Sunday Times: As Serious As Cancer

A senior NHS consultant, a former gynaecologist and a mother of three who all suffer from a rare blood cancer have been denied life-saving stem cell transplant operations because the NHS may be forced to pay for a drug that protects healthy people against HIV.

The three have undergone months of gruelling chemotherapy to prepare their immune systems for the operations but have now been told that the procedures will not go ahead.

NHS England decided to reassess their treatments after the High Court ruled last month that it must consider paying for the HIV drug.

It will cost an estimated £10m-£20m a year to pay for the HIV treatment, which is known as pre-exposure prophylaxis (Prep). This is a prevention strategy that involves people who are HIV-negative but at a high risk of infection taking a daily pill.

Although the HIV treatment has been hailed as a “game-changer” in the battle against the disease, some argue that priority should be given to those who are already ill rather than those who might become sick...

The Sunday Times - who under Andrew Neil's editorship in the 80s denied there was any link between HIV and Aids.

This is also utter balls - there is no connection.

Art: Aids America

No one has a fully convincing theory as to why gay men are so overrepresented among artists, writers and performers. But we are and, in the 1980s and early 1990s, Aids scythed through the American cultural landscape, wiping out a generation of creators and inspired others to mourn, memorialize, organize and fight back. Art Aids America, an exhibition on view at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, revisits those harrowing, death-trailed years, and argues that Aids changed the course of art history, not only through its casualties but through the response it galvanized. (The show was first seen at the Tacoma Art Museum, in Washington state.) It is far from a perfect exhibition, but it is a powerful one....

Guardian.

Photography: Nicholas Nixon

The people you saw with Aids in newspapers or on television were very gaunt gay men near death. It was easy for the public to say: I don’t use drugs, I’m not gay, I don’t need to care. And no one was writing about the humanity of these men, how they’d been oppressed. That seemed shabby to me. I thought, arrogantly, that a book of pictures of individuals might soften people’s attitudes. It would be a record of their place in life, right up to the end if they wanted. The gaunt picture would be preceded by images of them in better health...

Robert Sappenfield And His Parents (1987) by Nicholas Nixon.

My Best Shot, The Guardian.

Sex Roulette: Very Big In The Land Of Make Believe

It’s the ultimate in extreme sex – parties where one person secretly has HIV, and everyone has unprotected sex without knowing who it is.

Doctors in Barcelona have claimed that ‘sex roulette’ parties taking place, usually among gay men – and it echoes previous reports of such parties among wealthy people in Serbia.

The ‘thrill’ comes from knowing you might be infected, people who claim to have attended such parties say...

Last year, a Serbian stripper called Tijana claimed that the parties originated in Serbia – and were named Serbian sex roulette, after Russian roulette.

She said, ‘This bizarre variation that seems popular for extreme sex. People who turn up for the party wear masks, and one of them has HIV.

‘The wealthy organise these sex parties for other rich people. The real kick for these people is apparently the risk that they might be the one having sex with the HIV-infected partner.

Metro.

This is a complete fiction.

Rob Waugh, go fuck yourself, you complete fucking idiot.

PS Older readers may recall a decade ago the media reporting on 'bug chasing' by gay men who were, we were told, deliberately trying to get infected with HIV - this was soon shown to be an urban myth. 

Here's a great piece of bull fighting by Andrew Sullivan; Sex- and death-crazed gays play viral Russian Roulette! 

Yup, 'viral Russian roulette'.

History repeats...

Update: Regurgitated, pretty much verbatim, in the Mail Online.

And the Mirror.

And the Express and The Sun.

Seems journos can't resist a 'sex and death' story.

Note how they stress 'doctors warn', like that makes it true.

Presuming the doctor - singular - exists [Edit: He does, have emailed him], unless you believe in unquestioning subservience to authority figures, he may not be reliable.

Just ask Dr Harold Shipman, Josef Mengele, or the 50 British doctors who are struck off for malpractice every year.

Did someone say 'lobotomy'?

This really is 'journalism' at its fucking worst.

I challenge any journalist to find a 'sex roulette party' and attend.

