks in college by typing papers for friends. It also let me support myself as a “temp” during more than one fallow period of my writing career.

I officially started that career—in my own mind, anyway—when I paid $50 just after my 1980 college graduation for a 40-year-old manual Royal KMM typewriter.

Many letters, poems and my earliest published articles—book reviews—were produced on the black cast-iron beauty/beast. It served me well until I got myself trained on a “word processor” in 1983.

After enjoying the networked word processors in the newsroom during my spring 1984 internship at the Christian Science Monitor, in Boston, it seemed a step back to the IBM “Selectric” typewriters then still in use at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, when I began my master’s program there the following January.

I bought my first PC in 1990, with the money I made from selling my recently deceased Dad’s car. He hadn’t been able to pay for my education, but I figured the computer would represent his investment in my future.

I owned two more PCs during the nineties and early 2000s before finally buying my Apple in 2006. I wanted to keep up with the trend in journalism toward the use of multimedia in storytelling. Not to sound like a commercial, but nobody integrates everything digital better than Apple.

I don’t think it’s only that I’ve passed the half-century mark--so maybe feeling a bit of nostalgia for my youth--that has me wanting to get that old Royal back to working condition. I’m an Apple, after all. I embrace new technology. I love everything digital.

Anthony Casillo, a New Yorker who has repaired and collected antique manual typewriters for 35 of his 55 years, put it well in a phone interview.

The man behind www.typewritercollector.com said that on any given day he might work in his Long Island shop on a 100-year-old typewriter and a cutting-edge computer.

“Seeing an old manual typewriter makes you stop and pause for a minute,” he said, “to reflect on all that’s happened since that instrument was in its heyday.”

He added, “Most of the time, in the hustle and bustle of everyday life you don’t take the time.”

So there’s that tangible, cast-iron connection to an earlier time.

But it isn’t mere nostalgia that makes many writers still work on old manual typewriters.

Part of it is an appreciation of the risk and romance of writing, of committing one’s thoughts and feelings in the printed word that can’t simply be taken back or deleted with the press of a button.

Ray Marr, 72, whose Marr Office Equipment shop on Main Street in Pawtucket, RI, has sold and serviced typewriters since his dad bought the business in 1950, recently recounted an experience that sums it up well.

A Providence Journal sports writer brought in his old Olivetti. The keys were worn after being pressed for years into the service of translating their user’s reporting into engaging and lively newspaper stories.

Could Mr. Marr fix the old machine?

After a thorough cleaning and with new keys harvested from the exact same Olivetti model he found in the shop’s basement “morgue” of broken typewriters, the old boy was good as new.

The owner was so excited about his “new” typewriter he ran out of the shop to fetch his wife from the car just to see it.

Two weeks later, Mr. Marr was shocked to come across the sports writer’s obituary in the newspaper.

Years later he tells the story to illustrate how attached writers become to their “writing machines.”

He was glad his work had brought such joy to the man so unexpectedly close to the end of his life.

As a writer myself I’ll venture to suggest something even deeper was happening for the reporter.

I think there was a certain fulfillment.

The beloved, taken-for-granted, no doubt at times despised instrument on which he had transposed the music of words and language that filled his heart and mind, had been renewed and restored to new life--and its life would continue, even after he himself had moved on.

It seems to me that’s as beautiful a note as any on which to end an article about writing machines--or a life.

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