While I appreciate your commitment to HIV Prevention, your editorial doesn’t shed any new light on the issue. You make no mention of the fact that Public Health’s stigmatizing and demonizing efforts to smear gay men and their sexual practices may be part of the reason why gay men checked out of prevention and of thinking about HIV/AIDS more generally. You tell people they’re a piece of shit for long enough, eventually they stop tuning in to hear more.

My problem with Public Health is that there is no accountability for the racist, sexist, rabidly sex-negative, and often antigay messages that are trumpeted from the mountaintop under the guise of HIV prevention. “Oh, that campaign was racist? Well at least it started dialogue.” You hear it time and time again, from the local to state to national level. In their minds, reducing HIV infections is the only end worth measuring – and if it reinforces or reproduces racism or antigay sentiment along the way, so be it.

And don’t make the mistake of thinking more funding = better prevention. Most of the CDC dollars allocated to prevention fund tired, useless, and ineffective interventions that have no relation to the complexities of gay men’s lives. Just take a look at the available “DEBIs” that ASOs have to put up with. Many people on the ground tell me that they have to pretend to be engaged in these pathetic excuses for interventions while secretly radically changing the curriculum on the ground. The CDC’s efforts force ASOs into positions of dishonesty and secrecy. Where’s the critique of the CDC’s infrastructure in your analysis? Of the damning and devastating impact of abstinence-only education? Of Congress’ forcing states to pass HIV disclosure criminalization laws, even though they are harmful to Public Health, if they accept Ryan White dollars?

So forgive me if I’m not sympathetic to your critique. But I think you’ve missed the point. It’s not gay men who need to shape up. It’s the CDC, local, state, and federal governments, and the larger institution of Public Health that needs to get its priorities straight.

Trevor