.: World AIDS Day - Twenty Years

Monday, December 01, 2008

World AIDS Day - Twenty Years

I'm having a terrible time saying celebrate and World AIDS Day in the same sentence. Frankly I'm not feeling this is an accomplishment worth celebrating though I understand how I'm supposed to think about it, how some think I should feel about it. I'm just still too damn sad and angry about the whole deal. I was a late bloomer when it came to being in the life, I came out in 1987. It was still very early in the epidemic and for the most part people were acting as if it could never happen to them. The 80's was a pretty wild time, I was young and feeling just a little behind coming out at the relatively old age of 27. I had my share of dating and then some but then something happened that changed my world. All of my friends started to die. This might not been totally unlike generations before me who had gone of to a war somewhere and lost friends, but this was slower, in some cases more insidious as many died slowly and unlike a war I was able to attend every wake every funeral, between 1991 & 1994 I had attended 34 funerals, it was like a car crash in slow motion. When Perry died that was the last funeral I attended, I had no more emotion to give. Out of all of those deaths I had had relationships with two Rashine who passed in the early 90's while living in North Carolina and Perry who's passing was the devastating last straw. One year I went to see the AIDS Quilt which had over 91,000 panels and was 1,293,300 square feet in size. The sheer size of it and what it stood for was over whelming added to that the many names on it that I knew.

I wish today I could say that I am over it... I'm not. For along time I felt alone and in some cases I was and I can not for the life of me understand how I passed through such times and come out of it HIV Free. I know I should feel blessed, and part of me does feel this way. Part of me remains emotional crippled, part of me is a survivor, and part of me is mad as hell that I am still here still dealing with this fucking disease.

Today is World AIDS Day and in the twenty years since the first one I have met some brave and heroic people who have been lost like my friend Byron and Perry and Carl Stepps who ran the In The Circle program for Men of Color, James Drain who was a close friend. I have so many friends who live each day with this menace and they are always in my prayers. All of them have shown an inner strength that inspires me to live on and do something with my life! and I am thankful for each of them!

Let me close by saying that there is so much to do and there are organizations that can help such as the World AIDS Day organization, and in Detroit you can contact KICK and finally in Toronto ACT. Please if you need help or if you can donate money or time I am sure your help will be appreciated. Always wear a condom because getting sick is not cool!

World AIDS Day, observed December 1 each year, is dedicated to raising awareness of the AIDS pandemic caused by the spread of HIV infection. AIDS has killed more than 25 million people between 1981 and 2007,[including 330,000 children. Over three-quarters of these deaths occurred in sub-Saharan Africa, retarding economic growth and destroying human capital. Most researchers believe that HIV originated in sub-Saharan Africa during the twentieth century. AIDS was first recognized by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1981 and its cause, HIV, identified by American and French scientists in the early 1980s and an estimated 33 million people worldwide live with HIV as of 2007. This makes it one of the most destructive epidemics in recorded history. Despite recent, improved access to antiretroviral treatment and care in many regions of the world, the AIDS epidemic claimed an estimated 2 million lives in 2007, of which about 270,000 were children. The concept of a World AIDS Day originated at the 1988 World Summit of Ministers of Health on Programmes for AIDS Prevention. Since then, it has been taken up by governments, international organizations and charities around the world.

From its inception until 2004, UNAIDS spearheaded the World AIDS Day campaign, choosing annual themes in consultation with other global health organizations. In 2005 this responsibility was turned over to World AIDS Campaign (WAC), who chose Stop AIDS: Keep the Promise as the main theme for World AIDS Day observances through 2010, with more specific sub-taglines chosen annually. This theme is not specific to World AIDS Day, but is used year-round in WAC's efforts to highlight HIV/AIDS awareness within the context of other major global events including the G8 Summit. World AIDS Campaign also conducts “in-country” campaigns throughout the world, like the Student Stop AIDS Campaign, an infection-awareness campaign targeting young people throughout the UK.

Note: All images and text (not specified) is copyrighted by Christopher Cushman. This site does not specify or denote the sexual orientation of any model and as such please post your comments accordingly.

