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Title: HIV Stigma View count: 5249 Rating: 5.0 (17 ratings) Description: Cass Mann is one of the world's longest-term HIV-positive diagnosed gay men, now in his third decade of living with HIV, and the founder of UK's only gay men's HIV/AIDS charity Positively Healthy, which provides HIV services including education, support, and peer counselling. He feels that ironically, it is often other gay men who most stigmatize gay men. They associate the gay identity with an AIDS identity, and they want to dissociate themselves from it. He experiences the deepest discrimination from people in the gay community who want nothing to do with an HIV positive person. Many HIV positive gay men don't want to go to clubs because visible side effects of antiretroviral drugs like lipodystrophy (muscle wasting), lipoatrophy (facial wasting) and the "buffalo hump" (irregular fat deposits in the body) cause them to be singled out and ridiculed. He feels that a lot of the stigmatization is due to the person's fear of the possibility that they too may become HIV positive. As a result, HIV positive gay men often don't go to lit venues; they go to dark rooms, back rooms, or parks instead. Cass is concerned that whereas heterosexuals meet anywhere and everywhere, gay men primarily meet in venues where alcohol and drugs are used, and wonders why that's the case. For more information about HIV/AIDS, visit http://www.posh-uk.org.uk/ and http://www.AIDSvideos.org/. This video is freely downloadable from http://www.archive.org/details/HivStigma . [Do you want to help prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS? Are you fluent in a language other than English? Then volunteer to translate this video into another language! Click http://AIDSvideos.org/translate.shtml to learn how you can help!!!] Tags: hiv, aids, stigma, lipodystrophy, lipoatrophy, club, dark, back, room, park, alcohol, drugs, discrimination, cass, mann, positively, Author: AIDSvideos |
