Please join us at the launch presentation of ACT UP activist Stav Bee’s paper ‘ACT UP – Women, AIDS and the NHS’ on Sunday March 13th from 6-8pm at the London LGBT+ Community Centre. It is free and all donations on the night go towards the Positively UK Hardship Fund / Facebook event page here
About ACT UP – Women, AIDS and the NHS
This open ended paper is exploring how the National Health Service was founded and developed in the UK, bubbling before WW2 and completed by 1947. Equality, lack of discrimination and prejudice and free healthcare for all, was at the heart of NHS, which continues to this day despite the lack of funding and the political bureaucracies.
HIV is a virus that if untreated can lead to AIDS. The HIV epidemic that has been one of the most devastating and infectious diseases to have emerged in human history, wiping communities.
The epidemic has been fueled by spreading fear through ignorance and political apathy, ignorance and monetization.
It is considered that these viruses HIV 1 and HIV 2 have appeared in certain primates in Sub Saharan Africa, where they act as natural hosts and through cross-species infections and human intervention of testing, inoculating and experimenting with species which carry viruses humans cannot handle.
The paper continues with HIV and AIDS in the UK, which was branded as a ‘gay disease’ escalating more homophobia, discrimination and increasing fear through ignorance with panicked and costly campaigns from the homophobic and inconsiderate Tory government.
HIV and AIDS has no race and orientation and it has no gender, however it grows on power imbalances and marginalisation, including gender inequality . Women (and children) have been living with HIV too, some have acquired HIV through transfusions, unprotected sex and intravenous drugs – through sharing needles and children used to get HIV perinatally (from mother to child – if they don’t have access to HIV treatment).
In the UK there are 30,000 women living with HIV, one third of 100 k people who have HIV . Thanks to advancement in Anti Retro Viral (ARV) treatment and good social care women with HIV can expect to live long and healthy lives, they can have HIV negative children, and cannot transmit HIV to their sexual partners. However, stigma is still rife in the community, and many women still live in silence and fear.
Women living with HIV in the UK experience an intersection of issues 85% are from racially minoritized groups ( especially Black African), one third live in poverty, around 50% have been diagnosed with a mental health condition. Nevertheless we rarely include women in the UK HIV narrative. We are here to open the discussion.
About Stav B – ‘I am a queer woman, artist, ACT UP activist and creative and everything I conceive, plan, execute is based around art and creativity, along with love and fun.’
About Positively UK Hardship Fund – Positively UK’s Hardship Support Scheme provides financial support to help people living with HIV in times of crisis.
About ACT UP London – ACT UP London is a diverse, non-partisan group of individuals united in anger and committed to direct action to end the HIV pandemic, along with the broader inequalities and injustices that perpetuate it.
