BY MAURICE FARRELL
& RACHEL EVANS
According to a UNAIDS/World Health Organisation report "AIDS Epidemic Update 2003", released on November 25, an estimated 40 million people are now infected with HIV. Three million died last year from AIDS. The virus has killed around 26 million people, half of them women, in the last 23 years. Sixty-eight million are expected to die by 2020.
In sub-Saharan Africa, the situation is dire. More than 3 million people were infected there last year — and it is home to an estimated 30% of those infected with HIV. According to UNAIDS 2002 report, 600 South Africans die every day from AIDS.
In India, 3.97 million people are living with HIV and in Latin America and the Carribean, 1.9 million. The 2003 update identifies China and Russia as potential sites of "new epidemics".
Even in the First World, where the problem is not nearly as serious, infections are rising significantly. According to the president of the AIDS Council of NSW, Adrian Lovney, there was a 10-15% increase in Victoria and NSW last year.
With an average post-infection "lifespan" of a terrifying two-three years in the Third World, where drug treatment is prohibitively expensive, and 15-30 years in Australia where drugs are more available, HIV is a worldwide health disaster.
After concerted First World prevention campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s led to a drop in infection rates — a result of sustained grass-roots campaigns — the emphasis has now shifted to treatment programs, and the rates of infection are on the rise again.
Prevention, both within the First World and the Third World, is less profitable for pharmaceutical companies than drug treatment. While First World governments can spend money on subsidising AIDS treatment drugs, Third World governments have little extra money to give to the pharma giants. The lives of those dying the most rapidly — poor black Africans — do not rate a blip on the care scale for the profit-hungry fat cats.
The first cases of what was originally termed the Gay Related Immune Deficiancy were discovered in the late 1970s in New York. The epidemic quickly spread across the United States, and was soon being diagnosed in other First World countries.
The disease hit the gay community hard. According to Dennis Altman's Aids and the New Puritanism, 4000 gay men died in five years in the US.
The so-called gay disease
San Francisco's famous dens with their heaving mass of male bodies writhing in the dance of same-sex couplings, were deathly quiet in the early to mid-1980s. Gay men were watching their loved ones die inexplicably, and praying the flu, diarrhea and spots didn't mean they too, had the killer virus.
Instead of sympathy from governments and churches, the gay community was accused of killing heterosexuals who were unfortunate enough to get a transfusion of HIV-infected blood.
In response, thousands responded to the call, "Don't agonise, organise!". ACTUP — the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power — was formed in the 1980s.
ACTUP was primarily based in the US, where it had more than 29 branches. But as AidsDemoGraphics, a pictorial history of the movement written and compiled by Douglas Crimp and Adam Rolston in 1990, points out: "Although our struggles are most often waged at a local level, the AIDS epidemic and the activist movement dedicated to ending it is national and international in scope, and the US government is a major culprit in the problems we face and a central target of our anger."
The creativity and boldness of ACTUP's work has lessons for activists today.
Mass demonstrations, mass disruption of official conferences, sit-ins, occupations of government offices, mock die-ins and mock quarantine camps within pride marches were all hallmarks of this courageous movement. A pink triangle, used by the Nazis to identify homosexuals, emblazoned "silence = death" became its "logo".
ACTUP produced amazing posters promoting safe sex and AIDS activism, massive placards calling then-US President Ronald Reagan a killer and a hypocrite for refusing to take more action, and a mock AIDS edition of the New York Times, which replaced the normal homophobic publication through a daring mass replacement of the paper at 3am all across New York.
ACTUP demanded research funding, affordable drugs, an end to perpetual government inaction, an end to the homophobic lies and bigotry within the media and government officials and access to the established AIDS organisations.
And when the anti-Gulf War movement erupted in the early 1990s, battle-hardened queens and kings threw themselves into the fray, yelling "More money for health — not war".
And the campaigning paid off with incresed government support for treatment. By the late 1990s, treatments had began to increase lifespans, the state began to take up the safe-sex message, including to schools. Condoms and lube were available in hotels, pubs, clubs and beats. And the infection rate declined.
In Australia, where high schools remain condom-free, sex education featured less "abstinence is the only cure" and more bananas being condom wrapped by biology teachers. Sex-on-site porn showed the joys of dental dam rimming and the ecstasy of "topping" with a condom on.
But while the First World activists who had survived were getting complacent with a dropping infection rate and better treatment, in the Third World, the AIDS crisis was just hitting its stride.
The Third World pandemic
And there, there was even less sympathy for AIDS sufferers. Drugs now available in the First World were nowhere to be seen in the Third World.
Journalist Barton Gellman's research bears this out. In a December 27, 2000 article for the Washington Post entitled, "An unequal calculus of life and death", Gellman notes that the pharma industry has more or less abandoned the Third World. He explained:
"Corporate boards and regional operating companies have weighed the costs and benefits of pricing AIDS medicines within reach of most of the dying. With the tacit and sometimes explicit assent of public authorities, the companies decided the costs were too great.
"'The brutal fact', health economist William McGreevey told an invitation-only World Bank audience on May 22, 1998, was that 'those who could pay' for Africa's AIDS therapy — the pharmaceutical industry, by way of price cuts, and 'rich-country taxpayers', by way of foreign aid — 'are very unlikely to be persuaded to do so.' Despite appearances, that assessment is yet to be disproved."
By the mid-1990s, AIDS activism was less fighting homophobia in the First World, and more fighting for equal access to treatment in the Third World. The South African Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) — formed in mid 1990s — currently has 10,000 members.
Its demands are similar to ACTUP's: to ensure access to affordable and quality treatment for people with HIV/AIDS; to prevent and eliminate new HIV infections; and to improve the affordability and quality of health-care access for all. The organisation also "campaigns against profiteering from drug companies".
The South African campaigners are mostly black, mostly poor, have a long history of activism and live in a country with gross wealth inequality. TAC focuses on raising the visibility of the issue through poster campaigns, street action and pamphlets.
TAC and ACT-UP-style activism is needed now, across the world.
In Australia, much of the safe-sex message has drifted away. It is common to see "bare-backing" (penetration without a condom) in sex shows and requested in personal ads in the gay press. But the First World problem is still a drop in the ocean in comparison to the station across the globe.
We must challenge the "education campaigns" such as in Papua New Guinea, that argue that abstinence and monogamy will eliminate the disease. In Australia, we must challenge the reduction of visible condoms in gay pubs, the lack of leaders of the AIDS organisations wanting to go to beats and campaign. We need to challenge the rise of syphilis and gonorrhea due, partly, to the lack of accessible safe-sex information in high schools.
An arrest in the spread of HIV/AIDS here would be possible with a challenging street campaign. We have to re-preach a safe-sex message, produce posters/banners/T-shirts that say "Bare-backing = suicide". We need to write about safe sex, popularise the use of condoms, go on spray-ups with the old slogans, and make up some new ones.
We need to link up with activists in PNG, Indonesia and South Africa and compare out movements' successes and failures. Offering solidarity and support to those fighting for this disease to be taken seriously where it is most devastating should be a priority.
We need to do this, because of, in the words of Crimp and Rolston, "the thousands who have died because of government inaction in the AIDS crisis, and the survival of the millions who are fighting to stay alive."
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, December 10, 2003.
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