December 1st

among other things, vote

Every December 1, I’m torn about what to write. Item #1: It’s World AIDS Day. “This year’s theme is “World AIDS Day 35: Remember and Commit.” This annual event serves as a reminder of the global struggle to end HIV-related stigma, an opportunity to honor those we have lost, and a rallying cry to commit to working toward a day when HIV is no longer a public health threat.

In the national goal of ending the HIV epidemic by 2030, GLAAD “noted an alarming generation gap. Gen Z, the youngest generation in population surveys, is the most diverse and most out LGBTQ generation in history. According to our study, Gen Z is also the least knowledgeable about HIV.” Ignorance is NOT bliss.

Wyoming

Here’s a JEOPARDY clue:

#8974, aired 2023-11-16 THE NAME OF THE LAW $1600: The Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 was named for James Byrd Jr. & this Casper, Wyoming man

The $1,600 clue was a Triple Stumper, with no one even ringing in to say the name of Matthew Shepard, born on December 1, 1976, whose brutal death in Wyoming in 1998 because he was gay I mentioned here and elsewhere.

(In case you’ve forgotten Byrd, he was the black man “who was tied to a truck by two white supremacists and a third man who had no racist background, dragged behind it, and decapitated in Jasper, Texas” in the same year.”)

It only took a decade and a black President to enact the bill.

Per Wikipedia:

“The measure expands the 1969 United States federal hate-crime law to include crimes motivated by a victim’s actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.

“The bill also:

  • Removes, in the case of hate crimes related to the race, color, religion, or national origin of the victim, the prerequisite that the victim be engaging in a federally protected activity, like voting or going to school;
  • Gives federal authorities greater ability to engage in hate crime investigations that local authorities choose not to pursue;
  • Provides $5 million per year in funding for fiscal years 2010 through 2012 to help state and local agencies pay for investigating and prosecuting hate crimes;
  • Requires the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to track statistics on hate crimes based on gender and gender identity (statistics for the other groups were already tracked).”
Sister Rosa

The other December 1st recollection involves Rosa Parks being arrested on a Montgomery city bus in 1955 for failing to cede her seat to a white man.

As I noted back in 2010, Rosa was hardly the first person unwilling to give up her bus seat. Claudette Colvin had done the same nine months earlier, but she was young, loud, and brash.

What got me thinking about this was a new movie about Bayard Rustin, which I have not yet seen. He was the most important civil rights organizer that most people never heard of. It was his study of Gandhian nonviolence that informed much of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s strategies.    He was also instrumental in forming the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and organized the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

You probably didn’t know him because he was gay at a time when, at best, it was inconvenient to the civil rights movement. At worst, he could have been jailed.

This makes me think about how well we marginalize folks who either don’t fit a particular narrative or else we cast aspersions on them to make them less than.

Alternative narratives

The defense in the Shepard case suggested that his ruthless murder was just a drug purchase gone wrong.

Many high-profile murder of a black person while dealing with law enforcement since the Black Lives Matter movement began has involved the victims painted as criminals. George Floyd allegedly passed a counterfeit $20 bill. Philando Castile was stopped for a traffic violation. Eric Gardner was selling loose cigarettes. And so on.

So, December 1st often fills me with hope. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 wouldn’t have happened if Martin Luther King Jr. and MANY others hadn’t used the Montgomery bus boycott as a launching pad for another phase of the Civil Rights movement.

December 1st shows how marriage equality, from Loving v. Virginia (1967) to Obergefell v. Hodges  (2015) can take place.

But I have no illusion that these hard-won victories can’t be rolled back. Since Shelby County v.  Holder, when SCOTUS gutted the Voting Right Act, the “Brennan Center has consistently found that states previously covered by the preclearance requirement have engaged in significant efforts to disenfranchise voters.”

Books being banned and challenged usually highlight black people, brown people, gay people, trans people… you get the drift.

My Christmas wish is for people to register and vote, not just in presidential years. Folks should be voting in school and library board selections, city and town council races, state and county legislative contests, etc. If possible, get involved in campaigns. Or – if you’re brave enough, and in this social media environment, it is brave – run yourself.

