It’s Time Poz People Had a Life Away From The Propaganda of Fear
The gay male community of San Francisco, for too long in my opinion, was subjected to needlessly hysterical and often insulting AIDS prevention social marketing campaigns, reaching a tipping point in 2007 of revulsion and anger from the target audience.
Bankrolled with ample federal and local government dollars, possessing very little science-based evidence and too much useless marketing survey results, the Department of Public Health and HIV prevention nonprofits ceaselessly rolled out ever more alarming ads, often characterizing gays and people with AIDS as irresponsible, dumb or selfish.
Practically anywhere a gay man might cast his eyes -- bus shelters, community newspapers, web sites, billboards, television screens, sex clubs, cafes, and bars -- was plastered with HIV social marketing of one sort or another, all of it negative.
Public health and nonprofit executives and educators claimed the best way to reach the complacent homosexual was through finger-wagging and pathologizing sexual and community norms. Social marketing of this sort was declared a fundamental building block for gay wellness and effective HIV prevention.
The late gay health advocate Eric Rofes spurred a reassessment of such campaigns, rejecting the stigmatizing reasoning and messaging:
I think more than anything we need a few years of "time out" from directive AIDS prevention work for gay men. We need to get away from all the messaging, all the marketing, all the "crises of the week" used to terrify gay men into sexual sterility. (Here I am talking about "new" strains of HIV, or the crisis of crystal, or the crisis of barebacking, or the crisis of low self-esteem or any of the "second wave" of AIDS we’ve supposedly been seeing over the past 15 years).
I think gay men need time out, time on our own, to heal, to discover, and to return to a place where our sex and desires and bodies were things of joy and excitement, and pleasure and intense spiritual connection. Frankly, many of us have forged our own "time out" from all of the violence sent down to us by AIDS prevention.
Rofes hit a key point about the time-out notion that resonated deeply within my psyche and queer spirituality, and he beautifully rebuked the shoddy and stigmatizing attitude of the social workers creating the crises campaigns.
Practically anywhere a gay man might cast his eyes -- bus shelters, community newspapers, web sites, billboards, television screens, sex clubs, cafes, and bars -- was plastered with HIV social marketing, all of it negative.
Gays were not the dangerous walking Petri dishes of infections out to spread disease and death painted of us by a few of the campaigns. We had not forgotten our collective tragic history of so many of our lovers and friends and families taken from us far too early because of AIDS.
Among the insults hurl at us was the "Who Gives A Fuck?" print-ad campaign from the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, typical of approaching complicated gay health needs with an nasty question, pissing off many men and expecting us to then want to engage with the educators. We were not complacent; just fed up with the endless assumptions of clueless health authorities about our lives and sexual practices.
While the authorities bemoaned fewer funerals, lacking current high deaths to point to as prevention tools, participation at prevention workshops was dropping dramatically. Without the assistance of HIV groups, PWAs and radical sexual health advocates paid close attention to viral loads and other health markers, as they developed sero-sorting and additional practices that averted new transmissions.
I attended too-many-to-count public debates about alarmist social marketing campaigns, demanding ads congratulate gays for our tremendous work combating AIDS and helping PWAs stay alive. Use a positive approach and stroke our community’s strengths, reinforce the myriad ways we maintain wellness, I suggested.
Another idea of mine not adopted called for consistent simple prevention messages -- how to use penile and anal condoms, pre- and post- exposure info -- just like the warnings on cigarette packets. It would be like a text-based health reminder always in front of gay eyeballs. My pleas were rejected.
HIV prevention social marketing campaigns gradually declined, as national and local government funding streams dried up, and nonprofits had better ways to spend their revenue raised from private individuals and corporations. As long as public dollars would underwrite the ads, social marketing was integral to gay wellness.
Presently, there is no prevention advertising campaign in San Francisco. Such social marketing has all but vanished here. The current campaigns recruit volunteers for vaccine clinical trials and push regular testing for HIV and sexually transmitted infections, from the public health department, or as in the effort from the S.F. AIDS Foundation, with its "We are more than HIV" branding and messaging.
Let’s be the thankful that the fear-based, poke ’em the eye to start a discussion approach has vanished from the campaigns. Kudos to the Foundation for finally using their advertising budget to build on the assets of gay-community wellness.
Even with treatment and viral load reduction becoming integral to prevention, I still see a need for text-based, low-key, fact-based ads promoting condoms, PEP, and PrEP. Social marketing done right, with input from target audiences, has its place.
Comments