Tweeting, Barebacking, and More

• Thanks to William Bradley for the link to an article about a man who tweeted the argument he was forced to overhear at a Burger King in Boston.  The article's author argues that the argument should not have been made public on Twitter, and many of those who left comments agree.  I disagree, though there are too many reasons to get into why.  I just don't get why people are shocked when things done in public are made public.  Since the Rodney King beating, we know that cameras and recoding devices are everywhere, and that was before we were even talking about social media.  It's funny that so many are upset that this was made public on Twitter, but if this fight had led to the murder or assault of one member of the couple by the other, he'd be a hero for documenting what led to the crime.  We can't have it both ways.
• I love how the last paragraph of this article about some of the problems that have occurred at various occupy sites puts sexual assaults at the same level as peeing in a bottle.  We were in the middle of the power outage when a women's only tent was created at Occupy Wall Street because some women felt the park wasn't safe, so I don't know if anyone has been talking about that or if it has been kept quiet so representation of the movement stays entirely positive.
• John Hodgins tweeted a link to this great article on happiness.  It's a lot of common sense, but it's also concise, clear, and something I think I should read daily.
• I was really happy to see such an extensive article about sex parties and barebacking in SF Weekly, but I did feel compelled to leave this comment at the site: "As someone who has been around and having sex since the 80s, who lost my first husband to AIDS as well as numerous friends, I really can't believe we're still having this discussion. People were having sex without condoms way before any porn company had videos showing it, way before barebacking was a word, and way before we had even a tenth of the drugs we have now to combat HIV. If you condemn the practice, it will not disappear. It will just go further underground. Shaming people about their sexual practices (when it's consenting adults with consenting adults) will lead to nothing but more pain, death, and conflict. Lots and lots of people have sex with condoms. Lots of lots of people do not. I'd rather have conversations than point fingers and say the government should step in and do something to 'those people.'"  I've left other comments, too, in response to what some people have said to me, but it's all the same kind of conversation we all usually have on this subject, and that's sad, really.

from Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner's "Sex in Public"

Word, part two.

"Respectable gays like to think that they owe nothing to the sexual subculture they think of as sleazy. But their success, their way of living, their political rights, and their very identities would never have been possible but for the existence of the public sexual culture they now despise" (Berlant and Warner 563).

The (Missing) Faces of African-American Girls with AIDS

Anyone who has been following me online for the last few years may remember occasional mentions of an article I was writing on representations of African-American girls with AIDS.  Well, it's now published!  Feminist Foundations has it as their lead article in the Spring 2010 issue, which just appeared this summer.  If you have Project Muse, you can download it (and perhaps get me on the Most Frequently Downloaded Articles list!).  Otherwise, email me for a copy.

From Larry Kramer's "Nuremberg Trials for AIDS"

Each of many, many people committed acts of inconceivable inhumanity that must be documented. Without such official documentation, the politics of homo-hating and bigotry will continue to rule the world and this plague will never end.

More. . .

Two Reasons Why Some People Do Not Get Tested for HIV

At 3:00 PM EST today, the National HIV Testing Day Twitter Town Hall will be taking place.  Check out the #nhtd hashtag for tweets about HIV testing.  My initial thoughts are too long to convey in a tweet, so I thought I'd map them out here.  HIV testing is incredibly important, but there are two things that always come to mind whenever I hear people calling for HIV testing, two reasons why people may not want to get tested.  I've been talking about both of these reasons for years, and no one has been able to give me strong counterarguments for them that I can use when people give these reasons to me.  I welcome hearing such perspectives in the comments.

The first reason has gotten more attention in recent health care reform debates.  Many people do not get tested for HIV because they do not want to be labeled as having a pre-existing condition when it comes to seeking health insurance.  Years ago in graduate school, I had a friend who said that he was not going to get tested until he earned tenure and could be more greatly assured that he would never lose his insurance since he would have greater job security.  There's a lot of logic to what he said.  If he took a new job and had to sign up for new insurance, a pre-existing condition could make it difficult, and drug therapies aimed at HIV are not cheap.  This is one reason why many of us argue that true health care reform must include provisions for those who have a range of pre-existing conditions. 

The second reason why some people choose not to get tested for HIV has to do with our judicial system.  Many people do not want to get tested for HIV because being HIV-positive subjects them to greater criminal prosecution.  Back in the late 1980s when I started having sex, the belief was that you needed to take measures to protect yourself if you did not want to contract HIV.  In the late 1990s, that began to change as states (over thirty of them at last count) began to argue that individual responsibility was largely irrelevant and instead started to criminalize the transmission of HIV.  Actually, I'm wrong.  In five states (Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, South Dakota, and Tennessee), you do not have to transmit HIV to be a criminal.

