Terje Anderson, of the US National Association of People with Aids,
is a former addict and rent boy. He tells Gus Cairns why HIV positive people
have nothing to be ashamed of
Terje Anderson thinks the Aids community acts like it is ashamed of people
with HIV. As executive director of the US National Association of People with
Aids, he should know.
“How sad it is that? In an effort to mainstream ourselves, we don’t
tell the truth about what we are. I think the message ‘the executive
director is a junkie whore’ is a good one.”
Surfing sweet 16
With grey beard and glasses, Terje looks more like a college lecturer than
the teenage ‘bed surfer’ of his ’70s youth. These days Terje
(pronounced Terry) mixes with politicians and is a Democratic Party noise
in his own right; a long way from his trick-turning days in the backstreets
of Baltimore.
“Baltimore had - still has - one of the biggest heroin problems in the
USA and I got into it when I was 15. It was easily affordable, and yeah, I
was a fucked-up teenager. I was fairly out about being gay, but there’s
no question that struggle around my sexuality was one reason I did it.
“In a funny kind of way heroin probably saved my life. It probably saved
me from killing myself during the darkest hours.
“I quickly figured that in my nearby park there would be guys who’d
give me $40 for a blowjob.”
Terje left home at 16 and did a lot of what he calls “bed-surfing”:
staying in hotels with Johns.
“It was kind of chaotic. I made stupid mistakes and I wouldn’t
recommend it to a kid of mine, but there was an energy to that life; a vibe.”
Functioning addict and life-long socialist
Terje left for Montreal and signed on at university where he eventually found
an outlet for his strong political views as vice president of the student
society.
“I was always a functioning addict. If you’d asked me if I was
a ‘junky’, I’d have said no. I always had a strong sense
of self-preservation and ran my habit like clockwork.
“My dad’s family were West Virginia coalminers and trade union
organisers. I’m one of the few Americans to still call myself a socialist.”
But things got worse before they got better. In 1981, aged 23, he moved back
to Baltimore where his habit spiralled out of control.
He lost his regular dealer, was forced to score on the street and was in an
abusive relationship with another user.
“I ended up in ER quite a few times, sometimes from ODs, sometimes because
he beat me up. I tried to get clean, go on methadone, but all my friends were
users too. I realised I had to get out.”
Clean but not serene
On New Year’s Eve 1983, Terje moved to Burlington, Vermont.
“I knew nobody. I picked it because it’s a liberal town, more
like Canada, and just over the border from Montreal. Its mayor Bernie Sanders
is now the only socialist Member of Congress.”
The newly cleaned-up Terje got involved in politics, and in HIV. He helped
run Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential bid, became executive director
of the state Democratic Party and set up the state’s first HIV organisation.
In Vermont he was joined by a boyfriend, an ex of the man who used to beat
him up. This boyfriend was diagnosed with HIV in 1988 and later died
“That’s probably why I didn’t get tested until 1997. I was
certain I was poz, no question, but I didn’t want to deal with it. I
eventually got tested once it was clear HAART was working, in 1997.”
At that point, after 15 years, he finally moved out of Burlington, first to
Colorado then to Washington DC to join NAPWA (National Association of People
with Aids).
Until last month his HIV history had been largely uneventful, with a persistently
low viral load and a CD4 count that went down only very slowly. But this has
just changed with a vengeance.
“I’ve been feeling like crap for a while and last week I woke
up with my lips and nose all swollen and a lymph nodes like a golf-ball under
my arm. It turns out to be TB.
“So I’ve just started on four TB drugs and they’ll put me
on HAART as soon as I can stop taking rifampicin (which interferes with HIV
meds). It hasn’t thrown me into a loop yet, but I tend to have a delayed
reaction to these things.”
Four more years
NAPWA with its 26 staff is not the biggest US Aids organisation, but it’s
certainly the oldest and arguably the most representative. Its shtick is leadership;
organising leadership training days around the country for HIV positive people
who want to advocate for their community. It holds an annual conference for
Positive Youth and is best-known for its National HIV Testing Day initiative
Terje says his job is a “joy” but he is frustrated by the current
political environment. Gay and HIV communities are still reeling in shock
from the re-election of George Bush. He is particularly angry at the way Bush
exploited the gay marriage issue. But Terje sees seeds of hope. In exit polls,
30 per cent of people favoured gay marriage and 30-40 per cent some kind of
civil union.
“Even Bush says he supports civil unions. In Massachusetts, people thought
political heads would roll over gay marriage, but the politicians are still
firmly in their place and people are thinking ‘Hang on, these gays have
been getting married for a year and my family hasn’t fallen to pieces’.”
He abhors a system that pours $100m into school programmes promoting abstinence
until marriage, yet denies gays marriage because they’re “promiscuous
ho’s”.
“What’s a gay kid to do? He’s just been told the abstinence
message doesn’t apply to him. Abstinence programme directors say ‘Well,
of course, for young gays ‘till marriage’ means ‘till you’re
in a committed relationship’ - but they won’t say so publicly.
“These measures are destroying people’s sense that their relationships
have any value. And if you destroy people’s self esteem, you’ll
destroy their respect for others too, and they won’t protect their partners.”
Aids - the human face
Gay men still form the largest group affected by HIV in the US, but the US
epidemic is now overwhelmingly concentrated among the black community. Black
women are 13 times more likely to have HIV than white women.
“HIV is more and more a disease of poor black and brown people and poor
women. Safety-net programmes have been starved, and 45 million Americans,
15 per cent of the country, get their only medical care from emergency rooms.
“Social policies put people at risk. The worst is the War on Drugs.
If you have a drug conviction you can’t get public housing; you can’t
have a student loan; being an addict no longer entitles you to disabled status,
so you can’t get Medicaid. And although local initiatives have sprung
up, no one’s even talking about amending federal regulations that won’t
fund needle exchange.”
Newark in New Jersey, heroin capital of the US and with the country’s
second highest Aids death rate, recently threw out a needle exchange proposal,
due to the intransigent opposition of its Democrat deputy mayor, Ronald Rice.
“We have to re-engage the public. The Aids community has only been talking
to itself. People don’t actually understand that there are people in
this country without a doctor and without Aids treatment. We have to put a
human face on it and say ‘Here’s Jo. She’ll die of Aids
unless she gets off the waiting list for drugs’.
“We need to get our campaigning act together. A lot of the more regressive
Bush policies get reversed if someone shines a bright light on them. When
they get bad press, they back down pretty fast.
“The Centers for Diseases Control took down their factsheet on condoms
for 18 months because the Christian right didn’t like it. After a critical
story in the New York Times, it was back up within two weeks.
“We need to get back the advocacy edge, lost in the post-HAART era.
That’s why we have the youth conference every year. The leadership of
Aids in this country still looks too much like me: white men in their 40s,”
he adds.
Last May a group of people living with HIV/Aids marched to demand better policies
and 100, including Terje, lay down in front of the capitol and were arrested
and booked.
But he unfortunately missed ACT-UP’s naked protest at the Republican
Convention in New York.
“I was in Kenya at the time overseeing our international advocacy programme.
But I’d have done it if asked, though I’m not as pretty at 46
as I was. I don’t think guys would pay for a blowjob now.”
• NAPWA www.napwa.org
info@napwa.org
