For Life and Love – We Are Not Going Back!

By Gerry Scoppettuolo

Because of a restraining order issued by a Federal judge, the Trump government has been forced to restore life-saving information about HIV/AIDS to the CDC’s website. Critical facts on HIV prevention, testing, treatment, programs and surveillance for gay and bisexual men and transgender and Black/Latin communities had been deleted shortly after Trump was inaugurated. Instead, the government posted the following hideous disclaimer above certain critical and relevant CDC pages:

 “Information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes, male and female. The Trump Administration rejects gender ideology and condemns the harms it causes to children, by 2promoting their chemical and surgical mutilation, and to women, by depriving them of their dignity, safety, well-being, and opportunities. This page does not reflect biological reality and therefore the Administration and this Department rejects it.” (Source: CDC;transgender)

The Trump government could hardly have targeted two more at-risk, high incidence populations. These two groups have constituted the majority of new yearly HIV diagnoses in recent years. Furthermore, although the new HHS/CDC claims to protect women from being deprived “of their dignity, safety, well-being, and opportunities,” Trump and RFK Jr..have also  terminated grants aimed at increasing women’s uptake of drugs that prevent HIV infection when taken in a timely fashion (these are known as PREP – drugs for pre-exposure prophylaxis, which are 96% effective against being infected by sexual or needle-sharing HIV positive partners). The full list of all 1900 terminated (and now on hold) HHS grants totaling $11 billion can be found here: https://taggs.hhs.gov/Content/Data/HHS_Grants_Terminated.pdf.

HIV/AIDS has killed upwards of 700,000 people in the U.S, since the CDC published its first report on the “mysterious disease.” Soon the programs that have guided many through this epidemic will be gone, destined for a dubious future in the new budget year, In recent years, this author deployed two CDC-originated  and funded Community-Level interventions with proven ability to reduce HIV risk behaviors: Futuro Saludable or Healthy Futures based on the CDC’s Popular Opinion Leader model (In Nashua New Hampshire Housing Projects ) and the MPowermnent Program, designed to reduce new infections among young gay and bisexual men. These programs were costly but scientifically proven to be effective in reducing HIV risk behavior. They were staffed by community members of the affected populations, giving them authenticity and effectiveness.

The gutting of these programs comes at a time when the CDC’s EHE initiative (Ending the HIV Epidemic) has been showing success in reducing the number of new HIV infections in the United States by 75 percent by 2025, and a 90% reduction by 2030. This program has been rolled out and funded in especially hard-hit U.S, cities. As one example, infections among Black gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men fell by 16% between 2018 – 2022.  (sources: Clinical Infectious Diseases, Jan 15, 2023 and  https://www.cdc.gov/nchhstp/director-letters/cdcpublishes-new-hiv-surveillanin dozens of hard-hit citice-reports.html.)

1987: the HIV/AIDS Plague Year – a reminiscence

I’m going to lick this thing”

Nashville, 1987 Brian’s words were quiet, self-assured and determined. Warm breezes of August ruffled the lace curtains in the family dining room, almost scattering his papers on the dining room table. News clippings, the latest court rulings and word of supposed medical breakthroughs in AZT, laid like a jigsaw puzzle there, waiting for Brian to solve them.

He had just gotten his AIDS diagnosis in New York City where he’d had a successful career with IBM. He returned to his family in Nashville to deal with the progression of the disease that he knew would surely come. Someone told me I needed to talk to him. My roommate, Chris and I had just launched an ACT-UP chapter (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in Nashville. Bill Bahlman, from NYC ACT-UP had gotten on a plane to Nashville to help us with our first demonstration where we picketed and disrupted a presentation by Representative William Dannemeyer who had arrived with President Reagan’s new AIDS Commission.

Dannemeyer was to give his usual speech declaring that AIDS was “God’s gift to humanity.” Before he could speak, we ran up to him and screamed in his face “We will not tolerate your hate”. Because of the tenuous immigration status of one of our members we could not risk arrest and left 2quickly. Note: Bill Bahlman would make 48 more flights to other cities in the following years organizing ACT-UP chapters across the country.

A tall and handsome man, Brian exuded an air of gentility and confidence and that afternoon we agreed to create a lobbying group to oppose the new Tennessee state legislation  which would prohibit food handlers living with HIV and other workers, even unionized ones, from “directly handle in any manner food intended for sale or public consumption” even though HIV is not infectious that way. I was asked by my union, Nashville SEIU Local 205, to testify against the bill before a Tennessee Legislative Committee which I did. This was to no avail.  The last time I saw Brian before he died in 1992, he walked with a cane, had lost about 80 pounds and had Kaposi’s Sarcoma lesions on his face and in every orifice in his body.

Decades later the current United States’ authoritarian government, if it has its way, will return us to the 1980s. That was a time when HIV/AIDS case managers would retain from their dead clients the few AIDS drugs available and keep them in the trunks of their cars, in order to give them to those still alive. It was a time when heart -shaped cards asking for donations for funerals would adorn the walls of gay bars. A friend of mine had a Rolodex with the names of people he knew who had succumbed to the disease. He stopped when he reached 75. The theme of the mammoth 1987 Lesbian and Gay March on Washington of 500,000 still holds true today,

For Life and for Love, We Are Not Going Back!

In 2023, Tennessee replaced $6.2 Million in US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevention funding with state funds to redirect support away from men who have sex with men (MSM), transgender women (TGW), and heterosexual Black women (HSBW) and to prioritize instead first responders (FR), pregnant people (PP), and survivors of sex trafficking (SST). (Clinical Diseases, Jan 15, 2024)