Vito Mastrogiovanni (1951-1991)

Contemporary Issues Forum

Vito, top left

Vito Mastrogiovanni was a friend of mine when I was at Binghamton Central High School in the late 1960s. He wasn’t the first gay person I met, but he was the first person I knew who was “out of the closet,” as they used to say. My sister Leslie was disappointed because she thought – and she was right – that Vito was very cute.

Our school affiliation, Contemporary Issues Forum, advocated against the Vietnam War and fought racism, among other issues. Socially, we referred to ourselves as Holiday Unlimited, swiping the Beatles’ line, “A splendid time is guaranteed for all.”

Vito, George, Jane, Michelle, and Harry, and others in our coterie were a semester ahead of Karen and me. They graduated in June of 1970, and we in January 1971. Karen and I had attended our 10th reunion in 1981, and pretty much hated it. The night was salvaged by a party afterward hosted by a local friend.

Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome

In 1990, Karen and I went to the 1970 class reunion, and I had a surprisingly good time. But Vito did not attend, though he did come up from New York City, where he was working in the theater. BTW, he has a credit in the IBDB: The Nerd (Mar 22, 1987 – Apr 10, 1988), Hair Design by Vito Mastrogiovanni.

Vito was understandably angry that he was suffering from AIDS during a period when it was almost certainly a death sentence. As his sister recently noted, he was amazingly thin in these photos. I never saw him again, but I understand that he became more, if not accepting, then at peace with his mortality. He died on 15 May 1991, so just over 30 years ago, before he reached his 40th birthday.

As I noted WAY back in 2005, Vito was commemorated on the famous AIDS quilt. At my request, sections that included his piece came to Albany at least twice. The section is in no way as dynamic as Vito was.

Jane, Tom, Roger, Vito, George, Karen, Harry

Ending AIDS, racism: world falling short

Rosa refuses to stand; AIDS continues

cdc-hiv-race
https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/group/racialethnic/africanamericans/index.html New HIV Diagnoses in the US and Dependent Areas, 2018

Back in July 2020, I came across this article. “Ending AIDS: World Will Fall Short of 2020 Targets.” It noted that the “COVID-19 pandemic [is] on track to blow HIV progress off course, experts say

“The 2020 targets set by UNAIDS to control global HIV infection will not be met with ‘COVID-19 risks blowing HIV progress way off course,’ officials reported.

“According to the 2020 Global AIDS Update, 1.7 million people worldwide were newly infected in 2019 with HIV.” The target for this year was 500,000 “for 2020, according to the report at the International AIDS Conference virtual meeting.”

But on this World AIDS Day, don’t blame it all on the pandemic. “Our progress towards ending AIDS as a public health threat by 2030 was already off track before the COVID-19 outbreak.”

Three score and five

Meanwhile, it’s been 65 years since Rosa Parks refused to yield her seat in Montgomery, AL. The problems with the perception of the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and ’60s are several. For one, it seems to have been oversimplified. Rosa sat, Martin spoke and justice was won.

The push for equality started much earlier and remains necessary to this day. Why it took George Floyd’s death for a bunch of people to figure that out I’m sure some sociologists are analyzing.

Surely, we know about the perils of jogging while black or sleeping while black.

But it’s the everyday things that I find troubling. This story of a racist Pennsylvania judge resigning right before his own misconduct trial was set to begin happened to be in my feed. There are far too many examples to note.

About three and a half years ago, there was this blog post by a local author called “Why so many blacks in ads?” Knowing vaguely the guy who wrote it – he’s thrilled that IMPOTUS is going – I think the query was naive but not malicious. But the responses were, for the most part, virulent. Over 300 comments, 10% in 2020. There is a lot of use of the N-word.

Interestingly, the complaints aren’t all from the US. “My father fought in wwll for white British people this is our country and feel we are getting pushed out by black people ..their are to many black people in adverts.” It’s so comforting that racism and bad grammar are international.

The point is…

We ain’t there yet. We still need to work to eradicate these scourges. And, as you can see in the graphic from 2018, there is a relationship between race (systemic racism?) and HIV. AIDS is defeatable. And racism… well, I’m not so sure, but we need to keep on trying.

