Michael Broder
#hivtest #hivtreat #hivprevent #nohivshame #nohivstigma
For over 25 years now I’ve been living with HIV.
I was being evaluated for severe dermatitis when I took the test
that came back positive. Nothing you could do to treat
HIV infection back then. We had drugs to prevent
opportunistic infections, but there was no pill for the shame
so many felt—although I had little sense of shame or stigma
around my HIV infection. Sure, I had reason to feel stigmatized—
guys leaving a first date mid-dinner when you disclose your HIV
status certainly didn’t help. But overall I was pretty shameless.
To me, these kinds of rejections served more to test
my own resolve to stay, well, positive—anger helped prevent
me from slipping into despair, reminded me to treat
myself well, be gentle with myself, give myself little treats
now and then—a new pair of orange Chuck Taylors. But stigma
on a population basis posed a serious challenge to prevention
efforts. It was hard to get people to access services for HIV
when you risked your job or home just by getting tested,
when religious and political leaders trafficked in shame,
scapegoated the most vulnerable, stoked shame
and fear to distract from their failure to support treatment
efforts—government for the most part encouraged testing
so we could “protect the innocent” from infection—stigma
substituting for real health policy—turning HIV
into a referendum on gays and drug addicts to prevent
the public from demanding action, turning prevention
into an excuse for discrimination and using shame
to fuel hatred and violence against people with HIV.
In 1996, the FDA approved the first effective treatments—
science and profit motive overcoming fear and stigma.
The AIDS epidemic was perhaps the ultimate test
of capitalism as a force for social good; I could testify,
as a medical communications professional, that preventing
sickness and death motivated researchers to brave the stigma
connected even with studying AIDS. What a shame,
the deep contempt with which Reagans and Falwells treated
people whose only crime was becoming infected with HIV.
The AIDS pandemic continues to test us, continues to shame
us for our failure to prevent suffering, for continuing to treat
it as someone’s else problem—stigma still the ultimate risk factor for HIV.
Editor’s Note: I generally don’t like sestinas, but every poet should know what they are and how they work, so we needed an example of one for Na(HIV)PoWriMo, so duck duck goose, here you go. I decided to take the end-words from the hashtags I developed for HIV Here & Now back in 2015; how convenient that there turned out to be the requisite six of them! I tested positive for HIV on October 18, 1990. I believe I was infected by my beloved Anthony Ibrahin Salinas (1955–1994), the Tony of the “Tony Poems” in my first book; at least, I like to think so.
Michael Broder is the author of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and Drug and Disease Free (Indolent Books, 2016), edited and with an introduction by Jameson Fitzpatrick. He is the founding publisher and managing editor of Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press in Brooklyn. Broder and his husband, the poet Jason Schneiderman, were among the first gay men to be married in the United States. They live in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, with a colony of stray and feral cats.
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Here is today’s prompt
(optional as always)
Write a sestina addressing HIV. The sestina has six stanzas and a final half-stanza often called an envoi. The six stanzas exhibit a precise pattern of end-words: ABCDEF, FAEBDC, CFDABE, ECBFAD, DEACFB, BDFECA. That is, each succeeding stanza begins with the last end-word from the previous stanza (end-word #6), and then bounces back and forth like a ping pong ball to the preceding stanza’s end-word #1, #5, #2, #4, and finally #3. The envoi uses two end-words in each of its three lines; in particular, with reference to the first stanza, it uses end-words #2 and #5 in its first line, #4 and #3 in its second line, and #6 and #1 in its third line, in that order. Traditionally, the first word in the pair appears anywhere but the end of the line, and the second word in the pair is the last word in the line—but many poets today ignore the traditional end-word ordering of the envoi. If you search online for “sestina,” you will find many more detailed explanations of the form.
