Melissa Gira Grant | The Nation
Ending Prostitution 'Central' to Ending AIDS, US Tells Supreme Court
Sex workers and advocates at We Can End AIDS March, July 2012, in Washington, DC. Photo by Melissa Gira Grant.
On the steps of the Supreme Court yesterday morning, shortly before arguments began on the constitutionality of compelling aid recipients to oppose prostitution, a dozen or so students in marigold hooded sweatshirts won the color-coordinated insignia game. Outside a photo op or two, the small group of activists with red umbrellas—which signal support for sex workers’ rights—left them folded at their feet. Sex workers, it appeared, would be as nearly invisible outside the Court as they would be in the arguments made within.
Anti-Prostitution Pledge Heads to Supreme Court
The XIX International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2012) in Washington, DC. (IAS/Deborah W. Campos)
On Monday, the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in a case that will decide if recipients of government aid can be forced to oppose prostitution—or potentially any other issue as a contingency of receiving US funds. The case, Alliance for Open Society International v. United States Agency for International Development, arises from a controversial policy governing AIDS education, prevention and treatment, a decade-long fight that's crossed political lines and was kicked off by Representative Chris Smith as part of a larger conservative attempt to undermine reproductive and sexual health care. With HIV and AIDS projects facing closure if they don't adopt the government's position on sex work, it's sex workers who are paying the ultimate price.
Having AIDS Is Not a Crime: A DC March Demands an End to Discriminatory Police Tactics
Byeesha Owens is on the mic as this Wednesday’s We Can End AIDS march in Washington approached its first targets, UPS and Wells Fargo. This is what an AIDS enemy looks like as we enter the fourth decade of the epidemic: those who drive policies that drive the epidemic, and those who profit from disease and discrimination.
It’s Owens’s first AIDS march, and it’s sticky and hot in Washington, and by the time we get to the White House, we’ll have been marching for two hours. She’s here with her aunt from New Jersey, who’s been HIV-positive for over twenty years. The tattoos around Owens’s collarbone glisten. With the heat, there’s more bared skin out on the march than inside the climate-controlled convention center that houses the AIDS conference, where the march stepped off.
Protest Greets the International AIDS Conference in DC
Washington welcomed the International AIDS Conference back to the United States this Sunday, after a twenty-two-year absence due to US policy that barred people living with HIV from entering the country. As most delegates began to queue for the IAC’s opening session, a group of about twenty young women, trans people and men successfully interrupted the opening press conference, wearing green Statue of Liberty crowns, sounding vuvuzelas and chanting “No sex workers? No drug users? No IAC!” The United States still refuses entry to people who sell sex or people who use drugs, groups that are among the most vulnerable to HIV transmission and who have the least access to prevention and treatment resources.
As the protesters filed out, Diane Havlir, conference co-chair, began her remarks again. “We’re here to talk about courage and big ideas,” she told reporters, as bursts of vuvuzela and and chants could be heard in the press room again. “All of us at this table will be judged for our actions.”
AIDS Isn't Just a Public Health Issue, It's an Injustice
Can activists gathering in Washington, DC, for the International AIDS Conference get Obama and the world to listen?
Starting this Sunday in Washington, an estimated 20,000 people will convene to “turn the tide” of the AIDS pandemic, at the International AIDS Conference, the largest global gathering devoted to HIV/AIDS. For the first time in twenty-two years, the AIDS conference returns to the United States, thanks in significant part to President Obama’s lifting the HIV travel ban, which had prohibited people living with HIV/AIDS from entering the United States since 1987. Activists are mobilizing in the thousands to ensure that the concerns of people most impacted by HIV/AIDS are not sidelined.
The International AIDS Conference is a bit of a circus, or perhaps multiple rings of competing circuses. High-level policy makers with the power to set the global AIDS agenda, along with drug manufacturers and doctors, join the ranks of community health workers and grassroots activists. On stage and in the hallways, there will be Gateses (Bill and Melinda, whose foundation is a major AIDS funder worldwide), sometimes Clintons and, this year, Bushes (Laura and W.). There are pleasant swarms of consultants and wonks, bright banners and loud marches. Walking through the Global Village, the free satellite conference set up alongside the pricey formal conference, delegates are as likely to find sex educators demonstrating receptive (sometimes called female) condoms as they are to cross paths with United Nations staff. In a sense, all are equal in this space, but just for one week every two years, and even then, not really.
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