Queer View Mirror | Pocketmags.com

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Queer View Mirror

#ActUpDublin

#MarshaPJohnson

#SameSexAdoption

UNLEASH THE POWER!

That Ireland needs the Aids activist group ACT UP once again is a sad reflection of the failure to consign HIV and Aids to history. Despite one of the most effective grassroots-generated health campaigns in history, not to mention the development of some of the most sophisticated drugs ever, the disease is making a comeback, with 512 new cases last year in Ireland, almost half of them among men who have sex with men (MSM).

And yet, it could still be brought under control; the one-a-day pill that HIV-positive people take works so well that the virus often becomes undetectable and therefore untransmissible (hence ‘U=U’). Then there’s PrEP, which if used properly, hugely reduces the chances of HIV infection during unprotected sex. In the UK, the NHS in Scotland and Wales provides PrEP, while in October, English STI clinics started recruiting 10,000 eligible people as part of a large-scale study. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Northern Ireland has no state provision of PrEP drugs. Many people in the UK continue to do their own thing and buy PrEP drugs online for £40 or so a month, leaving them vulnerable to counterfeiters.

In Ireland, while individual members of government have made positive noises about PrEP, it still isn’t available through the HSE. An assessment process has been promised to decide if it should be approved and reimbursed, but without political urgency, this could mean PrEP wouldn’t be made available by the HSE until 2019 at the earliest. Doctors can prescribe the brand name version, Truvada, which costs north of €400 a month. People who have sourced the cheaper generic version online are breaking the law if they have it delivered in the post and ACT UP Dublin says it has heard of cases of generic PrEP being seized by customs.

If all the tools to fight HIV were easily available in Ireland, then it’s likely the number of new cases would start to fall sharply; surely a win-win for everyone?

LESSONS FROM HISTORY

How far the LGBT+ community has come since Stonewall, as well as how far it still has to go, are woven through the affecting documentary, The Death and Life of Marsha P Johnson, which is available on Netflix now. She was one of those now famous drag queens who was at the front of the crowd that refused to go quietly after a police raid on New York’s Stonewall Inn in 1969. She and other drag queens, as well as gay people of colour – often described as ‘street people’ – were profound outsiders, who couldn’t and wouldn’t ‘pass’ and their nothing-to-lose rage ignited the gay rights movement that has achieved so much in the almost 50 years since.

However, as this documentary, looking at the available facts in Marsha’s death in 1992 – her body washed up at the Christopher Street Pier on the Hudson River – shows, the early gay rights movement had a difficult and at times hostile relationship with drag queens, trans people and others from the ‘wrong’ side of the tracks.

Remaining outsiders as the gay community advanced through those first rights marches, the first Aids epidemic and on to real equality, took a heavy toll on those early drag queens and trans people. In the film, they often wind up dead, in prison or homeless. The story is told through the attempt of an older trans woman, Victoria Cruz, to shed light on what actually happened to Marsha, more than 20 years before. At the time, the police investigation was no more than cursory; after all, no one cares what happened to a poor black drag queen.

In the present, a similar case – a black trans-person dies violently at the hands of a straight man – comes to trial, and despite the pleas of the victim’s family, the judge apparently accepts the killer’s plea of ‘trans panic’ and hands down just a few years jail time. It gets better, yes, but not for everyone yet.

SOMEBODY DID THINK OF THE CHILDREN

It’s kind of amazing the difference a little tweak in a set of rules can make. Changing a few words in the State’s founding set of rules allows marriage equality, while another few words prevent doctors from doing what’s best for the health of some pregnant women, while also directly denying them something as basic as physical autonomy.

Recently, Minister Katherine Zappone got another set of rules tweaked and the result is that same-sex couples – married, civil partnershipped or not – can now adopt children, under the same set of rules as everyone else.

Before this small change, only one partner in a same-sex unmarried couple could adopt children, leaving the other partner with only the most basic guardian rights, even if they intended to raise the child with the adoptive parent.

This little fix, which won’t harm anyone and may indeed give children in need more opportunities to be part of a caring family, is another of the steps we take as a nation to equality, and Minister Zappone deserves her GALAS gong for getting it over the line, among other things.

This article appears in 335

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