Sign, Sign, Sign

It’s all happening again.

Back in May there was a proposal to completely change the way HIV Prevention was delivered in London, to scrape the current multi-branch approach and replace it with a system was only designed to was waste money. Well, thanks to the public out cry, that wasn’t steam-rolled through and we still have an approach that is working. But not for long, it seems.

The latest funding proposal for HIV prevention serving gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (MSM) is to be only £1,145,960 (£1.1 million), that means there will be a cut in the money for HIV Prevention next year (the new funding will start in April 2008). This will work out at £7.64 a year for every MSM in London – that’s how much London PCT’s value MSM’s health. Back in April 1998 the funding was £2 million, so ten years later we’ve see a 55% reduction in HIV Prevention funding. This is a scandal, especially when we’ve actually seen a fall in HIV infections in London’s MSM – the opposite of the national trend.

But we don’t have to take this lying down. Firstly, there is a petition to the Prime Minister to oppose this, and we can sign it online at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/hivprevention/

Also we can write to our MP, which can be done online at http://www.upmystreet.com/commons/l/ , and tell them how much we oppose this.

We won back in May, we need to do this again. One voice, shouting on its own, can easily be ignored; many voices all speaking together will grab attention.

Drew.

It’s Me Again.

I’ve finally found some time away from working (the non-creative world of audits) to do some writing of my own, and some of it is getting published.

I’ve had another very short story published on the Gay Flash Fiction website (http://www.gayflashfiction.com/ ). Its a very brief short story, called Once More With Feeling, about a man who find his lover is being unfaith but does behave in the expected way. Unfortunately, I can’t post a direct link to the short here, because of the format Gay Flash Fiction all the pages have the same address, if you go to the Stories Page of the website the story is about halfway down. Enjoy.

Nursing Times has accepted another of my comments pieces, which is due for publication in December, and Nursing Standard has commission me to do another book review.

I have also started to post articles on Shvoong website, which is like a showcase for free lance article writing. Editors can view abstracts of my articles and buy them if they want to publish them. I have one article already up on it (http://www.shvoong.com/medicine-and-health/1696951-step/ ), so fingers crossed that can generate some more publishing chances.

Drew.

Doris Lessing Says It All…

"Oh Christ! ... I couldn't care less." Was Doris Lessing’s response yesterday, as she climbed out of a taxi returning home from a shopping trip, on being told she had won the Nobel Prize for literature. I laughed so much it caused me to have a coughing fit.

Back in the 1970s Doris Lessing was told, by an officious representative of the Nobel Committee, that she would “never” win the Nobel prize, so she put all thought of it out of her mind. She speculated, yesterday, that she had been told this because she’d written a series of science fiction novels, The Shikasta books. If this is true then the people who made that decision should hand their heads in shame. The Shikasta books were how I first started reading her work and how I discovered the wonderful writing of Doris Lessing. She has an amazing ability to examine the world around her with a razor sharp skill.

But, in the end, are literary prizes important? Doris Lessing has won almost every one of them there is to but if she had won none of them would that have made her any lesser of writer, I think not.

My school introduced a prize for creative writing, but I only heard of it when the winner was announced. You see, the only pupils that could enter it were the ones in the top stream for English, and I not being so was automatically barred from it. The girl who won it that first never won another word after she left school, until like me.

Most years, when they announce the short list and then the winner for the Booker Prize I am left with the feeling “Who picks these books?” They nominate books I would not want to read, let alone books I actually have read. It seems to being popular is an automatic bar to nomination, like not being in the top set for English.

I’m with Doris Lessing, "Oh Christ! ... I couldn't care less." I’d much rather people read what I wrote.

Drew.

Work is The Curse…

Oscar Wilde said “Work is the curse of the drinking classes”, it is a typically flippant remark of his but sometimes I feel that work is the curse of my writing. In the last month or so I’ve been busy with my job, I’m an Audit Nurse, and it has left little room for anything else. My writing output has mostly been audit reports, a very dry and very unfulfilling activity. It has left me frustrated as hell.

I’ve still managed to keep up with writing my novel, a fantasy story about a boy searching for his missing mother through seven very different worlds. It’s my first real attempt at writing a novel, I feel I’ve waited far too long to start and I don’t know if it will be any good but I’ve got to keep on writing it. You see, its story has got right under my skin and I can’t stop thinking about it, working out the plot in my head, twisting and turning were my characters will go, it’s a kind of obsession but a good one.

This month will see the publication of an article I wrote, promoting testicular self-examination (sounds so exciting), for the British magazine Out in the City. The only thing is I don’t know exactly when it will be published; all they’ve told me is that it’s going to be in the September issue.

I certainly won’t let my blog be so silent for so long again, I’m not going to give up on this.

Drew.

Publish and Be…

I’ve heard it said, so many times, that you can’t fight the bigots, you just have to ignore them and eventually they’ll go away. I don’t agree, I can’t agree because I’ve seen how effective it can be to stand-up to them.

