But is it art?Nick Partridge, chief executive of Terrence Higgins Trust, pictured with Britart diva Tracey Emin at the annual London Lighthouse charity auction held at Christie's last month. The auction, which is now in its sixth year, raised an incredible £100,000 for services to support people with HIV. Among other celebrity supporters present were Elizabeth Murdoch and Kirsty Young. Perhaps the strangest lot auctioned was 'Tea at the House of Lords with Jeffrey Archer', which went for £4,500, since it remains unclear whether the 'novelist' and former Tory Party chairman will be allowed back in the upper house after his stay in Lincoln prison. |
The National Aids Trust (NAT) has launched an intensive mass media campaign aimed at tackling HIV stigma and discrimination among the general public.
Advertisements are appearing in national newspapers such as The Sun, Daily Mirror and Metro, with the tagline: 'Are you HIV prejudiced?'
MTV will cover the issue and radio ads are being aired on Kiss FM and Virgin Radio as part of the first national media information campaign on HIV in this country since the 'Iceberg' and 'Tombstone' ads in the late 1980s.
The media campaign has been launched at a time when NAT says HIV and Aids has been knocked off the media agenda in this country.
Speaking at the launch, Neil Gerrard, Labour MP for Walthamstow and chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Aids, said: "Persuading people to test for HIV is very difficult when people who become diagnosed continue to face discrimination and prejudice in the workplace and in housing."
The campaign, funded with £450,000 from the Department of Health, goes out at a time when HIV infections in this country have reached record levels and for the first time more rapidly among heterosexuals than among gay men.
Over 40,000 people are now believed to be living with HIV in Britain, including over 20,000 gay men and over 10,000 Africans. Last year new infections reached a record high of over 6,000.
Jonathan Grimshaw, a leading activist who has received an MBE for his work on Aids and who is now Vice Chair of NAT, said HIV positive people need sympathy and compassion not rejection and disgust, but many with the virus don't get any support or help.
"We have become an HIV ignorant society at a time when HIV cases are rising quickly. Restricting the rights of people with HIV does nothing for public health, in fact the reverse is true."
Julie Reynolds, a 37-year-old HIV positive woman from south London, explained at the launch that she was diagnosed in 1991 and had been afraid to even tell her family she had the disease. She had faced stigma in the NHS when a sign was put on her hospital bed that she was 'infectious' and her dentist had refused to treat her because of her status.
"I sat around for three months worrying if my teeth were going to fall out, as if I hadn't enough to worry about."
She said she hoped the NAT campaign would help ease public fears and negative attitudes towards HIV positive people.
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Freedoms, who distributed 1.2 million free condoms around London gay venues last year, say they are facing a 'bottomless demand' and now have a funding crisis.
Although Freedoms are planning to distribute 500,000 more condoms this year, they have only received a 2.5 per cent increase to their £191,000 funding.
"The shortfall may have to be made up by encouraging more men to pay for their condoms, and asking gay venues to pay more for the free ones they hand out," said Freedoms' Robert Goodwin, addressing the CHAPS Gay Men's HIV Prevention Conference on 27 March.
"1.2 million condoms is only three per London gay man per year," said Goodwin. "And at 16p a condom that's very good value. But some venues - particularly saunas - continue to run out of them no matter how many we supply."
Freedoms say they are thinking of supplying condoms to gay venues only on certain conditions, the most radical of which is that they should not be freely available in bowls or containers any more, but should be kept in dispensers behind the counter. Venue owners would also have to commit to displaying safer-sex literature and posters.
"I am in favour of free condom distribution personally," Goodwin said: "but free condoms were only ever supposed to be an emergency resource for men who had forgotten to buy them. Schemes like Freedoms generated an expectation that condoms would be freely available at gay venues. Have we created 'free condom addication'?"
Robert Quinlan of the Gay Men's Health Project in Dublin said: "Gay venues make huge profits. I think they should pay for condoms for their customers."
Fraser Serle of Health First said there has been a 'massive explosion' of the gay scene since free schemes started in the 1980s: "It was the most public way of combating Aids then, but can we sustain it now?"
But Paul Martin of Brighton and Hove Primary Care Trust said there was not enough evidence to assess the value of any HIV prevention method. "We don't know if you get 'more protected bangs for your buck' if you spend £5,000 on a safer-sex workshop or spend it on free condoms." Gus Cairns
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 Clint Walters, trustee of the UKC and driving force behind HIFY-UK |
Many young gay men in Britain are anxious and depressed, and have high levels of self-hatred and low self-esteem, according to new research.
But the report produced by Dr Debra Bekerian at the University of East London's School of Psychology also suggests that young gays are less likely to engage in unsafe sexual practices once they know their HIV status.
Most of those interviewed for the study - among youth groups in London and East Anglia - considered current health messages to be too clinical and irrelevant.
The report says that little education is offered to support young gays to behave in a responsible manner.
Clint Walters, from Health Initiatives for Youth (HIFY-UK) said: "The Government has failed to support or acknowledge gay youth - putting them at greater risk. Until the Government scraps Section 28, society will continue to discriminate against homosexuals.
"Prejudice and bullying by other children is reinforced by Section 28 - who are given the licence to perpetuate hatred and discrimination within schools and behind the bike sheds."
Meanwhile, because there is less general interest in Aids than there was 20 years ago, with little mass media coverage, many young gays assume they are not at risk and think the disease is only relevant to an older generation. Laurence Gibson
To contact Health Initiatives for Youth (HIFY-UK) call 0800 298 3099 or visit: www.hify-uk.com
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