2019: significant anniversary for HIV/AIDS

The virus is still very much around.

what is HIVBecause some folks seem to believe that HIV/AIDS is cured, some statistics:

In 2018 (the latest data available)…
37.9 million [32.7 million–44.0 million] people globally were living with HIV.
23.3 million [20.5 million–24.3 million] people were accessing antiretroviral therapy.
1.7 million [1.4 million–2.3 million] people became newly infected with HIV.
770 000 [570 000–1.1 million] people died from AIDS-related illnesses.

In the United States, “approximately 1.1 million people… are living with HIV today. About 15 percent of them (1 in 7) are unaware they are infected. An estimated 38,700 Americans became newly infected with HIV in 2016.”

An article in US News notes that 2019 is a significant anniversary. “HIV and AIDS have been part of the world’s consciousness for 40 years now. In 1979 and 1980, doctors in Los Angeles and New York were suddenly reporting rare types of pneumonia, cancer, and other illnesses…

“Today, AIDS is fairly well controlled – in developed countries anyway. But the virus, which actually has been infecting humans since at least 1959, and perhaps since the late 1940s, according to the AIDS Institute, is still very much around.”

Why do nearly 1000 girls and young women contract HIV every day?

PrEP

A couple years back, there was a presentation at my church about Pre-exposure prophylaxis (or PrEP). It is “a way for people who do not have HIV but who are at very high risk of getting HIV to prevent HIV infection by taking a pill every day.

“The pill (brand name Truvada)” – which is advertised on American television – “contains two medicines (tenofovir and emtricitabine). [They are] used in combination with other medicines to treat the disease. When someone is exposed to HIV through sex or injection drug use, these medicines can work to keep the virus from establishing a permanent infection.”

Here’s what the US budget in fighting HIV/AIDS has looked like in the past decade or so.

I was happy to get to “know” Ruth, an HIV survivor, who is nursing others in Sierra Leone with the disease.

From April 2018 in the NYT magazine: Those we lost to the AIDS epidemic. Someone posted on Facebook recently six actors we lost prematurely. I DO remember two of the performers, Merritt Butrick and Tom Villard.

And Pedro Zamora died 25 years ago, hours after Real World San Francisco ended. Yes, I did watch that season.

The Library of Congress will house the archives of the famous AIDS quilt

Music throwback: Red Hot + Blue

There were approximately 36.7 million people worldwide living with HIV/AIDS at the end of 2016.

From the Wikipedia: “Red Hot + Blue is the first in the series of compilation albums from the Red Hot Organization… It features contemporary pop performers reinterpreting several songs of Cole Porter, and the title of the album comes from Cole Porter’s musical Red, Hot and Blue.

“Released in 1990, it sold over a million copies worldwide and was heralded as one of the first major AIDS benefits in the music business. The accompanying ABC television special [which I watched at the time] featured music videos for the songs. The clips portrayed the societal effects of AIDS.”

Yes, a good cause, to be sure. But also great music. It made my list of the top 25 albums previous 25 years back in 2010.

Lest you think the AIDS crisis is over: According to UNAIDS:

“There were approximately 36.7 million people worldwide living with HIV/AIDS at the end of 2016. Of these, 2.1 million were children (under 16 years old).

“An estimated 1.8 million individuals worldwide became newly infected with HIV in 2016 – about 5,000 new infections per day. This includes 160,000 children (under 16 years).”

Here are some US stats.

There were several followup albums to Red Hot + Blue. These are just the ones I own:

Red Hot + Dance (1992)- features three new songs by George Michael

No Alternative (1993) – alternative rock
Sexual Healing – Soul Asylum

Red Hot + Country (1994) – music from the classic country and rock genres performed by seasoned old and new country music artists, often together
Teach Your Children – Suzy Bogguss, Kathy Mattea, and Crosby, Stills and Nash
The T.B. is Whipping Me= Wilco and Syd Straw

Red Hot + Rio (1996) – a contemporary tribute to the Bossa nova sound, especially the music of Antonio Carlos Jobim
Use Your Head – Money Mark

Red Hot + Rhapsody (1998) – celebrating George Gershwin
Summertime – Bobby Womack and The Roots
A Foggy Day In London Town – David Bowie and Angelo Badalamenti

By George (& Ira): Red Hot on Gershwin (1998) – compilation of previous cuts

Red Hot + Riot: The Music and Spirit of Fela Kuti (2002)
By Your Side – Sade

16 songs (plus two ringers) of the 20 songs from Red Hot + Blue HERE.

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