1985 in LGBT rights

Transcription

A Gay Man Speaks Out: Partying, Club Drugs, and HIV The context in which gay men become initially HIV infected is very complex and hasn't really been properly studied. Many clinicians and researchers say that a lot of infections in gay men occur, because of depression, anxiety, and sense of inevitability. Now I think there is some enormous truth in that, but also I have known gay men, more gay men becoming infected with HIV, while partying. They weren't unhappy, they were partying. They were having a great time. They were on acid in San Francisco, they were on ketamine in Los Angeles, they were crystal meth in London. They weren't having a bad time, they weren't depressed, they were partying. And because the drugs made them unconscious, in that context, they didn't think about the next minute, the next day, let alone the next year or the next decade. But somewhere before that happened, somewhere in their mind becoming HIV infected wasn't problematic. It wasn't as if they went into the party mode thinking we need to be careful because if we get out of our faces this is going to happen. It will happen if you haven't made plans before how you are going to protect yourself. So I feel the clearest answer I can give anxiety, depression, partying, wanting to join a club that everyone else is a member of because once you are HIV infected the other shoe is dropped. Nothing worse can happen to you. The worst that can happen, has happened to you. You have become HIV positive. Okay, you can get syphilis, this and whatever else, hepatitis. HIV is the big one, the big H, the big A, AIDS. So the worst that can happen to you has happened. You can relax, both shoes are on the floor, you have dropped the other shoe. Inevitability syndrome I call it, because nothing else can happen to you, the worst has already happened and I feel like a lot of the gay men getting infected now are very relaxed about it, because they haven't had to worry about becoming HIV positive, because hey they became HIV positive so what's there to worry about? I can understand that, but what it says about them and our communities, our gay communities is that, is that all there is? Is that all there is to it? That becoming HIV positive is the zenos, the nadir of our lives? I don't think that we have created communities worth living in. We went straight from sexual liberation in the sixties to the AIDS wards of the late seventies and eighties. We had a very short time of liberation, but in that time of liberation we discovered drugs, we discovered the type of sex a human being can not sustain over a long period and what is forgotten and if you study the data in America, which is where the best data comes from in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago. HIV, the HIV epidemic is parallel to the explosion of recreational drugs. They happened at the same time together and in a way this sort of floored each other. You couldn't tease out one from the other, because I don't know a single man, gay man, who became HIV positive in those cities or at that time who wasn't also a very heavy drug user. I recommend everyone who is watching this to read Larry Kramer's book: Faggots. Which is where it puts it very well, which is where he got crucified and also Randy Shilts: And the Band Played On and if you can bear to watch A Long Time Companion. These tell a story of how it began and because we have no sense of history, we are a very young community. We need to know where we came from, because there's the answer to where it went wrong. When I ran the Embassy in Heaven [a gay club in London] the gay men I knew who become HIV infected then later developed AIDS and died was very heavy into certain drugs: cocaine, the biggest of all was poppers. In fact, I, my charity, went to court in this country with the pharmaceutical society and got amyl nitrate banned, but unfortunately because the pharmaceutical society did not get the whole family of poppers banned, which is the alkyl nitrate family. You could still butyl and N-s-butyl nitrate. These drugs are described by the co-discover of HIV, Dr. Robert Gallo, as the primary cause of AIDS and HIV positive gay men. They deplete glutathion, they cause T-cell depletion. The classical science of AIDS progression. So then we worked with the medicines control agency, the Utter Department of Health and worked with them over many years in a multimillion pound case to get Butyl and N-s-butyl banned and unfortunately lost the case and they were not banned. The case was lost in an interesting technicality by saying well if you are going to ban these drugs you may as well ban anything that has an impacted on the human body such as tea and coffee. A very convoluted argument, technically they were correct, but these drugs are not taken by the general population. Gay men are exposed to very specific drugs. Poppers are almost unique to gay men. I'm not saying it's the cause of AIDS, but as Robert Gallo says it's the major cause of the progression. So cocaine, poppers, and ecstasy is a disinhibitor. The biggest killer today I would say apart from poppers is crystal meth. Anyone taking crystal meth I hope you made your will, because you aren't going to survive. You are going to get seriously ill and you are going to die. Talk about depression and anxiety, crystal meth. Talk about suicidal tendency, crystal meth. So, you can't tease out the strands of recreational drug abuse or misuse from HIV, they go together. You can't remove one strand from the other. It's almost the same strand. So, I would say if you look at where we came from, it's a sign to where we are going. We are re-creating the same conditions that create the AIDS epidemic the HIV epidemic in the first place, except twenty five years later. We haven't learned a thing. Stop the drugs and stop the unsafe sex, if you want to live. If you don't want to live, continue. However, don't expect sympathy, empathy, or funding or maybe even clinical care soon. You take full responsibility, caveat emptor.