Where are we now with AIDS? Gscene Magazine. November 2015

Not that I’ve never written about where we were with AIDS or anything. It’s been a major bleat of mine in this column and other magazines. Or, indeed, covered the AIDS conferences or Big Pharma exposés about creaming a community of all their financials. Now that its been handed over to the medics and financiers completely, we enter a newer tender in the so called war on AIDS. The war on AIDS still being available through medication. We enter the age where, no medical institution or corporation takes control but a lowly hedge funder who publicly buys the medication for pennies and sells it for dollars before our eyes. All with more of a markup than a kilo of Tina. Nothing is wrong with this because this is exactly what drug companies have been doing forever. But here it shamelessly out of the closet for all to see.

And so we get to the hedgefunders controlling the lives of the once dying. Now controlling the monetary value of staying alive, hoping that the rich white western gays can still cough up enough profit - without a second thought about anyone else, Africa perhaps. Then posturing themselves in the media and the media then celebrating their gains. 

An AIDS now without a history. Gone are the legions of lesions slipping away under clean white western sheets. The old deaths, now forgotten as merely a debt to the impoverished still-living. A crisis dissolved into a spreadsheet. A vector chart representing a few standing soldiers on the horizon, once limping and badly bruised. Of fervent shouting, reminding us they are still here as we shunter along. All now for a health service to pay a hedgefunder a fixed price of his own choosing. Unwarranted, unstable and still holding a linage to ransom- from the drug companies to the bullied NHS and its shallow-panting out-patients.

All justified by the second term of the democratically elected band of fools and sons of bust stockbrokers from days gone by. Gently pressing on the forehead of every degenerate, drowning in designer cesspools of their own making. 

Where are we with AIDS again? Back to the days of ignorance where the dying are now farther away. A disbelief about the perils of contraction of a disease. The ability to look the other way, again. Not through lack of knowledge or shock or disbelief - we know this sleeping demon well - but from an assurance that it can now be corrected by expensive pharmaceuticals and the taking of comfort in that - where it once was abhorrent. The meds for life culture that HIV flagged up first and then became the paradigm for an increasingly unhealthy populace. ‘We have a tablet for that’ – and a life -long tablet for bogus diseases brought about by modern existence.

And then the urgency of the cure which is only really a race to a patent. Then selling the cure in tablet form to the highest bidder. Mixing a combination into a newer patent and starting the billing cycle all over again.

So where are we with AIDS? 

AIDS has become the unspoken again, although not for any reasons of shame. AIDS is unspoken because people now live. AIDS is off the checklist, replaced by alcohol induced hypermarket multi- morbidities such as Diabetes.  Then multiple drugs for possible side effects of one ailment, unnecessary, yet keeping the drug-lords in jets and their own private health care.  And when the patent is up on these drugs, just like HIV, they will be recombined, re-patented and reevaluated all over again. It’s the oldest trick in the book to sell the same thing twice. 

Where were we, again?

Are we at a place where there are no more battles to be fought and won by people like us? A place where the LGBT community has ceased to exist. Did we want this? We wanted no more than this? What we seem to have left are the surviving screaming desperados wailing for anther party drug. Bars and organizations flying the flag for us all. The ship upon which we were Shang-hai’d  has sailed and reached a different port. We’ve got what we wanted and we find that we’ve arrived at a place where equality still doesn’t exist.  The best we could hope for is visibility and assimilation and if you look at every chat show on network telly on a Friday night - that’s all we have.

So, that’s where we are. Homeowners all. Media whores all. Camp and visible. Hand holding in public without a right to fight for anyone. A time where KS is forgotten along with the swollen glands and the loosening bowels. All gone. Because now someone is paying a fortune to keep us alive. A tax on the just-about living. But this time without the kicking.

So, with all this in mind, I’m a bit shamed that I enter the hospital this week for the second tonsillectomy this year. (Who knew you had two) And I thank my once gay stars that we’ve arrived where we all wanted.  Pat yourselves on the back.