Missouri really drives me batty, though.  As Tim Dean puts it in Unlimited Intimacy, "Missouri is unique in explicitly denying the use of a condom as a defense" (6n10).  In other words, if you are a man who is HIV-positive, and you have sex with someone while wearing a condom and without disclosing your status, you are a criminal.  If you are an HIV-positive woman, and you have sex with a man and ask him to wear a condom but do not disclose your status, then you are a criminal.  If you are transgender, then this point obviously applies to the person/people who insert(s) a penis into the other(s).  We can (and should) discuss the ethics of disclosure but not here.  My argument in this post is that the criminalization of HIV transmission has had the effect of pushing some people not to get tested.  As someone told me when I was doing HIV-related volunteer work when I lived in Ohio, "If I don't know my HIV status, then I decrease the reasons why someone would want me in jail."

Many people use the argument that getting tested for HIV and learning your status means that you gain greater control over your own health and well-being.  There's a lot of truth to that.  But getting tested and finding out you have HIV also means that you become a member of a class of people known as the HIV-positive, and we live in a country that means people with that label are allowed to be treated in ways people without that label do not, which means losing some of the control people have before being tested.  Many people who do not want to be treated in those ways simply do not get tested.  In no way am I arguing that getting tested for HIV is a bad thing.  It can be really important and even necessary.  I do just want to be clear that there are legitimate reasons why some people choose not to be tested, and dismissing those reasons does not help anyone.

If you believe in the importance of HIV testing, then I hope you not only urge individuals to get tested but also push our local, state, and national governments to enact laws (or remove laws) that will encourage and not discourage people from getting tested.  It's something I'm trying to do by raising these issues whenever I can.

ETA: I created a Twapper Keeper for all of the #nhtd tweets.

The Need for Sexual Exploration

While reading Richard Meyer's Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (2002), I found this quotation from Cindy Patton's Sex and Germs: The Politics of AIDS (1985).

AIDS must not be viewed as proof that sexual exploration and the elaboration of sexual community were mistakes. [. . .] Lesbians and gay men [. . .] must maintain that vision of sexual liberation that defines the last fifteen years of [our] activism (235-6).

I think this rings even more true today in light of the continuing conservative backlash against queers of all types at local, state, national, and international levels as well as the mainstream gay/lesbian movement's current emphasis on a liberal (as opposed to a radical) political agenda.

You Take the Good, You Take the Bad

Yep, what happened in Maine sucks. It's one thing not to give a group of people rights. It's another thing to take away rights that a group has. But, whatever, been there, done that.

Instead, I'm rather excited that the federal government is lifting the ban on HIV+ people traveling into the United States. That makes me really happy because it changes the potential for my research. There have been time I've been at conferences and had to listen to speakers from other countries say they had to lie about their health to get into the country to speak, and there have been plenty of other times when I've been to conferences and someone was not able to attend because they didn't want to lie, and they knew it would be illegal for them to enter this country. That means I lose a chance to learn from some pretty great people.

This also means that the International AIDS Conference can be held in the United States! I'm not saying I'll be able to attend, but the chance of attending increases when it's actually in this country. And the travel ban was the number one reason why it hasn't been in this country in recent years. After all, if it's illegal for half the presenters and attendees to show up, why have it here? And I just made up that number; I don't know how many attend who are HIV+, but a lot do.

The potential of lifting the ban is really exciting.

A Little Talk about Wojnarowicz

(For my regular readers: At the RSA Seminar this week, we have been asked to compose a blog post like one you would see on No Caption Needed. I'm altering that for selfish reasons. I want to get that damn Wojnarowicz article I've been talking about for years to a journal by the end of 2009, so I'm taking every opportunity I can to write for that article. So I'm doing a close reading of one of the images I plan to discuss there. That's what this is. Feel free to comment, since this is part of a project I intend to pursue in depth, as anyone who has known me for a while knows. I have none of my research with me, so this is a basic close reading, but any and all feedback is welcome. Because the journal may not be able to reproduce images, I am writing as though the image is not included in this entry.)

This is one representative example of the images contained within the Sex Series. Like every other image in the series, Wojnarowicz prints it so that the image looks not like a standard photograph but more like it is a negative, still in black-and-white but with the light patterns reversed. The dominant image is a photograph of the two main bridges connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn, Manhattan Bridge and Brooklyn Bridge. The top right of the photograph shows the southeastern edge of lower Manhattan, while the bottom shows the northern sections of Brooklyn. The photograph depicts a somewhat typical skyline shot clearly taken from a plane. The viewer is place well above this scene, barely able to distinguish any building but the tallest skyscrapers, let alone individual cars on the bridges. It is a vast and familiar public space, one where millions of people shift in and out of it each day.

