Homo-negativity to blame
A former White House science advisor visiting Australia says governments need to look harder at the social factors driving recent increases in Western HIV rates, particularly ‘homo-negativity’ from religious and ethnic communities.
Dr Judith Auerbach, who is now vice president of science and public policy at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, will address increasing infection rates among men who have sex with men at the 2009 Australasian Sexual Health and HIV conferences in Brisbane this week.
“HIV infection rates among gay men have increased steadily since the 1990s, while they’ve declined among most other population groups. The epidemic is still overwhelmingly among gay men,” Auerbach told the Sydney Star Observer.
New estimates from the US Centers for Disease Control claim men who have sex with men are 50 times more likely to have HIV than other men and women.
Higher rates of depression and alcohol and substance abuse among adult gay men have consistently been linked to HIV acquisition risk, Auerbach said.
“It’s all connected to being gay in a homo-negative culture. The background of gay men’s lives can have an ultimately very complicated pathway to acquisition and transmission of HIV.
“Everything from child sexual abuse, to being bullied in school, to other ways you could define homo-negativity, the ways dominant culture is negative to homosexuality and is played out by bullies, has a relationship to adult behaviours that lead to HIV risk.”
African American gay men have even higher HIV rates. Auerbach said that had a lot to do with their social position, driven in part by the homophobic black church culture, and also their low visibility in so-called gay refuge destinations like San Francisco’s Castro district.
“[Same-sex] marriage is not necessarily protective,” she said. “Most transfers continue to happen between main partners, not the other partnerships. All people tend to use condoms with their non-main partnerships.”
Auerbach and the SFAF are now facing the challenge of whether it is possible to tell gay men to have fewer sexual partners.
“We’re more likely to say ‘use condoms correctly and consistently’ than we are to say ‘don’t have multiple sex partners’. We don’t take an abstinence-only point of view, but we do point out there are epidemiologic arguments to be made that it would make more sense to reduce one’s sex partners.”
Gay communities are still important, Auerbach said, but gay men’s sexuality is increasingly only one part of their lives, making the traditional strength of gay communities in combating HIV more complex.
It doesn’t’ really take a rocket scientist to figure out that when you teach your gay children to hate themselves that, duh, they will grow up to hate themselves.
This, of course, does not take the responsibility off of gay men to protect themselves. However, when you are taught day after day and year after year and decade after decade by your own family and by society that your life is worthless and meaningless, a human being might actually start to BELIEVE that.
And when Heterosexuals send these young, abused, damaged gay children out into the world with the knowledge that humankind despises them and not only wishes them harm, but actually wishes for their death, well, you do the math, folks.
Don’t these ‘science’ people realize that they are studying the WRONG THING. It is not Homosexuals that need to be studied. It is HETEROSEXUALS that need some lab work, here. Why isn’t anyone studying the character-flawed Heterosexual and their ability to treat the very Gay & Lesbian children that Heterosexuals themselves created in such vile and immoral ways? THAT is what we need an antidote for. The absolutely immoral treatment of Gay & Lesbian children by the very people that CREATE Gay & Lesbian children.
And I’ll bet that has never even crossed a Heterosexual mind.
A lot of very broad statements which include conclusions that can only be based on unreliable sources.
“HIV infection rates among gay men have increased steadily since the 1990s, while they’ve declined among most other population groups”
How do they define ‘gay men’.
It seems very convenient that the infection rates have declined amongst the other ‘groups’.
Everyone who knows straight people know that they take no precautions when having sex and that they are very promiscuous.
But apparently the studies conclude that the infection rates amongst gay men have increased because gay men have sex with other men. No mention of drug addicts contracting the disease through intravenous injections.
Perhaps with some carefully crafted questions included in clinical surveys, drug addicts are now defined as ‘gay men’. Perhaps prisoners in gaol are now defined as ‘gay men’ because they have homosexual sex and abuse drugs while they are incarcerated.
The fact that convicts would kill any gay men they met outside gaol doesn’t make the data because it doesn’t fit the terms of reference of the reports and cannot be measured with the instruments created to compare the data collected.
Governments and political parties can and do manipulate research data.
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare produces reports relating to child abuse in Australia.
The Institute does not use the definition of ‘incest’ as an instrument to measure a discrete act amongst all the acts defined as child sexual abuse. Political parties and lobby groups have used their influence to eliminate a frequently occurring method of child sexual abuse from the terms of reference for statistical surveys for the deliberate purpose of concealing the extent and frequency of the offence.
In the current article we are expected to believe that the incidence of HIV infections amongst gay males is increasing while the incidence of the disease amongst other groups is decreasing.
I strongly suspect that Governments and lobby groups have perverted the terms of reference of those organisations tasked to collect statistics on the infection rates of HIV amongst the various groups in society for the deliberate purpose of fostering ‘homo-negativity’.
If a drug addict contracts HIV through needle sharing he is categorised as a gay male. If a convict contracts aid through needle sharing and having unprotected sex he is categorised as a gay male.
If a heterosexual male was diagnosed with HIV he might be asked some carefully crafted questions – any answer to which would categorise him as a gay male.
To believe the data I have to believe in the integrity and ethics of the people and organisations tasked to collect the data.
Those organisations are funded by governments. The people who work for those organisations rely on their salaries to survive.
Governments can and do use their influence upon the organisations they fund.
I do not trust the data because I do not trust the governments that control the agencies that collect the data.