Write a Comment
5 Comments
Going back to my college days. I remember Thomas Szasz' writing about dis-ease and what that meant as relating to your general health condition, physical and mental. I recommend it for consideration on this topic.
Okay, CL, but there's is a difference between describing someone as HIV positive and describing them as "unhealthy". When you denote HIV negative people as "healthy", it stands to reason that those who are positive are to be considered "unhealthy". "Unhealthy" is not a scientific descriptor. It is vague and for most people suggests someone whose physical appearance is not good and whose ability to carry out a normal life is impaired by their symptoms. I've been poz for 10 years now. I've never had symptoms of any kind and, not only have I never thought of myself as anything other than healthy, no one I know would either. People who are poz can be very healthy. The fact that they need to take medication does not change that. There are asthmatics, diabetics and epileptics who must take medication but who are "healthy".
Eh...may I interject something I thought was obvious: we, as HIV+, are carrying a very destructive virus which needs to be kept in check with onerous medication. If we were uninfected, we'd be healthy. How about not letting political correctness cloud what is after all reality.
Your right, about the insidious way poz people are labeled as ill by the media, and still by most of the population in this and other countries. It's almost expected that most negative people possess a naivete about what it's like to be person carrying what has become in many cases, a hidden condition. Hidden in the sense only in that we are past the time when people walked around with the clinically named "cadaverous" look. What I find more heinous is what you end your blog with. The audacity of gay men, in the online dating scene, who not only exclude people, as "clean" and "disease-free", but also exclude further into racial, degrees of masculinity, preferred sexual position, etc... Some write it off as "a preference", or, "just not my taste", as if humans are some sort of confectionery, while others claim that it's their right to protect themselves against HIV/AIDS. Of all, the latter to me is the most offensive, if that's possible, because it denotes an obvious prejudice, apparently, but moreover it puts the responsibility of staying negative solely on the person living with HIV/AIDS. In the year 2010, after decades of the first cases of this disease hit our community, there are way too many gay men who are still too insanely ignorant of their personal responsibility to remain negative. Hypocrisy is what will come back to bite their butts. Recently, I read a comment on another online magazine, that will remain nameless, in which the discussion about racism in gay online sex sites. One man was specific enough in his argument to have the right to discern who he sleeps with, by stating that he prefers not to sleep with Black men, not because of their race, but because Black men, gay or straight apparently, as he didn't make the distinction, are more than likely to be HIV positive than any other race. Although there is a specific problem in the African-American community, the statement also is fueling ignorance and shame in both communities, thwarting testing and reducing the spread of the disease. While dismissively ignoring the insidiousness of the plague of racism. Black man = risky sexual behavior = HIV/AIDS. So yes, I could see how the Times article can be inflammatory, but what is going on our own backyard is is incendiary. Which begs the question; Just how liberated are we?
Myles Helfand
I actually think the guy who wrote that article, Donald McNeil, is overall a responsible journalist on HIV-related topics -- surprisingly so, given that the newspaper he works for barely gives a crap about the subject unless it somehow manages to involve a U.S. political scandal. But the "healthy" thing bugs me, too, as does the NYTimes' insistence on using "AIDS" when "HIV" is the right term, which I think they do because they don't think their readers will understand if they use "HIV" instead. You also see words like "victim" and "suffer" and "patients" used a lot in mainstream media, all of which passively perpetuate this idea that people with HIV are objects to be pitied or judged. Ms. Whitehorn's right: It's exactly this kind of writing that, in its own way, perpetuates HIV/AIDS stigma and makes it that much harder for us to properly teach our society what it means to live with HIV. Not to mention what HIV even really is and why it should matter to the "average" (or, in the New York Times' case, the somewhat privileged) person.
December 20, 2010