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Join us for National Gay Men’s HIV/AIDS Awareness Day! Or, as we call it for short, NGMHAAD.
September 27 is coming soon, hard on the heels of AIDS 2012 in Washington, D.C.: the fifth annual National Gay Men’s HIV/AIDS Awareness Day! Click HERE to see what we did last year. And watch this page over coming weeks for this year's observances.
NAPWA founded NGMHAAD in 2008, because twelve years of successful treatment with “cocktail” drugs had allowed too many gay men to think the epidemic was over.
It isn’t. To those of us who remember the mid-nineties – when a month with only two funerals was like a vacation – it’s almost a miracle that so many of us who have HIV now live normal lives with normal life expectancies. But too many of us are still getting infected. Too many of us who are infected don’t know it. Too many of us who know we are infected can’t get care and lifesaving medicines in America’s unfair healthcare system.
As an out gay man who has lived with HIV for twenty-three years, I know the human cost of the numbers. More than a million Americans are living with HIV today. Half of them are gay men, and one in five doesn’t know he is infected. At least half, possibly as many as three-quarters of new infections come from people who don’t know they have the virus. Even with the “cocktail” drugs, living with HIV isn’t anyone’s idea of fun – and too many who need the “cocktail” can’t get it, because the healthcare system is broken.
And as an out gay man who has lived with HIV for twenty-three years, I have the right to say: we have a responsibility. To the quarter-million brothers and lovers we have buried. To the allies who have supported our fight for treatment access and civil rights. To ourselves.
We have a responsibility – to know our own status. Every gay man who is active with multiple partners (or thinks his partner may be) needs to get tested every three months.
We have a responsibility – to know how to protect ourselves and others. We’re excited about the potential of treatment-as-prevention and PrEP, but we all still need to keep our condoms handy.
We have a responsibility – to be as open as we can be about being HIV-positive. Sometimes disclosure isn’t safe, and safety comes first – but our brothers need to know they know people just like them who are living with the virus. And any new partner needs to know our status before the clothes come off.
We have a responsibility – to demand access to healthcare for ourselves and for all Americans. It’s not just a human right, it’s common sense. It costs the public sector more to ignore epidemic than to deal with it, and we need our elected officials to know we know that.
We have a responsibility – to demand to be treated as “normal.” We are normal. We should insist on marriage because it’s our right, and because it forces our neighbors to reconsider the homophobia that gave the HIV epidemic its opportunity to explode in the gay community and move on from there.
We have a responsibility – to love. Last year on National Gay Men's HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, we gave a Positive Leadership Award, NAPWA's highest honor, to Alvin Collins and John Sullivan. Alvin had been one of the unlucky few who, despite the best modern treatment for HIV, don't do well. John stuck to Alvin through thick and thin – and Alvin stuck to John. Alvin died this Spring. We have a responsibility to honor that love.
We have a responsibility. We changed the world in the eighties, insisting on treatment and research when Washington didn’t want to hear us. Today we have the medical and behavioral prevention tools we need to make new HIV infections a thing of the past. We insisted then. We can do it again.
Sincerely,
Frank J. Oldham, Jr.
President and CEO
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