At The Daily Beast, Max Blumenthal calls the Obama administration on the carpet for affirming Rick Warren and allies’ efforts to deny access to condoms and prevent Africa’s heterosexual and LGBT people from protecting themselves against HIV/AIDS.

Blumenthal notes that Warren has never been required to prove the efficacy of his anti-condom program. Instead, independent investigation into Warren’s involvement in Africa revealed alliances with Christian Right clergy who sidelined science-based approaches to combating AIDS in favor of abstinence-only education.

These clergy sabotaged Uganda’s once highly successful initiative to combat HIV/AIDS. Comprehensive sex education — consisting of lessons in abstinence, monogamy, and condom use — slashed HIV infection rates during the 1990s and up until 2003, when Christian Rightists in the Bush State Department and Congress began to sabotage the initiative. By 2005, Blumenthal notes, federal aid was being redirected to deny access to condoms and to discourage their use. Progress against HIV infection rates then halted. (Read More)

In the first step toward a global index of stigma against HIV/AIDS, a new British report finds that, years after HIV/AIDS education programs were gradually shelved, prejudice and discrimination are returning.

According to today’s Observer:

Researchers found that one in five people with an HIV diagnosis had been harassed, threatened or verbally assaulted in the past 12 months. Many reported ignorance and prejudice from within the medical profession, particularly from GPs and dentists. One in five reported being denied medical treatment because they had HIV.

In findings to be unveiled in parliament tomorrow, The People Living With HIV Stigma Index, a two-year research project funded by the Department for International Development and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, found that only 39% of people felt confident that their medical records were being kept confidential, with 18% saying their HIV status had been revealed without their consent.

Lisa Power, head of policy at the Terrence Higgins Trust, said that the public was more ignorant about HIV than a decade ago. “This research is really important because it’s about people’s perception of the prejudice they face.”

Musician Annie Lennox will be one of several high-profile speakers at a briefing on the subject of HIV stigma at the Houses of Parliament on Monday.

According to PinkPaper.com:

The Stigma Index is designed as a global initiative, but the UK results are the first to be obtained.

It is hoped that the initiative will be both a catalyst for creating and fostering change in the communities in which it is used, by empowering both the individuals and communities most affected by the epidemic.

Hat tip: Mike Tidmus

The brewing human-rights disaster in Uganda has thus far been blamed squarely on those who launched the current campaign of violence and brutal punishment: Exodus International board member Don Schmierer, Massachusetts ex-gay activist and Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively, the ex-gay International Healing Foundation led by Richard Cohen, Uganda ex-gay activist Stephen Langa, and Martin Ssempa, a longtime leader of Uganda’s religious war against its LGBT citizenry who is funded by U.S. evangelicals.

But as the crisis grows, so does U.S. foreign aid to Uganda: The State Department just promised Uganda $246 million with few if any human-rights strings attached. And so responsibility must now be shared not just by the masterminds of the campaign, but also by U.S. taxpayers. Let’s take a look back at how U.S. taxpayers like me — and many of you — became implicated in a violent evangelical war against Ugandan sexual minorities.

(Read More)

Steve Jordahl of Focus on the Family declared yesterday:

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) announced this week that gay- and bisexual-identified men are 50 times more likely to have AIDS than any other group.  One-half of the HIV cases diagnosed each year in the U.S. are within the gay community.

The average Christian-rightist speed-reader might conclude that half or more of the gay population in America is infected — and that AIDS is caused by being “identified” as gay or bisexual.

But Timothy Kincaid of Box Turtle Bulletin points out:

…The rate of new infections in the population of gay and bisexual men in 2007 was 0.69%. Or in 2007 one out of every 144 gay/bi men seroconverted.

That still is very high. And it is consistent with our calculations that about 12% of gay/bi men (or about 6% of all gay/bi people) are infected with HIV. (So play safe kids… or better yet, find someone to have and hold from this day forward.)

Focus on the Family purposely mischaracterized the nation’s same-sex-attracted population as predominantly diseased. The organization did so, because it wants Americans to condemn, fear, and punish same-sex attraction and sexual honesty. The organization does not want its audience to ponder the actual cause of most HIV infection, which happens to be the unprotected sex which Focus encourages every time it seeks to exclude condoms from the nation’s public-health, disease-prevention, and sex-education programs — and every time it seeks to prevent discussion of homosexuality among teachers, public-health authorities, and students.

Jordahl suggests that education and disease prevention are a waste of money:

Dr. David Stevens, CEO of the Christian Medical & Dental Associations, said that is throwing good money after bad.

“We spend millions and millions of dollars on education and prevention programs,” he said, “but those are often ignored by the homosexual community.”

Instead, Focus wants the federal government to divert billions of taxpayer dollars into failed “abstinence-only” programs which promote the very same sexual ignorance which led to the teen pregnancy of Bristol Palin, daughter of GOP presidential hopeful Sarah Palin.

The economy is in tatters, and the state of California is almost out of money. This puts 35,000 HIV-positive Californians in danger of losing support for costly treatment and medication.

