Blue and white information card for PrEP, a HIV preventative drug, with black and white lettering, depicting three cartoon silhouettes of people
Inscription
PrEP is a / pill that can / prevent HIV / when taken / before and / after sex. / Could PrEP / be for you, / or someone / you know? For more information: / prepster.info / Know about / PrEP / (Pre Exposure Prophylaxis) / [Twitter logo] [Instagram logo] TeamPrepster / [Facebook logo] prepster.info
Production date
2019
Production place
Scotland
Production organisations
HIV Scotland Developing HIV Literacy
Associated organisations
Yorkshire MESMAC
Associated place
leeds
Labels
[Addition made by Sophie Turbutt, PhD researcher from University of Leeds]
On development of PrEP:
Copy & paste to HIV/AIDS objects (leaflets, PrEP tablets) Skyline Event, 24/10/2022, with Andy (them/them) and Mike (he/him) ‘Andy: In the sexual health clinic, all the HIV care was integrated within it…. HIV care is now done at the Brotherton wing in the LGI. People were horrified when they found out they were going to separate it, ’cause they’d rather their neighbour thought they had gonorrhoea than HIV. Andy: [The stigma around AIDS and HIV] hasn’t changed. It’s still really bad... There was a nurse in York Hospital – this was like two or three weeks ago – she had written that [a patient] was HIV positive on the outside of the door, where other people could see [as a warning]. There’s all these areas of people where you think they should be educated, but you’re shocked to learn…. Andy: On my medical records when I used to get treated in Middlesborough, it had ‘Infected’ stamped across every page in red. Mike: And when we give blood it says ‘Infected’… Andy: There’s a hazard warning on your blood, even though you’re undetectable and you can’t pass it on. Mary: There was a time where the media was fanning the flames of stigma around HIV. Andy: It still is…. They still use that very inflammatory media when discussing HIV… They quite often use that homophobic or prejudiced language. Mike: And you can’t get life insurance if you’re HIV positive, even if you’re undetected…. They can’t cancel your life insurance if you’re already infected. So I rang them up and told them [after I was diagnosed] and said ‘Is this covered?’, and they said ‘Only if you got it through a blood transfusion.’… It’s like saying you’ve gone and got cancer on purpose. Andy: There’s friends who’ve told me about dentist appointments where the dentist has put on extra pairs of gloves, or a full hazmat suit… and you’re like ‘Did you not do HIV in your training?’ You know? Andy: [People who don’t have HIV don’t know what ‘undetectable’ means.] You’ll say ‘I’m undetectable’ and they go ‘What?’ How do you change that? How do you reframe that with new language? Mike: People are still stuck here with the tombstones. Andy: It came about on the back of the partner studies, which were extensive studies – they did it with heterosexual couples and then with gay couples. One partner would be positive and undetectable, and they measured thousands and thousands of sexual acts, and there was not one case of it being passed on. Mary: What message would you want to get out? Andy: Just that you can’t pass it on [check]. The life expectancy of someone who’s positive is the same as the wider population if not higher. [Both people add that this is partly because they get lots of checkups (twice a year).] Mike: When I first got me shoulder problem, they gave me an injection of steroids in me shoulder, and it reacted with my meds. I told the nurse I’d been having these symptoms – headaches, suicidal thoughts, I felt really lethargic all the time… [she did a blood test and told me I’d got a temporary version of Addison’s disease.]’
Skyline Event, 24/10/2022 Andy (them/them) and Mike (he/him) ‘Andy: Keeping it [discussions about sexual activities] hidden didn’t serve anybody, did it? This was the approach, you know, and look where it got us! Whereas now, it needs to me – we try and normalise it and talk about it as much as you’d talk about your physical health. It’s still one of the most regular conversations I have at work is people sharing [HIV positive] status when they’re first diagnosed, or even further down the line with a new partner. Andy: Yeah, you can then get the ignorant comments. Mike: And you can get people who then go and broadcast it to everyone. Andy: There are people who threaten to share someone’s status as a controlling abuse thing.’
‘Private Parts’ Exhibition Co-Production Session with Herfa (Thurs 10th November 2022) ‘I went to school in Zimbabwe there was a lot of talk about HIV and AIDS, as awareness, still battling it so like I remember being eight and for like school assembly with did a little play about how you shoudn’t stigmartise against AIDS but also what to do to keep yourself safe. SO we weren’t allowed to help each other if we cut our fingers for example … we weren’t supposed to touch each other if we were bleeding and then I think when you’re 10 you do this like let’s start programme when you start talking about sex education and social issues and it’s still very like aids focussed and then when you reach 12 … the last year primary school station so we learned about like condoms but we didn’t use fruit to put them on we used coke or fanta bottles, glass bottles – less wasteful than using bananas.’
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23524966?searchText=HIV+crisis+1980s+UK Carmen H. Logie and Margaret F. Gibson, ‘A Mark That Is No Mark? Queer Women and Violence in HIV Discourse,’ Culture, Health & Sexuality 15, 1/2 (2013), 29–43 Lesbian, bisexual and queer women have been left out of the discourse on HIV/AIDS even though some of them have contracted it (via sexual assault/rape, via sleeping with bisexual women, via infected needles, etc). HIV/AIDS is associated so much with men who sleep with men that it can be difficult for women who sleep with women to handle the disconnect between their sexual identity and the fact they have this illness. Incidence of HIV/AIDS among them is low but not nonexistent, yet their experiences have been seemingly erased entirely.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/44862383?searchText=HIV+crisis+1980s+UK Matt Cook, ‘AIDS, Mass Observation, and the Fate of the Permissive Turn,’ Journal of the History of Sexuality 26, 2 (2017): 239–272 This article contains lots of interesting quotes from the Mass Observation project in the 1980s which addressed the AIDS crisis at the time - they showed varied degrees of sympathy. They showed how, for example, the HIV/AIDS crisis fomented a greater association between male homosexuality and promiscuity, and therefore a differentiation in some people’s minds between the imagined ‘good’ gay man who simply fell in love with another man, and the imagined aggressive, hypersexual gay man who had hundreds of sexual partners in his lifetime. The crisis also provoked discussion about whether the legalisation of homosexuality (in private, between people over 21) in 1967 was responsible for the extent of HIV/AIDS transmission.
https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/LLN-2019-0152/LLN-2019-0152.pdf ‘Pre-exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) Provision in England: Recent Developments’, House of Lords Library Briefing (2019) This is mirrored in debates today over PrEP: it is argued by some people that access to PrEP makes a person complacent and more likely to be promiscuous, and combined with imperfect usage this allegedly causes greater spread of HIV. However, a systemic review in 2018 found that use of PrEP had no relation to riskier sexual behaviour.
