Dear Sir,
I offer some sympathy to S. Richards as she struggles to understand the complexities of the troubling situation involving the relationship between Men who have Sex with Men (MSM), HIV and prohibitive laws. In fact it is something I tend to refer to as the Paradox of HIV Infection.
It is indeed a paradox in that in the three decades since HIV and AIDS were discovered with the resulting plethora of social and legal changes and the billions of dollars that have been spent to curb the spread, we as advocates and policy makers have been at pains to rationalize the apparent resistance of seroprevalence rates to fall correspondingly.
In health surveys done all over the world from limping developing nations such as ours to seemingly streamlined developed ones such as in Europe the peculiar vulnerabilities of the MSM population to HIV infection have been recognized and despite our best efforts and success in changing the minds of the general population from viewing AIDS as “the gay cancer”, high rates of infection persist among the MSM population. This has been attributed largely to restrictive social environments which foster a type of disenfranchisement that is conducive to risky sexual behaviours. The response has been to rally for an ease in prohibitive laws and attitudes coupled with targeted interventions in order to give MSM the necessary social capital to illicit behaviour change. There have been tremendous successes in this regard and it is true that despite major challenges the general population and in particular the vulnerable communities are well educated about HIV, AIDS, their own vulnerabilities, and the responsibility of the state to protect them from harm, and yet high rates of infection persist.
In response there has emerged a bit of an impasse between advocates such as myself and Richards about the repeal of the absurdly invasive law which is contained in the Offenses against the Persons Act and known as “the abominable crime of Buggery”. It has become an issue of Epidemiology versus Social Justice.
Persons such as Richards argue, given the worrying facts as I have highlighted above, that to repeal the buggery law would be socially irresponsible, intellectually dishonest, illogical and indicative of a more sinister agenda orchestrated by powerful gays to corrupt public morals. They cite epidemiological evidence as irrefutable proof that MSM are hell-bent on destruction (pun intended); they use examples mockingly equating anal sex and HIV to the cancer-causing effects of smoking cigarettes and asking whether a ban on cigarette smoking should be repealed given these facts if one existed; and they glibly give the impression that AIDS is just recompense for a reckless hedonistic lifestyle. I argue that their thinking is non-critical and that their brains have been infected by the dogma of their bibles and not affected by logic or the rhetoric of equality that the social revolution of the past 50 years has imbued.
As an advocate for social justice I argue that MSM are not infectious disease vectors as implicitly posited by Richards and others of her ilk and that it is evident based on the epidemiological data that we simply have not found that elusive answer or answers that will curb HIV infection generally much less for those among us with intrinsic and systemic vulnerabilities!
Botswana, Lesotho, South Africa, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe all have adult infection rates near or above 15% of the general population and no one would ever suggest that Africans should be outlawed or that coitus should be prohibited. Why then are MSM fair game for discrimination?
We must continue to explore the evidently causal relationship between restrictive legal and social environments and the elevated levels of HIV infection among the vulnerable. We must however do so objectively, carefully examining each variable and its complexities so that we can sufficiently articulate to cynics the specifics of how laws such as the buggery law, the hostility of the populace, and the complicity of the government perpetuate vulnerability and exacerbate infection rates among MSM.
In the mean time I advise Richards to take her nose or imagination out of people’s bedrooms and instead be a champion of social justice and the protection of the vulnerable as the good book prescribes.
I am Sincerely,
Brian-Paul N. Welsh
Brianpaul.welsh@gmail.com
I hope I was able to put her back to bed (and that it will be published of course).
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