HIV prevention programs may also be shown the door — resulting in higher long-term costs for the state and its families, as infections rise among youths and married couples.

Let’s not forget those among us who are still living with HIV. Let’s honor those who have died by helping those still with us. Please sign and pass around the linked petition from the San Francisco AIDS Foundation to rescue HIV funding in California.

Pedro (2009)
Directed by Nick Oceano
Screenplay by Dustin Lance Black
85 minutes
MTV Films

When MTV presented The Real World: San Francisco in 1994, nothing much was expected. Until housemate Pedro Zamora revealed that he was gay and living with full blown AIDS. Doors were flung open as the astonishingly handsome 22-year-old educated America about HIV — and fell in love — all while the cameras rolled. Pedro lived and died on national television, his tragically short life was heroic and left a lasting impact.

Now, Oscar winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (Milk) presents another masterful gay biopic: Pedro recreates Zamora’s almost storybook life.

Newcomer Alex Loynaz shines in the title role, capturing Pedro’s physical and spiritual beauty. It’s a heartbreaking performance. While The Real World was in production, Pedro’s doctors inform him that his T cells are gone. He realizes that time is running out. MTV offers to back off, but Pedro insists that everything be filmed: including his doctor’s visits, his HIV prevention lectures at high schools, and his blossoming romance with Sean (DuJuan Johnson) who lives in San Francisco, near the Real World house. Additional ground is broken when Pedro and Sean are married on the air, a telvision first.

The film also deals with Pedro’s off-screen family. Screenwriter Black courageously does not shy away from the homophobia that’s intrinsic to Latin culture. Justina Machado plays Mily Zamora, Pedro’s caregiver sister, while Anibal Llares is the largely silent Dad. They disapprove of homosexuality and especially of Sean. But in their eyes, you can see the genuine love they have for Pedro. They’re struggling with their own inner demons, trying as best they can to accept Pedro for who he is.

Matt Barr makes a brief, scene-stealing appearance as Puck, the foul-mouthed homophobe who’s thrown out of the Real World household after taunting Pedro’s HIV status. Barr plays the role quite well, though the actor is too cute to come across with the kind of ugly venom we saw in the real, hateful Puck.

Hale Appleman and Jenn Liu are attractive and likable as Judd and Pam, two housemates who fall in love off-screen and become Pedro’s closest friends. After Pedro passed away, Judd Winnick wrote a best-selling book: Pedro & Me, and continued Pedro’s AIDS advocacy work in his friend’s memory. Judd and Pam are now married and have two children.

The film is introduced by former President Bill Clinton, who also makes a brief, vocal cameo, recreating the actual phone call he had made to Zamora in 1994.

Pedro is a superb film: it’s good enough to have been accorded a theatrical release. We must never forget Pedro Zamora’s remarkable life, or his message of AIDS prevention.

There will be two more airings of Pedro on MTV this very weekend:

• Saturday, April 4, at 3 p.m.
• Sunday, April 5, at 8 a.m.

These are Eastern times: check local listings for verification. And look out for even more airings in the future.

David Alex Nahmod lives in San Francisco. Visit him at: DavidsOpenForum.Blogspot.com

In a CitizenLink press release issued today, Focus on the Family misdefined and distorted the proportion of reported HIV infections in 2006 that were attributable to men who have sex with men.

Focus falsely equated men-who-have-sex-with-men (MSM) with “homosexuality” and then inflated the percentage of cases in 2006 that were attributable to these men. The Centers for Disease Control reported that 53 percent — barely half — of new HIV infections in 2006 were attributable to MSM. Focus on the Family inflated this statistic to “almost 60 percent” and falsely attributed this exaggeration to the CDC.

The category of MSM includes men who claim to be ex-gay while closeting their sex with men, as well as ostensibly heterosexual men living on the “down low,” and bisexual men. The category does not include homosexual men who are incidentally or purposely abstinent. Nor does the category distinguish between sexually active men whose practices put them at very low risk of infection, and men who place themselves at high risk.

Focus recklessly lumps all these categories of men under a “homosexuality” banner and implies that all are at equal risk due to the honesty of some regarding their orientation, and not due to very specific high-risk behaviors. (Read More)

Stephen Bennett is a Connecticut-based ex-gay activist who counsels no ex-gays and offers no evidence of a past gay life, but who nevertheless requires $180,000 per year to support his antigay political campaigns.

His latest attempt at fund-raising and self-promotion, reported by Good As You, seems to encourage an HIV-positive Christian man to believe that a miracle — and not antiviral medication — has reduced the virus to undetectable levels. Bennett further reinforces the man’s belief that God alone has protected his wife during unsafe sex and protected his newborn son from infection — thus, he believes, excusing himself from taking precautions during future intimate relations.

Instead of cautioning the man to take his medications and use practical measures to protect his wife and future kids, Bennett champions the man’s dangerous delusion of being cured of HIV as “The Reason We Continue to Press on! Praise God!”