World AIDS DAY: Twin Pandemics of HIV/AIDS & COVID-19 Collide; and ACT UP Oral History Website Relaunch

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Published: 29 November 2021

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Tune into Out-FM on Tues., November 30, 2021 from 8:00-9:00pm, on 99.5FM WBAI/NY & listen at https://www.wbai.org/listen-live/

The audio of the show is directly below. Hit the play button or green download arrow. The video of the ACT UP Oral History Project interview is at the end of this post now.

Twin Pandemics of HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 Collide

Risk of more severe outcomes with COVID-19 may be more likely in HIV positive people. Yet around the world the COVID-19 pandemic has interfered with testing and treatment.  Health GAP, an organization dedicated to getting generic AIDS drugs to people with AIDS worldwide, sees President Biden’s FY22 budget  which includes funding for PEPFAR, a bilateral AIDS program, as deficient. It also sees failure to provide COVID-19 vaccines as hurting not only care, but care providers in countries receiving US AIDS funding.

According to Health GAP's Matthew Rose, “President Biden’s first detailed budget displays a lack of bold leadership motivated to end the HIV pandemic. Flat funding the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is deadly, particularly in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic when the vast majority of people with HIV in most affected countries when COVID-19 has already harmed HIV treatment and prevention programs, and most communities have no access to life-saving COVID-19 vaccines and treatment. If the U.S. had continued fully funding PEPFAR since 2003 instead of letting funding levels slip into a flat-line for the last 11 years, the HIV pandemic would look remarkably different today. “

ACT UP Oral History Project Website Relaunch

Joining us to discuss the project and their newly relaunched website is film maker and activist Jim Hubbard who co-produced with author Sara Schulman “United in Anger” a film documenting various ACT UP campaigns.

The ACT UP Oral History Project is an archive of 187 interviews with members of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, New York. The project is coordinated by Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman, with principal camera work by James Wentzy. The website adding full interviews with 187 surviving members of ACT UP/NY and hundreds of hours of footage of actions and meetings.

ACT UP, founded in March of 1987, is a diverse, non-partisan group of individuals, united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis.  Its determined advocacy and highly-focused demonstrations supported by innovative graphics utterly changed the world’s perception of people with AIDS and queer people. This description, on the actuporalhistory.org website introduces to some of the indepth coverage of the accomplishments of one of the most effective and influential left leaning LGBTQ groups in the US. The site is a great source of political and tactical decisions that challenged government policy and inaction at a time when the HIV epidemic was killing hundreds of thousands in the US and infecting more than a million young men and some women. It reveals some of the ways the group was able to capture the attention of the mass media and communicate to the public at large about government and corporate failures that jeapordized so many lives of people living with HIV and AIDS. Click here for part 2 of the Oral History Project interview with Jim Hubbard.
 

Gains by Intersex Activists Under Biden, Battles with Rightwing Legislators Over Medical Care

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Published: 15 November 2021

In this episode we bring you news of the LGBTQI Communitites struggles. Naomi Brussel and John Riley also bring us an extended interview about Intersex issues. Intersex is a group of conditions in which there is a discrepancy between the external genitals and the internal genitals (the testes and ovaries). The older term for this condition is hermaphroditism.  In the past two weeks, several events have brought the issues related to intersex people and their rights into the news. The United States State Department has issued its first passport using the X gender marker to Dana Zzyym (pronounced Zim) who had fought a six year legal battle to change the State Department's gender marker policy. And the Biden administration held a white house round table on intersex awareness day, October 27th, and issued a statement through its department of education. Protecting the rights of intersex students. The organization, Interact Advocates for Intersex Youth in conjunction with Harvard law school for the LGBTQ and Advocacy Clinic, there, launched an intersex advocacy toolkit. And one of the people responsible for driving various numbers of these events is Kimberly Zieselman, who is with us today.  Zieselman is the executive director of Interact Advocates. She is an intersex woman and has more than 20 years of experience in advocacy and nonprofit management. After graduating from Suffolk University law school, she served as a policy analyst for the Massachusetts joint House and Senate Committee on Healthcare, and then worked in government relations and advocacy for a variety of healthcare related nonprofits, including Boston Children's Hospital.

She led the group Interact through a successful strategic planning process about six years ago and rebranded and reorganized the organization in 2016 to reflect its core mission around intersex youth and the importance of raising intersex visibility, as well as using law and policy initiatives to protect intersex children's rights. She talked with Out-FM co-hosts Naomi Brussel and John Riley about some basic issues that Interact deals with, how rightwing legislatures on one hand demonize gender affirming surgery for trans youth and on the other affirm the right of parents and medical providers to do surgeries on intersex babies and toddlers