I Don't Want to Talk About it - Biography of Tony Carden by his mother Lesley Saddington

Tony Carden was a gay activist in Sydney and apart from the fact that he died of AIDS, he was also involved with organisations such as ACT UP, an activist group which it could in effect be said to have been imported from the USA where, thanks to Ronald Reagan,the number of deaths fromm HIV/AIDS had become astronomical. I suppose one could say that bin an way we were lucky in Australia when AIDS landed here,beucause to a certain extent we couldlearn from the US disaster and try and see that we did not make all the mistakes made in the USA. One thing we were lucky about was that we had a goverment at that time was composed of severalpeople who were progressive thinkers and were to achieve some progressive moves which helped to save the lives of thousands of people, mostly young men. We were also fortunate that gay liberation was in its early days and there were many youg people who became politically active which helped so many youg people understand actions that needed to be taken in order to work towards changing the political climate. One such person was Tony Carden who was at the forefront of activism in ACT UP and the likes which changed the politics of activism. Tony Carden died of AIDS and his mother Lesley Saddington has written a book about his life which should go a long way for today's young people to learn how to go about changing the politics of conservatism and effecting the changes we all need for a freer society and na less oppressive climate for the gay and lesbian and other people of diverse sexualities to live in a climate of less oppression making a happier set ofcommunities. I came out as a gay man when I was 61 in the early days of HIV/AIDS, and so was able to learn early about safe sex and other difficulties we were burdened with thanks to Reagen and Margaret Thatcher who was busy introducing some of the most conservative palicies in the UK of any white goverments in the Western world. To learn a great deal about life in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s, the book just published by Lesley Saddington is a must read called "I Don'[t Want to Talk About it. It reminded me a great deal of the great horrors of those terrible years.

Were so many of us wrong? Christos Tsiolkas on the new uncertainty

The Sydney Morning Herald

Were so many of us wrong? Christos Tsiolkas on the new uncertainty

In times of uncertainty, you deserve understanding.

By Christos Tsiolkas

April 3, 2020 

He who has not lived in the years before the revolution cannot know what the sweetness of living is. – Talleyrand

We are on day six of our self-isolation. Has it been less than a week since we caught the flight from London to Dubai, then Dubai to Melbourne? The COVID-19 virus has done many things, the most daunting and terrible being the lives that it has taken, but one of its aftershocks that has surprised me most is the alteration it has caused to our sense of time.

Christos Tsiolkas: ''I know, in my gut now, that Melbourne, that Australia, is home.''Credit:Eddie Jim

Three weeks ago, we landed in Britain and though we joked and bantered about touching elbows rather than kissing, we did hug and embrace friends, we went out to dinners and we got drunk and sat shivering around outside heaters, shoulder to shoulder, in the freezing English spring night. Day by day, however, the anxiety and fears grew.

Throughout the first week, and then into the second, I receive constant emails from home announcing that first this festival and then another would be cancelled. On a train to Glasgow, preparing my reading for an event, my phone vibrates and a text informs me that the AyeWrite Festival has also been cancelled. By the third day in Scotland, reading the escalating warnings on the internet, my partner, Wayne, and I make the decision to return home.

We are fortunate. We booked our journey through a travel agent and within minutes of emailing him, he has got us on a flight departing London in two days. We know that there are many people not so lucky. The websites of all the airlines are crashing. The phones are not being answered. All we want is to return home. That very notion, home, one that I have questioned and resisted and challenged for so many years; that notion, too, has been altered by the virus. I know, in my gut now, that Melbourne, that Australia, is home.

There is a strange and befuddling moment in Dubai airport. All the world seems to be there. We are Australians and New Zealanders, Nigerians and Ghanaians, Pakistani and Bangladeshi, North American and Latin American, many of us scrolling on phones and laptops and iPads, seeking information on which borders have been closed, whether we can indeed go home. Some of us are sitting still and staring out into space, shifting in those uncomfortable vinyl chairs, trying to not touch and not to breathe on one another.

I am two seats away from a young woman, poised and elegantly dressed, her hair hidden under a rainbow-coloured turban. She is speaking on her phone in rapid French. My own French is weak but I gather she has managed to get on a flight to Lagos and from Lagos she will do her best to head home. Wherever home may be. “Paris was strange,” she says into her phone. “Everything was closed, everything was shut. I’ve never seen it like that.”

And it’s at that precise moment, overhearing her conversation, looking around me at the people staring at their screens, that it strikes me how bizarre and ridiculous it is that we all have only so recently been zig-zagging around the world, taking this freedom and this movement and this privilege for granted. It isn’t a moral aversion that I am experiencing. It isn’t righteousness; it is more a recognition of absurdity. I turn to Wayne when he comes back from the long wait for the toilets.

“All of this, it’s unnecessary.”

“No, we need to get home, this is serious.”

“No, not that. All this travel, all this movement, that is what is unnecessary.”

''All this travel, all this movement, that is what is unnecessary.''Credit:Getty Images

On returning home, I find a series of emails from Australian literary festivals and arts organisations bemoaning the deleterious effect of COVID-19 on the arts sector. I understand and share these fears. I’m one of the lucky ones, able to support myself from writing. But for most of my friends, their creative work is subsidised by work in hospitality, in retail, in the public sector and in non-government welfare organisations. The abrupt and shocking collapse of the economy has us all reeling. And has us all frightened. Theatres are no longer putting on plays and cinemas are shut; book launches and writing classes are cancelled.

Again, time has refracted back on itself and the arguments and politics and conversations we were all so engaged with, so furious and so passionate about only a few weeks ago, seem ephemeral and unimportant. Unemployment is now the most pressing issue affecting us all.

It isn’t an abrupt leap from where we were only yesterday to the dystopian end-of-times of apocalypse. The in-between will be our lifetime.

Of course, there is the desire to avoid the getting and the passing on of the virus. But those images of thousands of desperate souls lining up outside Centrelink are what has brought the severity of what we are all undergoing into deepest focus. The people in the queues are clearly ourselves – how we dress, how we use our mobiles, that negotiation of both digital and physical space – yet they also are evocative of a past that we never really imagined we would see again: the echoes of the Great Depression.

Writers and filmmakers and artists have always imagined apocalyptic scenarios, and climate change and rising inequality has made that a central concern of recent speculative art and fiction. But whether it is the savage and nihilistic violence of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, or the scenes of zombie rampage and annihilating natural disasters that have proliferated in popular cinema, what we hadn’t conceived was the moment of in-between. I think this is why the dole queues are particularly frightening. They remind us that it isn’t an abrupt leap from where we were only yesterday – blithely assuming that the future would be ever-progressive and ever-prosperous – to the dystopian end-of-times of apocalypse. The in-between will take years. The in-between will be our lifetime.
So I worry for my friends who are writers and artists and playwrights and filmmakers. But I am equally worried for my friends who are nurses and couriers and administrators and teachers. All those differences we were extolling and idolising only a few weeks ago, they don’t matter much any more. In this moment, community trumps difference.

In between the pinging emails announcing the cancellation of one more writers’ festival and one more play, there have also been links to performances and artwork that people are creating online. There is indeed something exhilarating and defiant in the determination of the artist to keep making work. It might be my age or merely my disposition but I also sense something melancholy in the production of such work. A chamber orchestra plays in an vacant auditorium, a drag artist mimes in front of a DJ in an empty room. What is missing, and what is wretched, is that without the physical bodies of an audience, the work seems mere rehearsal. It is not unlike the few minutes of an AFL match I watched played without a crowd. The emptiness was deafening. I switched off the game. Guiltily, I switched off the music.

In some ways, I have been surprised by how much I have enjoyed this period of enforced isolation. In saying that, I know that I am fortunate. That I have a partner, a lovely home and shelves stacked with books and with LPs and with DVDs. We have friends and family and neighbours who make sure there is food on our doorstep and wine in our fridge.

I’m not a complete Luddite: YouTube and streaming have also kept me company. Yet it is the pleasures of the analogue world that have been the most satisfying and the most sustaining. I am halfway through a wonderful book, Jean-Michel Guenassia’s The Incorrigible Optimists Club, a tender requiem for the generation of eastern European dissidents who fled totalitarianism and wound up lost and exiled in Paris. It has been sitting by my bed for nearly two years now.

This morning, I was dancing to Hiperasia, a cheerfully inventive album by the Spanish electronica artist, El Guincho. As with the Guenassia novel, I’ve had it for some time. Only now do I give it a proper listen. Refracted through the changes brought about by the virus, the recent past seems an aeon ago. All the same, it has made me thankful for the present moment. Real time. The time of minutes and hours. The time of patience and reflection.

I miss people. Wayne and I discuss the progression of the virus, the responses globally and locally, the uncertain future that is coming. We both miss other voices, other perspectives, the opportunity to have one’s argument contested and opposed. Of course, this is possible online but Skype crackles and falters, the thin sounds on the other end don’t have the resonance of the human voice. Digital communication also exacerbates the limitations and prejudices of only speaking to those who think the same way you do.

There will come a time when we can return to the world, when social distancing will be the past. But there will be a ruined economy and there will be fractured communities. It is inevitable that this ruin and this fracturing will be part of the writing and the art that is to come. Every day, I wander the hall, the rooms of our house, I walk into the garden and tell myself I should write. But all my ideas seem paltry and inadequate. It is a cliche, and also a truth, that writing is a solitary labour. It is only now, physically separated from friends and colleagues, that I realise how much sustenance and inspiration I receive from their insights, their conversation and their argument. A room of one’s own is a necessity. It is not enough. These are the conversations that I want to have.

So many of us writers are progressive and left-wing, feminist and anti-racist. In one sense, the virus and its consequences have been a validation. Our coalition government, who for so many years rubbished the stimulus choices of the Rudd Labor government during the Global Financial Crisis, is now legislating for the state to commandeer and protect the economy. The tenets of economic liberalism that have dominated the globe for more than 50 years have been smashed by the urgency and virulence of this virus.

Yet there is another canonical ideal of liberalism that has also been demolished by the recent weeks, and that is the belief in open borders. While we waited to get out of Europe, country after country closed itself off from the rest of the world. In this sense, the virus and its consequences have validated the conservative voices that defend the nation state. It is not transglobal entities that are doing the work of looking after communities. It is the nation state. Were so many of us wrong? Were we shouting over people when maybe we should have been listening? Had we assumed racism and xenophobia whenever we heard an argument that challenged our beliefs? Had we forsaken questioning for certainty? And if so, what does that mean for the fiction we’ve been writing and the arguments we have been mounting?

I worry about the overreach of state power in the responses to the virus. They are necessary, they are medically and scientifically sanctioned, but the powers of surveillance and control now being deployed are deeply illiberal. And once enacted such powers may be difficult to reverse. I am shocked at how little weight the notion of liberty seems to have among my peers. A formative political awakening for me was the politics of AIDS. Some of the finest writing and the best art of the 1980s came out of provocation and resistance at the demonisation, and the attempts of state control, over people’s bodies. That suspicion of the state – of its courts and judiciary, of its police and its military, of its bureaucracy and of its power – seems to be a matter of little concern to a present generation of writers and artists.

An equal shock has been the relative silence over the actions of the Communist Party of China. Other governments have made mistakes or have had to backtrack on initial responses but it has been the CPC that has been the most appalling actor in this short history of COVID-19; in its initial recklessness in turning a blind eye to the conditions that allowed for its incubation, and in the terrifying repression it has visited on its own citizens.

I worry that we writers and artists have been woefully undergraduate in our rage over the past decade, tilting at the same bloody windmills. And maybe our understanding of history has been equally pitiful. The greatest gift reading history has done, is make me suspicious of certainty. Maybe that’s the conversation I’m really hankering to have. After the past few months, after these transformations, can a writer still adhere to certainty?

When we emerge out of our isolation, the world will be smaller and our horizons will be local. The priority will be solidarity and communion with the unemployed; everything else is not unimportant, but everything else will be secondary.

I also hope we emerge hungry for argument and conversation and debate. I hope our writing and our art asks more questions and doesn’t pretend to have all the answers.

