Russell
Fleet
ALIVE AND KICKING
BYE BYE FROM THE CAT FLU QUEEN
It seems we are at the end of a beautiful relationship. Sadly,
this will be my last spot as ‘Cat flu Queen-about-Town’ for PN,
at least for a while. The powers-that-be have decided that in order to accommodate
different voices they want to rotate their columnists; and judging from the
now defunct Positive Voices online forum, some of you would like to see us
rotating on a spit over charcoal (but that’s a fantasy for another day.)
When I started my columns, I was given
a brief to shake things up a bit, be a bit controversial, and maybe even raise
a few laughs in the process. I hope I succeeded, but only you can be the judge
of that. It’s the job of the columnists to reflect aspects of life with
the virus. However, if they are to be authentic they can only really talk
about their own lives, can’t they? But when they do, it’s not
all plain sailing, as my predecessor in this column discovered after his frank
admissions about his social life and how it affected his adherence. “Who
wants to hear about what it’s like to get pissed every
weekend and miss your meds?” we heard in the letters page. Well, I did
actually, it reminded me of my life. Another columnist got torn to shreds
because she had the confidence to have a wacky sense of humour about the whole
HIV experience. “Not serious enough”, we were told, “who
wants to hear about going shopping for shoes?” Well, I did, for once
again it reminded me of my life; but then I am to trainers what Imelda Marcos
was to heels.So I decided to follow their example and in doing so I’ve
stood up for unpopular causes like poz-poz barebacking, like getting over
the holier-than-thou finger-pointing routine that so many people with HIV
engage in, and like stepping away from the ‘perfect victim’ role
that is so often demanded of us by the outside and that so many of us are
only too happy to collude with, to our own detriment. I make no apologies
for pinching the Eliza Doolittle metaphor from a well-respected colleague
of mine in the health promotion sector, and equally no apologies for lambasting
the Elizas in this column. My reasons were simple and they still stand. It
seems to me that, every time there is any attempt in these pages to portray
HIV as anything less than the worst thing that can happen to a person, one
of the ‘ain’t it awful’ brigade pops up to piss on the bonfire.
Example: we all know that HIV is transmitted sexually in over 99 per cent
of cases worldwide, but no, it isn’t just another STI, it’s a
‘special’ case.
We all know that the vast majority of people lucky enough to be on treatment
can now, thankfully, live pretty much their normal lifespan without getting
seriously, life threateningly ill, but no, along comes another doom-monger
to remind us that it isn’t a chronic manageable condition, it’s
a ‘special’ case. Well, maybe we need to stop being so damn ‘special’
and accept that we’re just like everyone else who happens to have a
serious illness, and that ours is worse than some but not as bad as others.
Who knows, perhaps I’m completely unrepresentative of the ‘HIV
community’, if such a thing exists. Personally, I remain to be convinced
that sharing a germ automatically makes comrades of us all. Yet, I’ve
had a lot of very positive feedback from people that I meet in my work and
my social life that tells me that I’m by no means alone in my views,
my actions or my choices. Moreover, I see firsthand the damage that the limiting
beliefs and attitudes I’ve outlined above can do to people. In my job
I meet newly diagnosed people who think they’ll be dead in three years
after a seriously shortened life of unimaginable pain, suffering, poverty,
discrimination and rejection. I also meet gay men (and straights) with HIV
who also like a bit of unprotected how’s-yer-father with one another,
but who wouldn’t dream of doing so with a neggie, who don’t always
take their meds as they should and who don’t feel the need to be martyrs
to the virus. Perhaps I’m not as unrepresentative as some of you might
like to think. Well, thanks for listening. Having dealt with the cat flu,
I’m off to tackle bird flu; should be a piece of cake by comparison;
but don’t forget your jabs, peeps.