And predictably repeated by the gaytards at Gay Star News.

PrEP: Waiting

Rarely has a u-turn, rarely has a breach of trust, been so misleadingly announced. Reading NHS England’s press release, ‘Update on commissioning and provision of PrEP for HIV prevention’ (21 March 2016), you would think the NHS were simply clarifying progress to date and the well understood responsibilities for the commissioning of PrEP. In fact this press release was the announcement of a shocking U-turn as NHS England suddenly abandoned its own process for the approval of PrEP, just before its conclusion, with nothing to replace it bar some loose change found down the back of the sofa....

This fiasco will have serious human consequences in the many HIV transmissions which will take place and which would undoubtedly have been prevented if the NHS had not walked away from PrEP. It epitomises the inability of our health system to value prevention. Perhaps also the failure of our health system to value equally the well-being of gay men. We cannot allow PrEP to be in limbo for a further two years, provided to just a few on a totally inequitable basis. We need Ministers to take a lead in providing as a matter of urgency a credible alternative for the commissioning and funding of PrEP for everyone at high risk as soon as possible.

Yusef Azad, National Aids Trust blog.

See also 'The government’s attitude to rising HIV transmission rates has proved reckless and negligent', Chris Godfrey, Attitude blog.

NHS refusing to offer PrEP is insulting in the face of thousands of gay men who will be diagnosed with HIV without it, Matthew Hodson, GMFA.

Thatcher: Anal Sex

When Downing Street asked for the wording of the advert to be reconsidered, Sir Norman [Fowler] made it clear he felt the threat posed by the “grave and unprecedented problem” was not being adequately appreciated in Number 10.

He wrote to Mrs Thatcher: “Unless there is a reference to anal intercourse, which has been linked with 85 per cent of AIDS cases so far, the advertisement would lose all its medical authority and credibility...

The row ended when health officials suggested that the phrase “anal sex” be replaced with “rectal intercourse” and Mrs Thatcher, perhaps beginning to be persuaded of the scale of the emergency, declared the new language acceptable.

Despite a warning that she was being seen as “reluctant to treat the issue with the seriousness it deserves”, the Prime Minister continued to be less than enthusiastic about the publicity campaign.

A series of leaflets and television adverts, famously showing a tombstone etched with the words “Don’t die of ignorance”, nonetheless followed...

The Independent.

See Fighting The Epidemic (The Truth About The Aids Panic), Don Milligan.

Much misunderstood at the time, but he was proved right.

Thatcher: Will Do Harm

Margaret Thatcher bitterly resisted calls for a major public education campaign to counter the threat of an Aids epidemic.

Papers released by the National Archives at Kew show how the prime minister repeatedly raised objections, warning that alerting teenagers to the dangers of “risky sex” could backfire and cause “immense harm”.

She only backed down after a series of stark warnings by advisers that hundreds of thousands could become infected by the Aids virus unless people - particularly gay men and drug users - were persuaded to change their lifestyles.

The first case of Aids in the UK was recorded in 1981 and by 1986 there was growing public awareness of the spread of the disease for which there was then no known treatment.

But when Health Secretary Norman Fowler proposed a newspaper advertising campaign setting out advice on “safe sex”, Mrs Thatcher was horrified.

In particular she objected to a section entitled “What is risky sex?”

“Do we have to do the section on risky sex?” she scrawled in a handwritten note. “I should have thought it could do immense harm if young teenagers were to read it.”

She suggested the advert could even breach the Obscene Publications Act and proposed a more limited campaign based on previous public information campaigns on “venereal disease”.

“I think the anxiety on the part of parents and many teenagers who would never be in danger from Aids, exceeds the good it may do,” she wrote.

“It would be better in my view to follow the ‘VD’ precedent of putting notices in surgeries, public lavatories etc. But adverts where every young person will read and hear of practices they never knew about will do harm.” ...

Mirror. 

Lest we forget, here's Pink News' legendary tribute, Margaret Thatcher, a controversial figure on gay issues, dies aged 87.

The Reagan Years: When Aids Was Funny

Watch this on The Scene.

