Tag Archives: HIV/AIDS

LGBTIQ Equality, Politics

HIV/AIDS and discordant lingo

Leave a comment
CRYPTIC CROSSWORD Less acronyms and more plain talking on HIV/AIDS.
CRYPTIC CROSSWORD Less acronyms and more plain talking on HIV/AIDS.

A Writer calls for less HIV/AIDS weasel words.

THE world has been watching Melbourne this week as the city hosts the 20th International AIDS Conference.

Despite initial reports from the event focusing understandably on the delegates killed by the missile attack on their flight over eastern Ukraine, the conference agenda hit the airwaves visibly on this week’s episode of QandA.

As a result a range of new and unfamiliar language has been presented to mainstream and social media audiences. From ‘Sero-Discordant Relationship’, ‘PEP’, ‘PrEP’, ‘TasP’, ‘ART’ and ‘PMTCT’ to phrases like ‘heteronormative’ and ‘men who have sex with men’, Australians have been getting a higher-than-average dose of HIV/AIDS-related vocabulary.

Unfortunately the word use is not coming with enough interpretation. ‘Conference-style’ or ‘industry-speak’ acronyms and sound bites occur in every sector, but with its ‘Stepping Up The Pace’ mission statement, this particular conference and its media delegates could have done with more plain talking and less weasel words to get the important messages about HIV/AIDS through to the communities they are seeking to engage.

With new HIV infection levels in Australia at a 20-year high, one of those communities is surely ours. Surprising survey results on Queensland’s high-level ignorance about how HIV is acquired hit the mainstream media just a week after the conference.

The international conference has a focus on tackling new infections and raised questions about the direction new HIV/AIDS awareness campaigns should take, considering the scare-factor of the Grim Reaper ad campaign of the late 1980s, and new data which reveals the 96 per cent protection rate for sero-discordant sexual encounters if one of the partners is being treated with ARV.

If you’re confused it’s no wonder. I thought I knew plenty about HIV/AIDS, but, like writer and HIV activist Nic Holas who was on the QandA panel, I am torn about whether this should be an opinion piece or a community service announcement.

“I believe unlocking the acronyms will help.”

One of the terms the conference has chosen to focus on is ‘Men who have Sex with Men’ (MSM), although the focus is mainly on this HIV/AIDS risk group overseas.

“It is a key objective of the 20th International AIDS Conference to shine a light on those men who have sex with men, sex workers, transgender people and people who use drugs who do not have the same access to treatment, care and prevention as their western colleagues may do,” UNAIDS Executive Director Michel Sidibé said at the start of the conference.

Ever since the phrase was coined in the 1990s as a means of de-stigmatising HIV infections which were the result of heterosexual men who engaged in sex with other men, it has sat rather uninterpreted outside the HIV/AIDS community.

But is it effective when addressing Australians in the media? To answer that it’s important to underline that MSM does not mean ‘gay’ or ‘homosexual’, in fact the term was invented to shield MSMs from any hint of ‘gay’.

Many in the gay community have sexual encounters with MSMs in sex-on-premises businesses (read: ‘saunas’ and/or ‘bathhouses’) or at beats (read: ‘public toilets’, although beats are also located at road-stops, sports fields, and can often crop-up right in the high street at bookshops or other businesses).

SHINING A LIGHT On HIV/AIDS in Melbourne.
SHINING A LIGHT On HIV/AIDS in Melbourne.

It doesn’t take long at a gathering of gay men for the stories about baby seats in the backs of cars at beats, or wives dropping husbands at saunas, to enter the conversation with an awkward mixture of laughter and understanding. MSM do not identify as ‘gay’ and they (and therefore their heterosexual sexual partners) remain at very high risk of HIV infection, in part because they tend not to get tested regularly.

Post Exposure Prophylaxis (PEP) is a mouthful, but it’s also something the Australian community could develop a greater understanding of. Available at most hospital emergency departments, and essential to start before 72 hours have passed since exposure to the HIV virus, PEP is a four-week course of anti-HIV medication with a decent success rate.

Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) is similar, but it’s engaged as a means of preventing HIV infection. Sero-discordant couples (when one partner is HIV positive and the other is HIV negative) are in the demographic which can benefit from PrEP, including couples who are trying conceive a child while protecting the uninfected partner from contracting HIV.

Treatment as Prevention (TasP) is an approach to HIV prevention which acknowledges that a sexual partner taking antiretroviral (ARV) medication has a greatly-reduced viral load (the amount of HIV virus in body fluids). It’s important to acknowledge that ARV’s side-effects means this form of treatment program is not for everyone. TasP has made a significant difference in Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission (PMTCT) of HIV during breastfeeding.

‘Heteronormative’ is a term that has often cropped-up in HIV/AIDS debates, generally at the queer theory end of the spectrum, and it’s used to tackle the assumption that gender and sexual orientation fall into fixed categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ according to abstract ‘laws of nature’ that have led to the shaming of same-sex attracted people.

Such stigmatising only increases the conditions in which higher rates of HIV infection occur, no matter which country you live in.

There are many other new elements to HIV/AIDS, from home testing and rapid testing at clinics (which have the potential to ensure a higher rate of MSM testing), to new measures for assisting the ongoing health of long-infected PLWHA (‘People Living With HIV/AIDS’).