At the top of the image's left corner, Wojnarowicz has place a circular inset depicting sexual activity between two people. One person on all fours straddles the face of another person lying on her or his back. This inset represents the private domain. Acts like this one could be occurring throughout the public space in the image's background (though, hopefully, not in any cars on the bridge). In many ways, it is a completely average sex act between completely average people. But even though the act is average and ordinary, it is often shrouded in secrecy and shame. Wojnarowicz, knowing that American society does not engage in larger, public discussions about diverse facets of sexuality, wants the placement of these two images together to remind us that sex is everywhere, that it is as ordinary as the bridges that connect Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Gender is impossible to determine in the inset because of both the technique of printing is as a negative that I mention above but also because it is cropped in a way that removes the head and upper torso of the top person and the lower body of the bottom person. The sex act dominates. In depositions related to the court case, it is clear that Wildmon assumes these people are two gay men engaging in fellatio, but Wojnarowicz makes it clear that these are women participating in cunnilingus. I clarify gender in this case because it reflects what I see as one of Wojnarowicz's goals for the entire Sex Series. As a gay man, Wojnarowicz knows that viewers will assume he is promoting the need to acknowledge gay male sexuality in a world where thousands have died from or continue to live with HIV. But Wojnarowicz wants to promote the acknowledgment of sexuality in general. Many images in the Sex Series depict gay male sexuality, but others contain heterosexual sex, and this one highlights lesbian sex. Using the image of the negative erases gender (except in those insets that show a penis protruding from a male body) and highlights the normalcy of sexuality across genders.

The use of a circle may initially appear to be an ordinary way of inserting this private scene into this public space, but there is much more going on here. The use of the circle highlights visualizing technologies. Both the microscope and the telescope, devices that look outward and inward, use circular lenses. And connecting the insets to those technologies supports my claim above about the need to acknowledge the things that define our existence even if they usually remain invisible to the naked eye. The blood cells that carry oxygen to our hearts (and, in some cases HIV) and the stars that provide us light at night are a part of human existence. At the same time, reflecting on these technologies--and the ordinary and extraordinary things they can reveal--brings to mind other technologies, specifically the technologies of surveillance. I have said above that these insets highlights the normalcy of sexuality, but they also make visible the acts of surveillance that push people to keep sexuality secret. To be clear, neither I nor Wojnarowicz is arguing that we should be having sex in public. But this surveillance demands that we not even talk about sex in public, which is a dangerous silence in a world where sex can lead to death. I raise all of these points, however, to show that this image does not encourage a singular, simplistic reading. It is complex, just as sexuality itself is complex especially when you consider all its forms.

Ultimately, the images in the Sex Series promote the belief that sex, while usually a private act, is an ordinary part of life for most people. At the same time, sex can be a complex act that embodies a range of pleasures and fears, purposes and motivations. Placed within the context of Wojnarowicz's work in general, I see this series as arguing for the need to acknowledge this complexity and engage with it in public discourse. Otherwise, people of all sexualities and genders will continue not just to die from HIV but to feel the range of negative effects that result from seeing sex through a shroud of shame, secrecy, and fear.

World AIDS Day: Twenty Years Later

Today marks the twentieth anniversary of World AIDS Day. I remember the first one. I remember it because it was back when World AIDS Day was always paired with Day Without Art, when various museums and art spaces would do something to push us to think about AIDS, especially what we have lost. I remember it because it was my first year in college, and I was a big fan of Public News, the weekly alternative paper that exposed me to all kinds of films and artists I never would have known about otherwise. I remember that they had a special list of events in Houston, which included the fact that The Menil Collection hung a black cloth over the Andy Warhol that hung near the entrance. Granted, Warhol did not die of AIDS, but he was gay. It was a nice--if odd--gesture.

Still, I remember my first and the first World AIDS Day. I was certainly sexually active at the time. Please. I was a 130 pound nineteen-year-old guy attracted to older men. You know, like 27. I was naive in a lot of ways, but there were free condoms everywhere, so I always had some close at hand. I was lucky to be the age I was.

My first World AIDS Day was before I'd met anyone who I knew was HIV+. It was before I met Blane, the first man with whom I had sex after learning he was HIV+. It was before our wedding, of course, and before his death. It was before I worked at the Houston Center for Photography and helped mount an exhibit of work by HIV+ photographers.

I've been thinking of Blane lately. Last week, an old friend from graduate school wrote to me. She had just taught the poem I wrote about Blane that was included in the textbook Critical Inquires. She had some questions, which I happily answered. I hadn't read the poem in years. I still love it and am so happy that I wrote it. And kinda jazzed that college students in Minnesota are reading it today.

When I first started writing online, I always tried to do something to commemorate today. Back when I keep the online journal under a pseudonym, well before blogging tools were around, I posted an entirely black page for the day. It freaked a lot of people out. It was a typical 404-Page Not Found message, so people didn't know what to think. But it was my own non-subtle way to comment on the loss of words and images caused by AIDS.

In the last few years, I haven't said much. I wasn't even really planning to say anything today. But then I found out that it was the twentieth anniversary, and that brought back some memories.

And I couldn't let them disappear.