One of the most prominent stains on the reputation of the much-mythologized Reagan administration was its response, or lack of response, to the AIDS crisis as it began to ravage American cities in the early and mid-1980s. President Reagan famously (though, not famously enough) didn’t himself publicly mention AIDS until 1985, when more than 5,000 people, most of them gay men, had already been killed by the disease. Filmmaker Scott Calonico’s new documentary short, When AIDS Was Funny, exclusively debuting on VF.com, shows how the Reagan administration reacted to the mounting problem in chilling fashion. Not even Reagan’s appointed mouthpiece, notorious press secretary Larry Speakes, had much to say about the crisis beyond derisive laughter.

Using never-before-heard audio tapes from three separate press conferences, in 1982, 1983, and 1984, When AIDS Was Funny illustrates how the reporter Lester Kinsolving, a conservative (and not at all gay-friendly) fixture in the White House press corps, was consistently scoffed at when he posed urgent questions about the AIDS epidemic...

What Calonico has compiled, juxtaposing the deeply troubling audio with images of AIDS patients at Seattle’s Bailey-Boushay House in the 1990s, is an infuriating summation of the Reagan administration’s fatal inaction in confronting a generation-defining tragedy... 

Vanity Fair.

Elizabeth Taylor: Bel Air Buyers Club

[Kathy] Ireland carries the torch passed on to her by her mentor, the late actress Dame Elizabeth Taylor. Before her death in 2011 at the age of 79, Taylor founded the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation to fund prevention and education and to direct care and services to people living with AIDS. Ireland revealed to ET that Taylor's activism work didn't stop there. According to Ireland, Taylor developed a secret underground network to get experimental HIV drugs to patients similar to the true story in the movie, Dallas Buyers Club.

"Talk about fearless in her home in Bel-Air," Ireland said. "It was a safe house. A lot of the work that she did, it was illegal, but she was saving lives. It was in a time when it was not something to do. Business associates pleaded with her, 'Leave this thing alone.' She received death threats. Friends hung up on her when she asked for help, but something that I love about Elizabeth is her courage."...

Entertainment Tonight.

Fantastic if true, but until some of Liz's other friends comment it's impossible to verify.

Charlie Sheen: Shame

Back in 1982 when developing AIDS was viewed as a death sentence, I attempted suicide when I discovered I was HIV positive.

After hearing so many terrifying stories of long, agonising deaths, I just couldn’t face it.

But society’s ignorant response was almost as frightening.

Fortunately my attempt to take my own life failed and thankfully we’ve moved on from the hysterical reaction to AIDS in the 1980s.

Advances in medication and a more open-minded society have helped, but the Government is cutting funding for HIV services, there are new diagnosis every day and not everyone responds to the medication which combats the virus.

Now Charlie Sheen hasn’t helped the struggle to combat the stigma and misinformation that still surrounds the illness.

His claim that it would have been “impossible” to pass it on to other people is particularly damaging...

I understand the difficulties surrounding someone in Hollywood admitting this and it’s appalling to hear he’s been blackmailed.

Though going public about his status could have contributed towards normalising the condition - an important step in combating the spread of the virus.

Sheen is only admitted it because he was forced to do so.

It all contributes to a warped perception of the illness and turns HIV back into the sinister secret it was viewed as 30 years ago.

Joanthan Blake, also of LGSM (note the Pits & Perverts t-shirt), in the Mirror.

Bit of an odd one this, especically when you consider the Mirror's role in trying to (force) out Charlie Sheen, their awful 'Hollywood HIV panic' angle, and the incredibly shitty Fleet Street Fox article; The Hollywood actor with HIV deserves everything he gets - and worse.

But bear in mind this is in the Mirror and may only be very loosely based on what Jonathan said. 

PS A less judgemental piece from Independent Voices...

Hollywood HIV Panic: Oh, It's Charlie Sheen!

There you go, 'panic' over.

Maybe we'll go back to scaremongering about chemsex now?

NB Dan Wootton has not taken credit for the Mirror's story this time.

PS And the Telegraph re-run This is what it's really like to live with HIV (first published in April).