It’s a veritable alphabet of acronyms which many LGBTQI (there we go again) remain grateful for because this kind of language aims to avoid assumptions of ‘victims’ and blame.

While it’s tempting for Australians to believe that HIV/AIDS in a third-world issue, that we have tackled the problem, and there is plenty of good news to get our heads around, the issue of how to communicate that message without an increase in new HIV infections is now one of the main HIV/AIDS challenges facing Australia. I believe unlocking the acronyms will help.

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved.

Day Jobs, My Story

The Grim Reaper in the lunch room

Leave a comment
PRINTING IMPRESSED A romantic vision of my first day job at a printing firm.

A Writer’s first day job.

IN my last year of school, I was gently encouraged into some kind of employment. Having illustrated a local history book, I had a contact in the manager of a local printing firm.

After writing to him reminding him of my illustrations, he called and offered me a job.

My mental picture of working on a printing floor was rather romantic. Perhaps there would be intelligent people, poring over inks, print quality and words; contact with working writers and artists; and great pieces of literature on the brink of being born?

I worked out how to get to and from work on the local bus, arrived at the agreed time, and entered the workforce with an enthusiastic handshake and an introduction to my first task.

Remember those notebooks we used when people actually wrote things by hand, the kind with the red gum strip holding all the pages together? Whoever knew that they were gummed in one stack and had to be separated by hand?

Well I did, by the end of that first day, after separating a stack taller than me (I was then and still am 6’2”), into note pads of the same thickness.

Being at the back of the print floor, as I worked I had a view of the rest of the staff. Apart from the boss, who spent most of his time on the phone or working as his own receptionist at the front counter, there was a kind lady typesetting in a small glassed-in office, sitting at an enormous blue metal machine, out of the side of which a continuous flow of type would emerge.

There were two printing presses near me, operated by polite men, one of whom dressed in a neat, ink-stained lab coat, and the other who reminded me of Rod Stewart, had he ever embarked on a career in offset printing. Then there was the man whom I was to spend the most time with and learn the most from – the layout artist. We’ll call him Terry.

“His unbeatable aura of great skill in his work was quickly tarnished by the reality of his narrow-minded bigotry.”

At that time, Terry would have been in his fifties. A great teacher, he took me under his wing and showed me everything he knew, from setting type, to creating photographic or illustrative bromides to be set onto each aluminium plate, which he’d create in lightening speed for every job.

A business card he could dash off in about five minutes. A booklet in about an hour.

It was Terry who called time on morning tea and lunch, with a kindly manner which set the tone of the whole establishment. He spied that I’d committed myself to gummed notebook duties without fuss, and each time the boss would put me on an old collating machine, or packaging duties, Terry would ensure I’d get to learn something new before I’d collated or packed my brain into oblivion.

For a young writer-illustrator, this workplace was an immediate introduction to the nitty-gritty of publishing. I got to do a decent amount of creative work – dusting off little images for business cards and corporate documents. I got to edit a small magazine because there was no-one else to do it, in fact the boss landed the job on the basis of having someone around who had innate editing skills.

My five dollars an hour was money that I saw increasing in my bank account weekly, as I’d take my cheque up to the bank every friday afternoon before heading home.

For a day or two I fanstasised that this was a career choice for me – that somewhere, someplace, a writer-artist-editor could stick around a printing floor doing odd jobs and creating bits and pieces, for money. It was a vain hope. I always have plenty of those hanging around.

UNEXPECTED COLLEAGUE The Grim Reaper made an appearance in the lunch room of my first workplace (Image unknown, but in the pubic domain).
UNEXPECTED COLLEAGUE The Grim Reaper made an appearance in the lunch room of my first workplace.

What burst my bubble was not the limited creative prospects that I laid-out for myself, but the workplace reality of coming face-to-face with other peoples’ opinions.

I was from a very sheltered community (independent schools tend to create those) nothing about which really prepared me for some of the stuff that came out in the lunch room.

The most sudden example was the ‘AIDS is happening because God Hates Gays’ booklet, complete with the Grim Reaper on the cover, which Terry slid across the table to me, in front of everyone, saying: “You should read this.”

I was cornered, managing to not open it, but also not wanting to signal any kind of negative response. It was a nasty little polemic, but the paper quality was good – Terry had taught me how to gauge such things.

Later, while collating the latest golf club members’ booklet, Terry made a general observation to me that it was women who were better at such mundane tasks as collating and notepad separating, before pointedly not asking me into his company that afternoon to learn more about plate-making.

It took me a while to understand these blatant messages, because I was just so naive.

When University Orientation Week hit my diary, I decided to leave the job that had, for a short time, given me pleasure.

The boss and his wife were very kind in giving me a lovely set of graphic design pens as a send off. Mum noticed that I’d resigned a good week before Uni started, but I was incapable of explaining why.

None of my adult colleagues had enough spine to tell Terry to keep his opinions to himself, especially in front of an impressionable teenager. They were keeping the peace, I suppose. I did the only thing I knew how to do, which was to leave.

That’s the thing about day jobs – they’re easy to let go of when there is very little of your ego invested.

It might seem fitting of me to say that Terry taught me some kind of important lesson, but his unbeatable aura of great skill in his work was quickly tarnished by the reality of his narrow-minded bigotry. He taught me that not all words are beautiful.

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved.