Panel 3 -- Building Bridges: Linkages among the HIV/AIDS and Other Social Movements

How do HIV/AIDS social movements relate to other movements, and how can productive alliances be built among movements?

 

 

"Protesting in Parallel: The LGBT and HIV/AIDS Movements, 1969-2009"

Joyce Hunter, D.S.W.
Research Scientist at the HIV Center and Co-Investigator of the Global Community Core; Assistant Professor, Public Health, Sociomedical Sciences, Columbia University; and Assistant Professor, Clinical Psychiatric Social Work, Psychiatry, Columbia University
(Contact: jh547@columbia.edu)

Abstract: The LGBT movement has been integrally related to the HIV/AIDS movement ever since the emergence of the epidemic itself. However, the LGBT movement has also had other, broader goals, while HIV/AIDS activism has expanded well beyond its original base among gay men and their lesbian allies and supporters.  This paper analyzes the impact of HIV/AIDS on the LGBT movement, and the contribution of the LGBT movement to combating AIDS, across three critical time periods: 1) during the pre-epidemic period up to 1981, when LGBT organization built a critical infrastructure for the founding of the HIV/AIDS movement; 2) during the height of the epidemic from 1982-1995, when AIDS issues dominated the LGBT agenda, often at the expense of other issues, including the priorities of many lesbians; and 3) since 1996, when the availability of ARVs reduced the centrality of AIDS to LGBT activism and allowed other issues to emerge, especially partnership and family rights.

Presenter Bio:
Joyce Hunter, D.S.W., is a Research Scientist at the HIV Center. Dr. Hunter has been an activist, researcher, and clinician for over 30 years. As a founding member of the Hetrick-Martin Institute and Director and Clinical Supervisor of Social Work Services there, she co-developed a counseling program, drop-in center, and outreach project to street and homeless youth. She also co-founded the on-site high school program, the Harvey Milk School. Dr. Hunter has conducted clinical trainings for professionals and graduate students in HIV/AIDS prevention for women, youth, and families, combating homophobia for LGBT youth, reduction of high HIV/STD risk behaviors, best health practices for at-risk and HIV-positive youth, and needs of street, runaway, and homeless youth, working with racially/culturally diverse populations and families. Dr. Hunter is a founding member of the International AIDS Women's Caucus (IAWC), and was a former member of the Governing Council of the International AIDS Society. She is Co-Chair of Global AIDS Action Network (GAAN), and is Past President of the National Lesbian and Gay Health Association and Conference Co-Chair of its annual conferences. At the HIV Center, she is currently Principal Investigator of the Working It Out Project, a community-based HIV prevention research project for gay, lesbian, and bisexual adolescents that utilizes an award-winning video and an intervention curriculum.

 

“The Social Medicine and Anti-War Roots of the Early Gay Health Movement in Chicago and its Impact on the Gay Community and Governmental Responses to the AIDS/HIV Epidemic"

David G. Ostrow, M.D., Ph.D., LFAPA
Senior Scientist, Ogburn Stouffer Center for Social Organization Research, NORC at the University of Chicago; Chair, Behavioral Working Group of the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study, Howard Brown Health Center of Chicago
(Contact: dostrow@uchicago.edu) 

Abstract: This presentation will briefly link the early organization of a gay medical student support program and eventually the first gay community-based health center in the US (The Howard Brown Clinic, now the Howard Brown Community Health Center) to the community organizing, social medicine and anti-Vietnam War movements at the University of Chicago and University of Illinois at Chicago Medical schools in the late 1960's-early 1970's. The discovery of hepatitis B as a sexually transmitted disease among gay/bisexual men being served by community volunteers at HBC in the early 70s enabled the Clinic to develop the links to the CDC and local academic institutions to become the first community-based health organization to receive direct public health funding for the HBV epidemiological and vaccine development studies of the CDC during that period, and, at the same time, acquire the expertise and community support necessary to become a major HIV treatment, support and research site from the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in Chicago starting in 1982. How elements of those preceding community organizing and activist movements then were incorporated into the larger gay community's and governmental institutional responses to the AIDS/HIV epidemic will be the concluding part of the presentation.

Presenter bio:
For more than four decades, David Ostrow has been a bold, innovative leader in addressing critical issues of gay men’s health.  In 1974, while a NGMS MSTP student at the University of Chicago, Ostrow helped to found what is now the Howard Brown Health Center as a place to provide confidential and high-quality testing and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases for gay men. From the onset of the AIDS crisis, Ostrow has been at the forefront of research. At his suggestion, the National Institutes of Health started the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study (MACS), the largest and longest-running HIV/AIDS study in the world. Since 1999, Dr. Ostrow has been Chair of the Behavioral Working Group of the MACS, supervising all internally funded and facilitating externally funded behavioral research with the MACS data set and biorepository. With colleagues at the University of Michigan, Ostrow later established the National Institutes of Mental Health–sponsored Coping and Change Study (CCS), which examined the behavior and mental adaptations of Chicago MACS participants over the past 14 years. He has edited 12 books on various aspects of gay health and HIV/AIDS, including the 1983 landmark publication “Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Homosexual Men: Diagnosis, Treatment and Research,” and the 1999 “Psychosocial and Public Health Impacts of New HIV Treatments.”   Although Dr. Ostrow retired from the practice of addiction psychiatry in 2004, he continues to be active in sexual and drug use behavior research- most recently establishing multiple causal links between recreational drug use and HIV transmission- and patient advocacy issues.

 

"HIV & AIDS: At the Crossroads of Global Movements" 

Cynthia Rothschild, M.A., M.P.H.
Senior Policy Advisor at the Center for Women's Global Leadership at Rutgers University
(Contact: aimlgc@igc.org) 

Abstract: The HIV&AIDS pandemic has had devastating consequences around the globe, and has decimated individual lives, communities, and health systems. Yet, the intertwining human rights and health crises have also spawned courageous and creative activism, including both individual acts of resistance and organized political advocacy of social movements. This presentation will explore some of these strategic and innovative responses, and will focus in large part on AIDS-related challenges faced by, and successes in, international human rights, LGBT and women's advocacy.

Presenter bio:
Cynthia Rothschild, independent consultant and Senior Policy Advisor at the Center for Women's Global Leadership at Rutgers University, is currently  consulting  in areas related to the United Nations, HIV/AIDS, women  human rights defenders and sexual rights. A sexual rights activist  for over 19 years, she is the author of Written Out: How  Sexuality  is Used to Attack Women's Organizing; the co-author of  Strengthening  Resistance: Confronting Violence Against Women and  HIV/AIDS and  Amnesty International's Crimes of Hate, Conspiracy  of   Silence:  Torture and Ill-Treatment Based on Sexual Identity. Rothschild is also also the author of several recently published articles on sexual rights, including "Abstinence Goes Global: The United States, the Right Wing, and Human Rights", and"Not Your Average Sex Story:  Critical Issues in Recent Reporting on Human Rights and Sexuality". A former member of Amnesty International USA's Board of Directors and a founding member of Amnesty's LGBT program, she is now on the Advisory Board  of Human Rights Watch's  LGBT Program.  In addition, she has worked with a number of NGOs in women's human rights, reproductive rights and HIV/AIDS.  Her UN advocacy includes work at  the UN Human Rights Council, the Commission on the Status of Women  and various meetings on HIV & AIDS and rights of children. She sits on the steering committees of two international campaigns: Women Won't  Wait: End HIV and Violence Against Women. Now!, and the   International Women Human Rights Defenders Coalition.  She received graduate degrees from Columbia University in International Affairs and in Public Health.

 

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