PPS What is HIV? The Express finds out!

Update: Fact-checking the [US] media on Charlie Sheen and HIV - and more on 'inflammatory media coverage'.

Hollywood HIV Panic: 1980s Flashback!

Independent.

OJ writing about gay men as a strange abstraction again in The Guardian.

Gay Times.

Yeah, we get it, it's just like the 80s.

Blah blah blah stigma shame bad stuff etc.

Got anything interesting or original to say?

Nope?

Thought not.

PS And the wonderfully illiterate Pink News comes up top trumps!

Like a 14 year-old schoolboy's essay trying to show off by using a big word, unfortunately 'eviscerate' is the wrong word; it means 'disembowelling a goat.'

The Sun: Panic!

The 80s revival starts here.

NB Shamefully, the byline on this story is The Sun's token gayer, Dan Wootton. *

Dan lists a number of gay celebrities who have died of Aids-related illnesses or are living with HIV, but neglects to mention which The Sun and or The News Of The World tried to 'expose'.

* Readers of Private Eye will know that Mr Wootton regularly takes credit for his Sun Showbiz staff's stories, but this one's so crappy we shouldn't let him off the hook even if he 'only' approved it.

Update: An unbelivably shitty piece by The Mirror's Fleet Street Fox - erm...

This poll was deleted after it was pointed out it was also really shitty...

Photography: Rosalind Fox Solomon

Taken in the homes of people with Aids, Rosalind Fox Solomon’s provocative pictures from the late 80s challenged the ‘victim culture’ that surrounded the illness. She showed it could affect anyone – from women who’d had transfusions to the children of infected mothers.

The series will be shown at the Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York, during Paris Photo, in the Salon d’Honneur, a space dedicated to photography of historic importance.

Guardian online gallery.

Matthew Parris: Victims

Over my political lifetime I’ve watched a common English noun acquire a kind of holiness. The word is “victim”. In almost every field of politics and administration it is being used to lift claims beyond proper scrutiny.

So widely has this word now been stretched that at least one group of victims have appropriated to their cause the word “survivor” — “victim” being no longer enough. Victimhood is used everywhere as a weapon for getting priority, money or attention. It isn’t always wrong; but it is way of seeing the world that risks distorting our perspectives on government...

Gay men in Britain have been lucky our claimed victim status never turned sour. I feared it would — and did have some hint of that in the “what will they want next?” response that gay marriage legislation attracted from some. The HIV/Aids campaign must be counted a success for victim-led campaigning but I was never comfortable with the conflation of homosexuality with victimhood. Aids was a disease. So is lung cancer. Sufferers must be offered all help and sympathy, and the apportionment of blame is cruel and fruitless. But Aids did not make gay rights a nobler cause; the whimper that homosexuals “can’t help it” infuriates me — what difference should it make if we could? — and (vigorous supporter of Stonewall’s work though I remain) it is high time gays stopped playing the sympathy card, held our heads up and accepted we no longer have any urgent claim on the nation’s finite supply of pity...

The Times. 

Of course some have founded an entire career on presenting gay men as perpetual eternal victims.

PS This from Queerty is something of a masterclass in the 'We hate ourselves so much we are literally fucking and drugging ourselves to death!' mis lit school of gay journalism.

Wouldn't be suprised if he gets asked to write a column for Attitude.

Sex Survey: Oh Really?

UK-based gay men’s charity GMFA has carried out its biggest ever survey into gay men’s sex lives – with results that are both encouraging and others that are slightly worrying.

Of the 3,000 responses, high numbers of men admitted not using condoms when they had sex – although the majority of respondents also claimed to have had a sexual health test in the past twelve months.

In addition, over half of the men in the sample had fewer than five sexual partners in the last year – with 58% saying that they had had sex in the last week.

However, some of the most interesting results were those concerning HIV awareness and treatment.

Over half of respondents had not been diagnosed with HIV admitted that they were worried about becoming HIV-positive – but only a third admitted to using condoms the last time they had anal sex.