FROM DAILY MAVERICK 25 MARCH 2020

ANALYSIS: FACTS V. QUACKS

Comparing the government responses to #Covid19 under Ramaphosa and #HIV under Mbeki

By Mia Malan for the Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism• 25 March 2020

Thabo Mbeki and Cyril Ramaphosa. Photo composite supplied by Bhekisisa

Reporting on Covid-19 and HIV in South Africa is like night and day, says a writer who has reported on both epidemics.

It’s the day after the plane containing our repatriates from Wuhan has landed, when Cyril Ramaphosa declares a National State of Disaster in the country, in front of a blaring television in my lounge, when it hits me: Nowhere am I able to see a single activist venting vociferously against the government.

No Zackie Achmats, Fatima Hassans, Vuyiseka Dubulas, Edwin Camerons or Mark Heywoods standing firmly at the ready to contradict the President. No demonstrators spread-eagled across burning tar, playing dead alongside placards pleading for medicine and for the state to use evidence-based strategies to combat an epidemic.

No health minister screeching “Traitors!” at scientists and journalists who disagree with her denial of science and her refusal to provide people with life-saving treatment.

No pontifications about potatoes, beetroot, lemon and garlic as excellent means to protect people from a potentially fatal virus.

Instead we have a president taking responsibility, surrounded by his sober Cabinet, announcing: “It is up to us to determine how long [this epidemic] will last, how damaging it will be and how long it will take our economy and our country to recover.”

An Aids epidemic did not exist, the duo insisted

I was a young reporter when former President Thabo Mbeki and his Health Minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, shocked the world when they denied the link between HIV and Aids.

The virus, they argued, was not the cause of Aids. An Aids epidemic did not, in fact, exist, the duo insisted; it was all down to poverty. They also posited a range of conspiracy theories, including that HIV was manufactured in a lab somewhere in the West.

It was a truly tumultuous point in the history of our then young democracy.
If you were a dedicated health journalist during the late 1990s or early 2000s, you were basically a full-time Aids reporter. You spent your workdays recording Mbeki’s and Tshabalala-Msimang’s quackish HIV statements, which you then took to credible scientists and activists to correct by way of contradictory comments.

That, of course, was, if you DID disagree with the government.

But there were some in the media who either agreed with the president and the health minister, or could not muster the courage to oppose them. It was all about politics, and power.

HIV had become a political football, and with political leaders suggesting that a condition, which was killing hundreds of thousands, was simultaneously a hoax and something that had been manufactured by a demonic pharmaceutical industry, the issue transcended the realm of health. That meant that political and business journalists, also often editors-in-chief, joined the debate – and they chose sides that were mostly determined by politics, not science.

There was confusion all round, with mixed messages the order of the day.
I know this to be so, because I worked for the state broadcaster at the time, and the South African Broadcasting Corporation was a fierce supporter of the Mbeki government. Like many of my colleagues, I had to fight to get my stories, which more often than not presented opinions and facts that contradicted the president, aired.
  
Against the background of South Africa’s hard-fought-for young democracy at the time, disagreement with the president – and in essence taking the side of Western science – about the cause of a condition that was destroying the country, was frequently viewed as anti-democratic and even racist.

So, journalists, scientists and activists who opposed HIV quackery were “anti-Mbeki people”, not just mere supporters of science.

We were the enemy.

‘Shut up and listen!’

At the first International Aids Conference that was held on South African soil, in 2000, in Durban, the animosity was on open display amid the grandeur of the five-star Hilton Hotel, when the health minister reprimanded two world-renowned HIV scientists whose research appeared regularly in prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Tshabalala-Msimang ordered Salim Abdool Karim, now the head of the Centre for the Aids Programme of Research, Caprisa, and Hoosen Coovadia, then from the University of Kwazulu-Natal, to a luxury room where she chastised them in front of Health MECs and other politicians.

Both were respected health activists who had fought for equal access to healthcare for all races during apartheid.

“You’re disloyal! Traitors!” Abdool Karim remembers her screaming at them. “What you are doing is equal to treason to our country!”

Their sin was that they had been publicly defending HIV as the cause of Aids and advocating for access to antiretroviral treatment (labelled “poisonous” by Tshabalala-Msimang) for HIV-positive  South Africans. 

But when the two scientists tried to defend themselves, Abdool Karim recalls, Thabalala-Msimang interrupted them and yelled: “Shut up and listen!”

HIV stories – and scientists themselves – were filled with conflict

Twenty years later, after a decade of State Capture, and on the brink of another epidemic – Covid-19 – Abdool Karim received a call from the current health minister, Zweli Mkhize.

Mkhize was seeking advice, asking the scientist: “How do you think we can slow the spread” of the new coronavirus, known as SARS-Cov-2.

Says Abdool Karim: “With the coronavirus, our experience with government is exactly the opposite [of what we endured during the Mbeki and Tshabalala-Msimang era]. The minister has been contacting us, he wants to involve us, he is seeking the opposite of what Mbeki and Tshabalala-Msimang wanted.”

Abool Karim serves on a special Covid-19 committee. It advises the president on what actions to take. “With HIV we were so slack with taking things up, we delayed mother-to-child-prevention of HIV and access to antiretroviral treatment. But with Covid-19 we’re proactive and we’re acting early,” he says.
The consequences – in the form of more than 300,000 unnecessary HIV-related deaths, according to a Harvard University study – of the time the government took to respond to science, are unfortunately permanent.

As a result of the government’s contrasting responses, reporting on HIV and Covid-19 in South Africa as a journalist is like night and day. With one of the epidemics, activists and scientists were mostly our only sources of information, and the government the ones who blocked access to data. In the case of HIV, study after study has shown how conflict – one of the strongest news values – was a central theme in stories on the subject because of activists and government being played off against each other; but it often resulted in stories being repetitive, rather than meaningful.

With Covid-19, those same HIV activists who fought the government are now supporting and praising Cyril Ramaphosa’s early, evidence-based interventions. And the health ministry, which previously cut journalists off, has set up a media WhatsApp group through which the latest figures, as they become available, are posted directly to journalists’ phones. The system isn’t perfect – press releases have been retracted a few times because they contained the wrong figures – but the point is: there is a system that allows for a free flow of information. And when mistakes are made, the government has acknowledged them.

There’s even a data-free website and a public WhatsApp service that has so far been used by well over 2 million people, according to the health department. 

Is the ANC using its great power for good with Covid-19?

And, it seems, the ANC is, at this moment in history, using its great power for good – for state protection rather than State Capture. When the ANC Youth League in Limpopo, for instance, threatened the “mother of all marches” in the province after it was announced that the quarantine site for the Wuhan repatriates was going to be in the outskirts of Polokwane, Zweli Mkhize — a powerful man in the ANC — shushed them and crushed their plans very swiftly.
After the Wuhan plane landed he took to his Twitter handle to post a video branded with an “ANC Limpopo” logo to welcome the repatriates.

The government has been calling the media its “partners” in the fight against Covid-19. To the ears of someone who reported on HIV in South Africa in the 1990s and 2000s, that has been pretty surreal. I’m sure the “partners” thing has seemed equally strange to those in the media who’ve been reporting on State Capture and government corruption.

Okay, enough Kumbaya for now: As a journalist and editor, I of course am well aware of how rapidly this newfound “partnership” could end. But for now, it’s happening. We’re all in it together, on the same side. For now, I’m witnessing true leadership from the ANC.

We can’t stop this virus from spreading, but we can slow down the pace at which it spreads, to help our health system cope.

We’re moving into lockdown, testing sites are increasing, there are contact tracing teams, quarantine sites-in-the-making and relatively good communication systems that will hopefully prevent panic.

Yet, sadly, the ANC government’s criminal inaction two decades ago is likely to have a bearing on South Africa’s ability to combat Covid-19 successfully: We now have one of the highest HIV infection rates in the world, something that could have been prevented if we had put people on treatment earlier.

Our latest household survey shows that four out of 10 people with HIV are still not on treatment, which increases the chances that their immune systems are weak and potentially vulnerable to attacks from viruses such as SARS-CoV-2.
Lessons don’t emerge only from other countries. With regards to Covid-19 and our response in the coming weeks and months and maybe even years, our own history just may be our greatest teacher. DM

This story was first published by the Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism.
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BON - PETER BONSALL-BOONE - AND THE AIDS CRISIS - IGNORED BY ACON AND THE MEDIA!

Many pieces of media have written eulogies and obituary items on the death of Peter Bonsall-Boone - Bon to all and sundry - talking about his activism and things he was involved in during his long activist life - he died on 19 MAY 2017 aged 78.

I have not yet come across one, not even the AIDS Council of New South Wales - ACON - who have mentioned Bon's involvement with Community Support Network and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s.

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Community Support Network circa 1990

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"Bon did something about AIDS today"

- Bon walked the dog, then cooked a meal for Stewart. Stewart can't do all the things he was strong enough to do before. Stewart has AIDS. Bon visits Stewart as a volunteer of the Community Support Network. CSN volunteers learn many skills at our FREE course which enable them to assist a person living with AIDS to live with dignity and choices in their life. It doesn't take much to do something about AIDS: ring today to find out about one of our information sessions.

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Bon was involved with the training of volunteers who did the training course allowing people to care for people living with, and dying from HIV/AIDS.

Over the years Bon not only looked after people who were very ill, but often those who had been abandoned by friends and family because they were gay/lesbian and or had AIDS.

These were terrible years and they exacted a heavy toll on those who were carers - and cared!!! - and left many traumatised and in a worn-out emotional state.

Bon, who did so much, and cared so much, was not immune to the ravages of these times and abused his health many times, leaving him susceptible to all sorts of health problems, which no doubt created problems for him as he aged.

Trainspotter: The Madness of King Mbeki, HIV/AIDS edition

• Richard Poplak
• South Africa
• 07 Mar 2016  (South Africa) Daily Maverick

As you’re no doubt aware, former President Thabo Mbeki has been addressing his legacy in a series of letters published on his Foundation’s homepage. Interested South Africans wondered when he was going to get around to dealing with the most controversial aspect of his presidency? They should wonder no longer. Mbeki is still nuts about Aids. The first time, lots of people died unnecessarily. Now, it’s just pathetic. By RICHARD POPLAK.

Like most South Africans who trawl the Great Pacific garbage patch of South African politics for recyclables, I have a new Monday morning ritual. After breakfast, I reluctantly click my way to the Thabo Mbeki Foundation’s homepage, in search of a blinking icon emblazoned with the word “New.” There I find a portal into the past – or, rather, into an ever-evolving, always-under-construction historical theme park called Mbeki Land. The wilds of this place are inhabited by tin men, cackling witches, singing midgets and a menagerie of fantastical creatures, all of whom are presided over by a figure behind a curtain referred to by his minions as “The Prez.” Imagine the visitor’s disappointment when the curtain is pulled back to reveal Thabo Mbeki hunched in a chair, hammering away on – gasp! – a word processor.

For the several months, with Metamucil-like regularity, President Mbeki has published letters on his foundation’s website, all of which deal with some of the more controversial, if arcane, matters related to his term in office.

The following words were not written by Thabo Mbeki, but they provide an overview of his oeuvre, without subjecting the reader to the agony of an actual Mbeki letter:

Behind the issue of warm beverage consumption in parliament was a larger narrative.
For several decades, ever since I decided to step down from my position as president of the African National Congress, and therefore chose to entrust the country’s presidency to others within the one hundred (100) year-old party’s august ranks, the so-called “Issue of Mbeki and the Parliamentary Tearoom” has been hotly contested by the press and the historical fraternity. 

It has been said, by many in both institutions, that President Thabo Mbeki unilaterally chose to switch from Five Roses to Woolworths English Breakfast as the choice of tea bag to be consumed within the contextual space of the tea room, and that this choice reflected not only an uncomfortable closeness with the agents of white corporate power, in particular the grocery chain lobby, but also an unpleasant affinity with the English themselves, with whom President Mbeki had become close during his period in exile. 

Adv. Vusi Pikoli, who was at that time serving as head of the head National Director of Public Prosecutions (NDPP), was said by certain members of the press to have a strong and unwavering preference for Five Roses, and that he, and the Head of the Scorpions, Adv Leonard McCarthy, would strongly object to any attempts at removing the aforementioned tea bags from the tea room, and to replacing them with a superior brand. 

It is also said that when I tabled the issues of Woolworths English Breakfast’s marked superiority at a committee session during the ANC’s 1996 lekgotla, in particular focusing on the nutty aroma and cigar-smoke aftertaste inimical to the Five Roses varietal, Pikoli took copious notes, did not engage, and shortly thereafter began negotiating secretly with the Joko brand. But, as political correspondent Ranjeni Munusamy noted in a Standard 1 essay, written exclusively for Natal Catholic Girls Primary School in August 1987, and titled “What I did during my holidays”—“all is not what it seems.” 

The reader should now consider herself alerted to some signature Mbeki moves: the flip-flopping from first person to third; the convoluted, run-on sentences; the invocation of the long dead as standing witnesses. Wretched prose aside, the offense in these letters lurks within the minutia, within the endless attempts to “set straight” small points of contention while ignoring the larger implications of a billion tiny, ill-made decisions. As far as Thabo Mbeki is concerned, Thabo Mbeki never slipped up, and the country’s ills must be attributed to the tin men, cackling witches and singing midgets on the other side of the curtain.

But the most recent letter was a killer even by the former president’s standards. The issue that we’d all been dreading – Mbeki’s unforgivable policy decisions during the country’s HIV/Aids crisis – finally received its own rollercoaster ride in Mbeki Land. Entitled “A Brief Commentary on the Question of HIV and AIDS”, and published on Monday, it is – and I say this without reservation – the most absurd, tragic, turgid monstrosity that I have ever encountered on the internet. I repeat: On. The. Internet. Where idiocy goes to die. Where Donald Trump goes to Tweet. Where kitten GIFs count as high art.
 
There is, and always will be, a case to be made against the Western medical fraternity’s all-knowing arrogance, against Big Pharma’s endless rapacity, against the NGO industry’s warped, self- serving disease models, just as there’s a case to be made for respecting and venerating of traditional therapeutic methods. But Thabo Mbeki has never made the case for any of these with the proper rigour. In his most recent effort at white-washing his record, he kicks off with references to the first recorded incidences of HIV in Southern Africa, published in the New England Journal of Medicine and the South African Medical Journal back in 1985. Insanely, the former president is referencing thirty-year-old medical research, which noted that the only locals to have contracted the virus were male homosexuals who recently visited the United States. He quotes this ancient data in order to suggest that there was something fishy about how the virus “mutated” into an equal opportunity murderer of heterosexual South Africans during the mid-90s. 

“Why is this special type of HI Virus confined only to our region of the world!” [Keen observers of the Mbeki’s epistolary form will note the exclamation point in lieu of a question mark. This is a recent development.] “Why does it not spread to other areas, even within Africa! What happened to the 1985 South African HI Virus which behaved in the same way as the US and West European HI Virus! If it mutated into what it is today, why did it not mutate in the same way in the US and Western Europe!”

Is this seriously happening! Is Thabo Mbeki going back to the mat on the “HI Virus” conspiracy in 20-freaking-16! (And just like that, the former president starts a grammar trend.)

Shortly before reminding us that he never actually said that HIV didn’t cause Aids, but rather stated that “a virus cannot cause a syndrome” – South Africa’s ranking post-apartheid moment of purest spoken bullshit – Mbeki defends alternate forms of therapy by quoting the interview one Professor Luc Montagnier gave in a What-Is-Aids-Really? conspiracy-doc called House of Numbers. (Montagnier, Mbeki takes pains to point out, is a Nobel laureate – but hey, so is FW de Klerk) I couldn’t make head nor tails of what the prof was mumbling in the documentary, and it makes even less sense transcribed into Mbeki-ese. Something about oxidative stress, and that treating or curing Aids (I’m not sure which) requires a more holistic approach, including a focus on genital hygiene for women, nutrition, and “building up the poor African's immune system.”

Nutrition, however, is a fancy word for food, and there’s a good reason the majority South Africans didn’t (and still don’t) have access to anything but junk staples. Mbeki, who more than any single South African has guided macro-economic policy since the fall of apartheid, contended with regime’s nightmare legacy by dressing up as Margaret Thatcher. He has now attempted to yoke “nutrition” to his reimagined holistic African First health policy. But access to decent, immune-system-building mega-cuisine really comes down to purchasing power—in other words, if you don’t have money, you eat bleached maize three times a day. Did Mbeki’s signature implemented economic policy, the staggeringly neoliberal GEAR, align with his fantastical unimplemented Aids policy? Did it allow poor South Africans to emerge from the chrysalis of transition into a spirulina and wheatgrass-sipping utopia? 

Not so much.
Which brings us, finally, to the weakest, dopiest and, I’d argue, criminally insipid argument of his most recent epistle—Mbeki’s Ludlum-esque Tuberculosis Supremacy. It goes like this: 
the World Powers, in order to peddle money-spinning ARVs to dumb Africans, all yelled “Aids!” as loudly as possible at the same time, and we were bamboozled into believing that tuberculosis, followed in succession by a bunch of other unsexy diseases, weren’t bigger killers than HIV/Aids. “Why,” Mbeki wants to know, “would the South African Government, knowing the health condition of its own population very well, have been expected so to focus on the 9^th leading cause of death as virtually to treat as less urgent and important the first eight (8) leading causes of death, even taken together?” [sic]

I don’t even know where to go with this one. How about here: the ANC government under Mbeki abandoned everyone from tuberculosis patients to schizophrenics by allowing the public health system to drift into dysfunction, helmed (or unhelmed) by the most unloved politician of the democratic era, Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang – the only woman in history to enjoy the privilege of a burner liver. 

I’ve read the theories detailing Mbeki’s outlook on HIV/Aids, how deeply and personally he felt that the tub-thumping of a single disease was means of (once again) over-sexualizing and demeaning the black African body. But if the Aids crisis felt like just another ploy to recolonise Africa, it certainly didn’t tether us to the West anywhere near as much as GEAR’s preamble did. So there’s good re-colonisation and bad re-colonisation, and Mbeki got to pick which was which based on his personal shibboleths? But the kind of technocratic governance that Mbeki was known for preaching is by definition impersonal – you don’t get to sweat over your turn ons and turn offs when babies are dying. A health crisis requires a specific type of leadership, the type the Nigerians applied to the Ebola outbreak. In a country known for chaos, Abuja doubled-down on every piece of available scientific evidence and, poof, away the disease went. Mbeki’s job was to do everything – everything – possible to restrict the spread of any and every disease threatening the welfare of the South African people. If Big Pharma were fucking us in the process, that was a job for the ANC’s ten thousand Mercedes Benz-driving lawyers to sort out.