Back in July 1997 I was a Staff Nurse, working on a hospital ward, and I was on a week’s Night Duty. The ward was very quiet at night, once the patients had gone to sleep, and the patients always gave us their unwanted newspapers to read – ninety percent of the time they were tabloids. I’d rather sell my soul then actually pay money for those awful rags that make-up the British tabloids, the thought that my money going to aiding them is too much for my morals; but if someone gives me one free that eases my conscience. As awful as they are those tabloids make for fascinating reading, their stance that there’s always someone to “blame”, a villain in every story, and the blunt and inflammatory language they use. Also, I was really bored on that Night Duty.

One night, during that airless week, I opened an unwanted copy of The Sun newspaper (One of the worst all the tabloids) and read an opinion article called “It is cruel to ‘gay’ kids try sex at 16” by Anne Atkins – a “professional” vicar’s wife and right-wing Christian.

The article stated “this is not opinion: it is fact” that gay men have a life expectancy of 43 years and are 17 times more likely to be paedophiles then heterosexuals. (This is as much a “fact” as saying unicorns live in the depths of English forests and dragons roam the Walsh hills) The sheer homophobia and lies of that short opinion piece was sickening. Every short paragraph of it contained the most appalling lies, all of them designed to whip up homophobia. I felt sick to the pit of my stomach reading it.

At the time, July 1997, there was a political push to equalise the age of consent for both gay men and heterosexuals – only a few years before the gay age of consent had been lowered from 21 to 18. Months before the parliamentary debate the right-wing were crying homophobia about it; the Evangical Christians quickly added their voices.

Anne Atkins was a vicar’s wife, former actress and very poor novelist. She’d risen to notoriety only the previous year by attacking the twentieth anniversary celebrations of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement (LGCM), turning a two minute radio God-slot (for which she was a contributor) into homophobic propaganda – she actually claimed that accepting Lesbian & Gay Christians was causing the fall-off in the numbers of people coming forward to train as Anglican ministers, which was a lie. With this notoriety Atkins found the role of a life-time, she was the fluffy and blonde face of “Christian Morality”, her general persona was of “I’m only saying this because I care soooo much,” and it was completely untrue. Underneath she was just as bigoted, hypocritical, blinkered and truth-light as the rest of the Christian Right-Wing – trying to tell people how to live their lives without any regard to the realities of life. With Atkins there was one difference, she actually seemed to crave the fame her notoriety brought.

As I read and re-read that article I became more and more angry. In her short “career” up to that point Atkins had repeatedly used homophobia to keep her in the public eye, but this time she’d suppressed herself. This article oozed homophobia from every brief paragraph, but it was the lies there that were most shocking. Lies that painted gay men as diseased, corrupt and less then human. (Later I would find out that Atkins had based her article on a piece by Paul Cameron [I would never call the stuff Cameron produces as research, that would give it far more credit then it deserves] were he made the claims about gay men’s life expectancy and being paedophiles. Cameron’s work was no more then statistics with extreme prejudice, Cameron did not fulfil any of the requirements to measure life expectancy; all he did was a crude survey and then poured his prejudice on it. He made no attempt to reduce any of the biases in his survey. Atkins appeared to seize on this work without any attempt to analysis it) How much hate and fear must her little article have generated?

It was then I decided to do something about it.

In Britain we have the Press Complaints Commission, the body that oversees any complaints about newspapers. It is funded by the newspapers and rarely upholds the complaints it receives, it has always seemed to side with the newspapers; but complaining directly to The Sun newspaper would have been useless. So I got their Code of Practice and set about constructing my complaint. I wasn’t the only person who complained about Atkins’ article, they had a record number of complaints about it, though it still took them six months to reach their decision (!!).

I received my reply from the Press Complaints Commission on a Saturday morning, in late January 1998. Martin and I had recently started our relationship and that Saturday morning we were preparing to go out together but when I read the letter I actually jumped up and punched the air. They had found in our favour, they had found that Atkins’ article was not “factual” and she should never have claimed what she did. It was a victory, a wonderful victory for the truth. Rarely did the Press Complaints Commission uphold complaints but here it did, Atkins’ article had so blatantly breeched their Cod of Practice. The full decision can be read at: http://www.pcc.org.uk/news/index.html?article=MTk4MQ

I can’t say it was a glorious victory. Anne Atkins didn’t apology for her appalling article, she actually tried to paint herself as a victim in all of it, she claimed the article was re-written her a sub-editor and they had changed it (Anyone who’s had anything published knows that sub-editors do edit, often re-placing our over-writing, but never do they change the tone or emphasis). She never took responsibility for what she wrote. Atkins did claim, in the middle of all the negative publicity, that she would give up journalism to concentrate on novel writing – though this was as truthful as everything else she’d written because weeks later she was in another tabloid, using her usual homophobic tone to tell off George Michael. I certainly didn’t get any “right of reply”, though I’d have loved to have pointed out how Atkins had played fast and loose with the truth. But one important thing did come out of all of this; it stopped the rise of Anne Atkins as a moralist.

