PEPFAR

This past Thursday Dec 18, 2008, having taken pleasure in a deliciously prepared Thai Cuisine lunch sponsored by The Univ of Penn, CFAR CAB, as a welcoming salutation to our distinguished guest speaker Dr. Thomas J. Coates, UCLA AIDS Institute at the David Geffen School of Medicine,  I couldn’t imagine anywhere else I’d rather be. That is to say except to join the migration to Penn’s BRB Auditorium along with both Drs. John and Loretta Jemmott, some Penn Staff & Researchers and members of the CFAR CAB. Here we were to be served the academic portion and the main course of Dr Coates expertise, through his lecture entitled” HIV Prevention What’s Next Globally”.

Through a conversation with Michael Blank, Ph.D., Co-Director Penn Behavioral & Social Sciences Core and Tiffany Brown, Penn CFAR CAB Coordinator, I learned it took every bit of “two years” to coordinate Dr. Coate’s appearance. As Vice-Chair of Penn’s CFAR CAB and a person who is living with AIDS, I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to Penn’s competent Staff for facilitating Dr. Coates’ appearance and affirm that Dr Coates’ appearance was well worth the 2 year wait. It was an enriching experience.   read more »

Our luncheon was thoughtfully planned to be small and intimate, which allowed for some informal conversation. Up until now, of course all of my encounters with Dr. Coates had been external and superficial. I knew of him and his work through teleconferences, list serves, medical journals, internet, magazines, web cams, closed circuit TV and satellite presentations at various conferences. I took pleasure in meeting Dr Coates face to face and I got the distinct impression that he liked me too, but I’ll leave him to blog about that. I found Dr. Coates to be good-natured, up-beat and charming. I knew I would learn many things today in the course of conversation over lunch and by way of his lecture, and unexpectedly one of the first things I learned was The David Geffen School @ UCLA (where Dr Coates joined the Division of Infectious Diseases in 2003) is “the only school in the world named after a Gay Man.” Mmm, I thought. Interesting.

Wednesday, December 17 is the 6th annual International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, initiated by the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP).  In cities across the U.S., Canada and Europe, and in Skopje, Macedonia, and Sydney, Australia, sex workers will remember their dead and show their movement’s strength at vigils, demonstrations and film showings.  For a list of events across the country and the world, visit http://swopusa.org/dec17/locations.htm.

This year, there will be a first-time-ever national march in Washington, DC.  Sex workers and their allies will gather in Franklin Square Park (14th St. NW and I St. NW) for a rally, and march to the Department of Justice to read the names of sex workers who have been murdered in the past year.

“Sex workers experience a disproportionate level of preventable violence,” said Kelli Dorsey, director of the Washington DC community organization Different Avenues, in a press release supporting the protest.  “People of color and transgender people are overwhelmingly targeted.  This discrimination is too often ignored.”<!--break-->

Arrest, deportation and police abuse, as well as the stigma and violence sex workers often experience from clients, in their workplace and in society, also put them at risk for HIV. It’s hard to demand your client use a condom when your first priority is preventing him from raping or killing you.  It’s hard to carry condoms while working on the street if cops use them against you as evidence. 
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It was cold like January in DC last Thursday—the atmosphere fittingly freezing for our community inauguration of President-Elect Barack Obama as the first true AIDS president, a theatrical enactment to seal the promise of January 20th.   read more »