It gets worse, though. How does Mbeki end off this latest, lunatic zip around Mbeki Land? With a fascinating factoid: 

“The world's biggest killer and the greatest cause of ill-health and suffering across the globe is listed almost at the end of the International Classification of Diseases. It is given the code Z59.5 – extreme poverty.”

Well how about that? Did Mbeki’s policies, health or otherwise, deal with code Z59.5? Perhaps we’ll read about that in an upcoming letter, which in Mbeki Land means blaming poverty on poverty, while concentrating on the brand of tea bags and other tragic, sad-ass minutia. DM

Photo: A file photograph dated 10 February 2007 shows former South African President Thabo Mbeki addressing mourners at the funeral of African National Congress (ANC) stalwart Adelaide Tambo in Wattville, east of Johannesburg, South Africa. EPA/JON HRUSA.

• Richard Poplak
• South Africa

MBEKI'S REPUTATION IS NOT IN TATTERS BECAUSE HE WAS ALOOF

Op-Ed: Mbeki's reputation is not in tatters because he was aloof

• Nathan Geffen
• from Daily Maverick
• South Africa
• 01 Feb 2016 10:59 (South Africa)

It is because his policies caused hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths. By Nathan Geffen for GROUNDUP.

First published by GroundUp.

Four articles so far. More than 7,000 words. Yet in Thabo Mbeki's attempt to salvage his legacy, not once has our former president mentioned HIV. (Read articles one, two, three and four.)

In Monday's missive, which is even less penetrable than usual, Mbeki appears to defend himself from the charge of being aloof. He is upset that this accusation contributed to his defeat by Jacob Zuma at Polokowane in 2007.

But leaders are not looked upon unkindly by history solely for a subjective personality trait such as aloofness. Mbeki's reputation doesn't rise or fall on whether he was aloof, too intellectual or even authoritarian in his personal relationships. It is deservedly and unalterably shattered for a much clearer reason: he pursued policies that resulted in hundreds of thousands of people dying, most of whom might otherwise have still been alive today.

On 10 December 1998, a handful of people held a protest on the steps of St George's Cathedral. They had two main demands for government: (1) Make a plan to introduce an antiretroviral called AZT for pregnant women with HIV. (2) Develop “a comprehensive and affordable treatment plan for all people living with HIV/AIDS.”

That was the modest launch of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC). It took nearly four more years, two court orders and many large demonstrations before the state began reluctantly rolling out a countrywide mother-to-child transmission programme in 2002. It would take until March 2004 before antiretroviral treatment became available as a matter of policy in the public health system. And then only after more protests, the intervention of Nelson Mandela, a civil disobedience campaign and legal threats. By contrast, Botswana began its treatment programme in January 2002.

Even after the antiretroviral treatment rollout began, Mbeki's Minister of Health undermined it. She and the Medical Research Council under Anthony Mbewu gave and received support, both material and moral, to and from the charlatan Matthias Rath.
Rath ran double page newspaper advertisements across the country dissuading people from taking antiretrovirals. Instead, he encouraged them to take his vitamin products. He ran an unauthorised clinical trial, an extremely serious crime for which he can be tried if he ever returns to South Africa, under the nose of the Minister. His colleagues presented “results” of this trial at a meeting with the minister and the provincial MECs for Health (p. 56). She defended him publicly.

Meanwhile people died on Rath's clinical trial. They too might be alive today had they sought treatment in the public health system. It took two court cases by the TAC to run this murderous quack out of the country.

There was much else: co-option by the Department of Health of The National Association of People Living with HIV and AIDS (NAPWA), a major organisation representing people with HIV, support of several other charlatans – at least one of whom was even given an opportunity to present to a parliamentary committee (p. 87) to the applauds of the ANC members present. And let's not forget Virodene and Mbeki's purge of the Medicines Control Council because its chair dared to call him out (ch. 8).

Nearly two decades later that once internationally renowned institution has still not recovered.

Mbeki disputed there were many AIDS deaths. He was supported by Rian Malan. This likely earned Malan a favourable mention in Mbeki's 2004 State of the Nation Address.
Two studies, conducted independently of each other, have estimated that the delayed treatment rollout caused well over 300,000 avoidable deaths. These estimates are conservative. Without the robust response by civil society to Mbeki that ultimately resulted in the change in government policy, many more would have died.

You could argue that Mbeki made a mistake, that he got it unintentionally wrong, that there was no malice in his AIDS denialism. But Mbeki chose to ignore the country's scientists and doctors. These included Malegapuru Makgoba, who headed the Medical Research Council (before being replaced by Mbewu), Kgosi Letlape who headed the South African Medical Association, respected researchers Quarraisha and Salim Abdool Karim and many others.

Mbeki also ignored ordinary people with HIV like Christopher Moraka. In 2000 Moraka, dying of AIDS-related illnesses, appeared before Parliament and pleaded for pharmaceutical companies to drop the prices of AIDS medicines. He died long before the companies or anyone in cabinet listened. Mbeki, his Miniser of Health, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, and his Minister of Trade and Industry, Alec Erwin, barely lifted a finger to help bring down drug prices. That was left to TAC and other civil society organisations.

Instead Mbeki hosted his absurd AIDS advisory panel, half of whose members were AIDS denialists. He was photographed – smiling, not aloof – with an outspoken, now dead of AIDS, denialist. He questioned whether a virus can cause a syndrome, and continuously cast aspersions on proven antiretroviral treatments.

Whether or not Mbeki was aloof is irrelevant. What matters is that he caused enormous suffering and death. He should consider himself fortunate to have escaped prosecution. Instead of indulging in impenetrable revisionism, he should maybe consider penance by living the rest of his life quietly, pursuing good deeds. Perhaps he, as well as his chief apologist Frank Chikane, could start by washing the feet of the surviving members of Christopher Moraka's family. DM

Geffen is GroundUp's editor. Views expressed are not necessarily shared by GroundUp's staff.
Photo: Funeral of AIDS treatment activist Christopher Moraka on 8 May 2000. Source: Treatment Action Campaign.