Atkins had seemed to be carving out a career as Moral Campaigner, the person who speaks out against society’s “ills”. Being found guilty by the Press Complaints Commission seemed to stop that and instead she was consigned to the bin of “Rent-a-Bigot” – dragged out to disapprove of something. I can’t claim to be responsible for this but I am sure that my fighting back helped towards it.

I would do it all again, too, even though it was a long and frustrating experience. Since I’ve started to write seriously, especially since I have been writing opinion pieces, I have found how careful and accurate you have to be; I’d never dream of being as ignorant, biased and plain slapdash as Atkins was. An opinion piece, by its nature, is an expression of the writer’s opinions but what it is based on has to be truthful, it has to be based on the truth.

Drew.

One in Ten People

To mark the 25th anniversary of Terry Higgins’ death this year, one of the first people to die from AIDS in Britain, The Terrance Higgins Trust (Who bare his name) conducted a survey into people’s attitudes and knowledge around HIV & AIDS. 10% of those who took part thought HIV could be caught from sweat, 10% thought you can get it from kissing, 12% thought you can get it from sharing cutlery. 20% thought there’s a cure for AIDS.

When I read this I was shocked, all these beliefs are false but what was more shocking is that these are basic HIV/AIDS information, not rocket science, and should be widely known by now. We’ve had twenty-five years to get our message across, what the hell has gone wrong?

I turned my horror into an opinion piece for Nursing Times magazine (it was published two days ago), with the hope that others will feel the same way that I do. I can barely believe that our health information message has gone so wrong on HIV/AIDS. But HIV is no longer a “hot potato”, the media has long ago lost interest in it, and so such of our health information is in reaction to the latest media health-scare.

I am deeply saddened by this. So often we seem to be chasing behind bad information/rise in infection rates were HIV is concerned. We’ve had over twenty-five years and we are still not winning the fight against HIV, and it makes me feel sick.

Drew.

One of Those Moments.

While growing up the images of gay men I had were limited, at best. They basically came in two types, the sexless effeminate men (you couldn’t call them queens because they were so pathetic) or the self-hating and constantly apologising “hom-o-sexuals” (“oh please forgive me for being such a pervert”), and neither of them were remotely sexual. It was the 1970’s and it was no climate to try and develop a gay identity.

As I slipped into my teens I was desperate for any kind of gay images, anything that didn’t tell me gay was bad and unnatural. I couldn’t find it anywhere on television, if it was on radio it was hidden to me, and growing up in suburban Liverpool I had no access to the first shoots of British gay publishing – the newspapers I saw, if they ever mentioned it, only ran gays as “dirty pervert” stories.

On a cold Friday night in 1981 it all finally changed. My parents were out and I had the house to myself, so I sat down to watch the television the whole night – as a teenager I was practically addicted to it. I was watching Channel 4 (back then it was still new and still broadcasting programs aimed at “minorities”, programs aimed at groups no other channel would bother with; it hadn’t turned into the Reality TV and imported programs channel it is now), it was broadcasting the first Secret Policeman’s Ball that night. In the middle of all that Oxbridge humour Tom Robinson came on and, accompanying himself on a guitar, sang Glad To Be Gay. It was like a new world opening up for me.

Gay To Be Gay was never an anthem of pride, it was always a protest song against homophobia, yet it was the first time I ever heard someone publicly stand-up for being gay, it was the first positive image of being gay I had seen and it was wonderful. Here was a gay man who was unapologetically standing up for being gay, who was saying the problem was with society’s homophobia and not with his sexuality, and he was attractive.

For two minutes I watched almost breathlessly, this wonderful moment of basking it such a positive gay image, then it was over and the Oxbridge comedy continued.

At the time I never told anyone else about what I’d seen that night. I could barely accept that I was gay, back then, I could never have admitted to seeing and let alone enjoying Tom Robinson’s performance; but I never ever forgot it.

Several years later I saw Tom Robinson live, on a very wet Sunday evening in Southport’s Floral Hall (Southport is God’s Waiting Room on the Irish Sea). Live his performance was even better, he sang all the sang of his I’d grown to love in those few years (that moment on television had made me a life long fan), and when he sang Glad To Be Gay I happily sang along too – as did the rest of the audience.

Many years later I actually met Tom Robinson. It was in Trafalgar Square, London, for a World Aids rally. He was comparing and singing at it, I was a volunteer there. I physically met him and shuck his hand, he was handsome and charming as I remember from seeing him on stage. But I never told him about seeing him television, back in 1981, and what it had meant to me; well you don’t, do you…

Drew.