By contrast, 90% of gay with HIV said they used condoms the last time they had a sexual partner – and 71% claimed that they would use PrEP immediatley if it was available on the NHS...

Pink News. 

Yes, very interesting, but for the love of cock, you can't generalise from a self-selecting online survey.

And any sex survey should be taken with a rather large pinch of salty spunk.

The full survey results are in FS magazine's The Sex Issue.

Fagburn wonders if PN have read the editorial? 'Stats can be great to use. We love using them. But they can be manipulated to create a headline that doesn’t paint a full picture...'

IRONY EXPLOSION!!!

PS Yes, Gay Star News got the same press release and used the same headline (with added anal).

Adventures In Capitalism: Is This Man A Cunt?

Clue: The answer's 'yes'.

Normally an American would have to kill a lion to become so instantly and intensely hated.

PS A boffin explains how this crooked scam works (against us).

Sex: High Risk Myths

Utter nonsense from the vanilla erotophobic fart machine that is The Independent.

The author is a self-styled 'sex researcher' ie completely reliable, yeah?

All names have been changed - presumably to protect the probably made-up people.

Odd that this is about straight men who go to 'sex clubs' (which don't really exist) when 'bug-chasing' by gay men was shown to be a media-constructed homophobic myth 12 years ago.

Coz ALL DEM SAD TORTURED GAYZ ARE LITERALLY FUCKING THEMSELF TO DEATH!

What next?

An exposé on straight 'slamming'?

John Curry: Skating On Thin Ice

One of the authors in contention to win a prestigious sports book award is angry that John Curry, the Olympic figure skating champion, is largely ignored in the debate about homosexuality in sport, despite having the courage to reveal that he was gay almost 40 years ago.

Two of the titles shortlisted for the Cross British Sports Book Awards next week deal with sportsmen and their struggle with their sexuality.Proud, by Gareth Thomas and Michael Calvin, deals with how the former Wales and British Lions captain tried to hide the truth from his team-mates, but according to Bill Jones, author of Alone: The Triumph and Tragedy of John Curry, sportsmen such as Thomas and, more recently, Tom Daley, have been able to be honest about their sex lives in a far less hostile environment than that faced by Curry.

“Much as I hugely admire Tom Daley and Gareth Thomas for what they have done through social media or the biography, they are not doing anything that John didn’t do and they are taking far fewer risks because we are ready for it, we can deal with it,” Jones says.

“Homosexuality in sport is still a massive issue, but coming out does not engender the same feelings of isolation that it did for John and the support networks are there now. It’s fascinating that nearly four decades on since he sat in front of Fleet Street and told them he was gay, we still kind of think it is remarkable when someone comes out.

“It’s a bit sad for John that in that debate he gets left out. Part of me feels angry on John’s behalf that he’s not given the credit for that act of courage in 1976.”

Jones says that he has given a great deal of thought as to why Curry’s confession soon after his mesmerising performance at the Innsbruck Winter Games did not do more to speed along acceptance of homosexuality in sport.

“Part of the problem was that we didn’t have the language to have that conversation,” Jones says. “Newspapers didn’t know how to write about it or phrase it. The language was new. People didn’t talk about partners. The press found themselves in a position to ask John questions but they didn’t know quite how to ask them.

“It was more comfortable for John’s confession to just go quietly away. It wasn’t much better when he was dying at home in Warwickshire. The discomfort of the papers: they weren’t sure whether to have a go at an Aids sufferer or feel sorry for them.” ...

The Times.

Ice-skating is the only sport, apart from diving and boxing obvs, the gays are any good at.

Here's a Guardian excerpt from the book.

V&A: The Unnatural History Museum

'Corporate greed, government inaction and public indifference make Aids a political crisis'.

Gran Fury's 1989 détournement of a vacuous Benneton ad for Act Up is part of the V&A's LGBT collection.

The V&A are hosting a LGBTQ Tour of the museum each last Saturday of the month, starting tomorrow.

For more queer artefacts and stuff see Out In The Museum.

'My Heroes', April Ashley by Grayson Perry.

PS You may also enjoy the British Museum's Same-sex desire and gender identity trail and website.