• Nathan Geffen
• South Africa

HOMOPHOBIA, XENOPHOBIA, RACISM, SEXISM, MISOGYNY, ZIONISM, ANTI-SEMITISM - AUSTRALIANS ALL

Since Ian Thorpe emerged from his 20-year-old closet there have been several articles written, discussions on radio and television, and much interest shown from some sporting bodies about one of the areas most covered in shame over its ongoing stance on homophobia.

On a previous blog, some while ago, I posed the question as to how is it possible that in a sports code where there are somewhere between 1200 and 2000 players, administrators and others associated with the game, not one person has emerged as a gay, lesbian, transgender person involved in Australian Football League - or as it is popularly known - AFL?

This transcends statistical data and suggest that there are many people associated with AFL living in a closet because of the inherent homophobia, sexism and misogyny associated with that code.

Swimming and tennis have produced some notable exceptions, but that is what they are, exceptions.

Where are all the others, and why are they so intimidated and fearful of openly being who they are.

An example of how homophobia is affecting other members of our communities emerged in a report in a paper a few days ago from a man who appeared in a news item about HIV and AIDS, and who was verbally abused in a shop when some homophobes recognised him from the television programme which had carried the item about HIV and showed this young man. Here is the article:

Article in August 2014 edition of Star Observer

Mitchell Payne

Mitchell Payne

A FEW weeks after Mitchell appeared in a short documentary film about HIV stigma, two men started verbally abusing him while he was grocery shopping.

“I was in the fruit and veg section looking at apples,” he said, explaining the men were speaking loud enough to know Mitchell could hear them.

“They said, ‘isn’t that the guy from the AIDS documentary?’ I thought, okay, here we go…”

The men then said the apples would be spoiled because he had touched them. Finally, much louder again, one of them said: “Dirty AIDS cocksucker.”

“I could believe it was happening, to be honest. I basically just left. I didn’t say anything. Looking back I kind of wish I’d turned around and confronted these people, but in the moment, all I did was thought, I have to leave right now,” Mitchell said.

“Because not only had these people belittled me, they’d also said it loud enough for other people to hear… I didn’t really want to know if anyone was looking at me, because I felt the size of a peanut, just so tiny and insignificant in that moment.”

After so long being out and open as a gay man living with HIV, Mitchell had almost forgotten how deeply hurtful it could be to confront such direct stigma and abuse.

**This article first appeared in the brand new August 2014 issue of the Star Observer, which is now available in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Canberra. 

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The next article of interest was in the Sunday Age of 20 JULY 2014 and was about homophobia and sport - as so many homophobia articles are:

Homophobia, and the courage to speak out

July 20, 2014 Sunday Age

Gus Johnston

·                             

Former Victorian hockey player Gus Johnston: 'Let's call a spade a spade.'

Photo: Craig Sillitoe  WEB SITE:    www.csillitoe.com

Most people don’t think they’re homophobic. But let’s call a spade a spade. Homophobia is just a fancy word for fear, hate, anger, vilification, discrimination and prejudice. It’s easy for us all to get distracted by the specifics of its definition, but like the sadly commonplace “I’m not racist, but ...”, the frequently pleaded disclaimer, “Oh, I’m not a homophobe” is the all-too common defence of someone who has, in fact, just done or said something completely homophobic. 

Broadcaster Brian Taylor probably doesn’t see himself as homophobic, but yet, last weekend he called Harry Taylor “a big poofter” by way of demeaning him. If I was a young person coming to terms with my sexuality, and fearing that others would not accept me, what specifically am I supposed to think about Brian’s remarks?

As a gay man, I’m ashamed to admit I, too, have been complicit in homophobic behaviour. In the past, when others have used language or done homophobic things around me, how did I respond? Well, quite simply, I didn’t. It was easier to just laugh it off and avoid the social awkwardness of that kind of confrontation. Or probably, in my case, the silence stemmed from a fear that others might assume I was gay - which in fact I was - if I were to call out homophobia. And it’s that kind of silence in sport that allows homophobia to exist.

It’s easy to shoot this behaviour down when it’s broadcast on television, but what about at training, in the locker room or in the crowd where there are no cameras, nor wider public scrutiny. That’s where the damage is done and the problem festers.

I used to play hockey. I was a goalkeeper for 20 seasons. I wasn’t the best, but I was pretty good. I represented Victoria and held a scholarship with the Victorian Institute of Sport for a number of years. I played more than 200 State League One games for the Essendon Hockey Club (winning two premierships and two Best and Fairests along the way). I loved, and still do love, hockey. And like any true love, I made irrational and unconditional sacrifices for my sport. I wanted to be the greatest I could, and I wanted my sport to love me as much I loved it.

But for the best part of 20 years I harboured the secret of my sexuality. I exiled myself from a lot of social activity. I made it part of me. I pretended I had better things to do after the game. But in truth I often just didn’t want to put myself in social situations where relationships or my love life may become a topic of conversation.

Not only did I love my sport, I also loved how it made me feel; important, triumphant, invincible, fearless, a part of something bigger. But the sad reality was that behind closed doors I was sad, lonely, depressed and often afraid. For me it was some strange kind of purgatory, I felt trapped and alone inside a team full of my closest friends. While I began to contemplate suicide on a regular basis, I also continually reminded myself that I couldn’t die, because, well, I’d be letting my teammates down. So I just kept my head down.

At the time, I could think of nothing worse than being ostracised by my sport or being excluded in any way. And with homophobic language so rife, what was I to think? Nothing told me otherwise. It seemed safer to assume I would not be accepted, than to risk it all. Many of my teammates would use derogatory and homophobic language, never imagining anyone within earshot was directly affected by it. But they were. I was. 

I’m not alone either, the recent survey "Out on the fields", which was commissioned by the organisers of the Bingham Cup - the World Cup of gay rugby - tells us just how prevalent hostility toward gay and lesbian participants is within sport. That bullying and exclusion are commonplace. 

In late 2010, at the same time as my retirement from playing, Hockey Victoria, the sport’s governing body, quietly began an initiative called Fair Go, Sport! It was a project done in collaboration with the Victoria Human Rights Commission with funding from the Australian Sports Commission. Even though it was a relatively small initiative designed to promote gender and sexual diversity in our sport, it ultimately had a profound impact on my life. This act of progress helped me realise I could do what I needed to. And so I came out. Posting a video on YouTube to share my experiences and lend my voice to the conversation and send a message.

I wanted to send a message of hope, that we can all overcome homophobia. And even 2½ years since I came out, I don’t think that message has changed. Whether a player, administrator, fan, coach, the greatest swimmer the world has ever known or just a hockey player from Melbourne, with decency, love, respect and the courage to speak up, we all have the power to bring homophobia to an end. Making sport, and the world, a better place.

Gus Johnston played hockey for Victoria.

--------------------------------------------------------------

The following article in The Age of 14 JULY 2014 on Ian Thorpe emerging from his closet is probably a story that has a long way to go before it is played out. At the same time as this story appeared, there was an article by Kerryn Phelps in the Sydney Morning Herald, and judging by the numerous posts on the bottom of the article, there were very many angry people out there against what she had written. If you look up these articles on the web you will be able to decide what your own opinions are on the issue of sportspeople coming out and the timing thereof, but the conclusin must be that there is a great deal of homophobia in our communities!

Money aside, Thorpe's revelation will pay dividends

July 14, 2014

Andrew Webster

Chief Sports Writer, The Sydney Morning Herald

·                             

The truth: swimmer Ian Thorpe being interviewed by Michael Parkinson. Photo: Channel Ten

As a gay man, I couldn’t be happier for Ian Thorpe. As a journalist, I have misgivings of his outing as a homosexual with legendary interviewer Michael Parkinson, and its timing.

It does not rest well that Thorpe has decided to talk publicly about his sexuality as part of a reported $550,000 deal with Channel Ten that will see him call swimming at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow later this month.

That deal was hatched by his agent James Erskine, who also manages Parkinson. 

Thorpe has had the opportunity to set the record straight on many occasions.

Numerous biographies - authorised and not - have been penned about his life and career. He’s done documentaries, tell-all interviews, comical press conferences sponsored by Virgin declaring his comeback to the pool.

His message from the Parkinson interview has been cheapened by the fact it is part of a lucrative deal - and comes following reports in recent years of Thorpe’s financial troubles.

The chance to set the truth free, with dignity, has been there for Thorpe for years.

Indeed, the first chance Thorpe had to tell the truth came in 2003, when he sat down with my late, great editor at Inside Sport,Greg Hunter.

After finishing his long tenure at the monthly sport's magazine, Greg was thrust into the role of biographer, and then spent a year toiling over Thorpe’s story.

Greg was the ultimate professional and perfectionist. His editing of profile pieces often left this reporter on the verge of tears.

He was torn about the chapter concerning Thorpe’s sexuality. Specifically, he was concerned about a “Cheryl Kernot” situation.

In 2002, the former leader of the Democrats had published her biography, but it had failed to include one particular detail.

Soon after, Laurie Oakes revealed in his weekly column in The Bulletin that Kernot had failed to mention her extramarital affair while leader of the Democrats with former Labor frontbencher Gareth Evans.

But Greg’s concern went deeper than that.

We discussed Thorpe, at length, on numerous occasions, not least because I was coming to terms with my own sexuality. Greg had been a rock in this time, such was his altruistic manner.

Is Ian Thorpe gay? So many people had asked me, as a sports reporter, if I knew the answer.

I didn’t know. I was staring at the ceiling at night wondering why I was and how I was going to tell my father.

I just knew that if he was gay, and was denying it as much as I had, grappling with the truth, then I felt sorry for him.

In the end, Greg looked Thorpe in the eye, believed his version of events, and then passionately argued with anyone who dared to suggest the young swimmer was anything but heterosexual.

After the book was published, Thorpe told Alan Jones on 2GB he hadn't read it. It subsequently tanked.

The myth of Thorpe's heterosexuality was also perpetuated by many of his minders at that time. They fed the line that Thorpe was very much a ladies' man, in every sense, and laughed at suggestions otherwise.

Maybe those minders were protecting the pot of gold otherwise known as Thorpe Inc. 

Thorpe told Parkinson the fear of commercial reprisals stopped him, in part, from coming out sooner.

He is right.

Ian Roberts, the retired rugby league player who came out in 1995, often laughs at the mere notion of the “pink dollar”.

Whatever misgivings you or I might have about Thorpe's paid coming-out, it should not diminish the importance or significance of our greatest Olympian telling "the world" that he is gay.

Many have shrugged their shoulders in recent days and said, "So what? How is Thorpe’s sexuality anyone’s business? Who cares?"

Olympic diver Matthew Mitcham is right: Thorpe’s public declaration will save lives.

It will make it easier for those who are struggling to come to terms with who they are and where they fit in this world. Thorpe remains outrageously popular, despite his indifference towards being a public figure.

Of all the commentary written in the last few days, two lines stand out.

Said comic Tom Ballard in his column for Fairfax Media on Sunday: “For those who've heard this news and shrug and casually asks ‘who cares?’, I'd simply answer ‘15-year-old closeted me’. Scared, little, questioning Tom Ballard would have cared a lot if nine years ago he'd seen swimming champion and national treasure Ian Thorpe on the news, proudly identifying as a successful sportsman and a bloke who liked blokes.”

And this, from Rob Stott at news.com.au, about criticism that Thorpe has “lied” to us for years, including in his 2012 biography: “He was on his own deeply personal journey. A journey that even the most open-minded, tolerant person can’t understand until they’ve been through it themselves.”

That Thorpe is dealing with this now, at the age of 31, illuminates how far Australian society still has to go, and it extends beyond the Prime Minister's backward thinking about same-sex marriage.

Because it's not easy taking a stand - whether you are paid for it or not.

A month after I came out on the front page of The Sydney Morning Herald late last year in response to Knights player Ryan Stig's comparison between homosexuality and the work of the devil, I was having a beer at a Surry Hills pub.

A Sydney FC game was on that night, and many of its fans had filled the bar.

“Webster, you f..king faggot,” sneered one of them as I walked outside.

When I spun around and came back in and asked who'd said it, nobody had a word to say.

Who cares? I do.