1 comment:

Unknown said...: Your feelings about World AIDS Day are understandable. There are just things that are beyond our control. It is very painful knowing that many of your friends have died. You have so much STRENGTH being here right now. Ure a survivor and so are the rest of us who continue to live on for the ones who loss their lives so long ago. I commend you man. Keep on fighting man. Your blog touched me.; 12:19 PM

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Photograph project dedicated to capture the Art of Dance within the parameters of everyday life. The project hopes to capture the innate relationships between dance and everyday life. Images of dance performed in non-traditional locales hopefully demystifying dance as being inaccessible and drawing the obvious metaphor that while all can not express life with such movement and physicality, we all love with our own signature grace. Therefore we all dance.

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Through New Eyes: The Photography of Christopher Cushman by Rinaldo Walcott

The Black male body remains an enigma despite its over representation in the public sphere. The dominance of hip hop culture globally, driven in part, but not exclusively by the innovative sounds of rap music have made Black men a standard by which Black men and other men judge themselves in contemporary culture. However, there is a paradox, because despite the prevalence of hip-hop’s popular global impact, Black men are also still some of the most despised men in Western culture. Stereotypes of criminality, disease and danger still abound and organize Black men’s lives, even within hip hop culture. Thus representations of Black men tend to be much more restricted, than open-ended. The struggle to bring Black men into complex open-ended representations has been an on-going historical struggle. One of the most potent forms of representation in the last one hundred and fifty years has been the photograph. Photography has offered the promise to represent the real in a manner that has both seduce its viewers and baffled them with its artifice. Black male photographic representations in the last half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first have promised to rescue Black men from the confines of mis-representation and stereotype. One of the most difficult and complicated circumstances of Black male representations has been in the realm of representing their sexuality. Black men’s sexuality is still over-burdened by a perceived threat and danger, especially now in the hyped-up era of the downlow. Then along comes Cushman. I first hear of Christopher Cushman’s photography from my boyfriend. He told me of a guy who was taking photographs of black nudes based upon how they wanted themselves to be seen, not how he posed them as his models. When I met Cushman he confirmed that he did indeed work from the models’ suggested posed and not impose his own. The idea is a great one because it allows the models agency in choosing what they believe to be an adequate representation of who they are. While it is now true that in contemporary culture subjects have learned to play for the camera, offering us artifice on command, this artifice can be understood as exposing inner senses of self and being. Cushman’s photography captures and reveals those inner desires. Look at me, many of the models seems to say. But look at me anew, is also what they seem to project and insist on. Cushman’s eye lavishes these Black male bodies with glimmers of light revealing their nuance personalities. While most of the men are naked their individuality comes clearly through. And yet, their eyes too reveal that they belong to a community, a family and possess desires, fantasies and needs. In these photographs, as viewers we are given new eyes to see beyond our inner voyeur. Cushman channels, Robert Mapplethorpe, Rotimi Fani-Kayode and many other artists, commercial and amateur photographers who seek to rescue the Black male body from the disastrous depths of mis-representation, and who almost always fall short. The conversations that his models create between his work and others whether unconscious or not reveal the profound influence of the image in our time. However, in Cushman’s eyes the Black male body is not being rescued, instead it stands on a self-made pedestal, not arrogantly announcing its existence but coolly (its signature) singing its own praisesong as swathes of light and behind the camera love washes over it. In each moment a small but significant revelation is made. Each revelation offers us the opportunity of an Epiphany – to think a thought about a Black man that we have not thought before. Professor Rinaldo Walcott is a cultural critic and Canada Research Chair of Social Justice and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto. He lives and writes in Toronto.

FIERCE! Being Black, Being Gay in America

"What Chris has done with this important collection of images, Fierce: Being Black, Being Gay in America, A Photographic Essay, is to seek, lift, and affirm the identity and visibility of men-who love-men and express it in many ways. His photographs display Midwest American men from the outlandish and flamboyant, to the subdued and subtle. You’d think these were “ladies who lunch;” muscular men dressed for the “Park” in lace, and floppy hats to give effect for all to see. Brothers connecting in places we know are safe, such as our nightclubs, the discos, and special events targeting our interests.

The importance of Fierce is paramount: all men are created equal, and share a space on earth. These portraits of men have to be recognized as God’s beauty and not His damnation. Time will thank those who were strong and dared enough to express themselves for all to see and appreciate in a manner that’s loving and creative. Time will also thank us for not living in a paranoid state of mind, and afraid of our own shadows. Remember, this cluster of work isn’t Robert Mappelthope’s approach to black imagery, but the approach of documenting men as they wanted to be seen: with and without sexual stimulation, for shock value."

Curtis A. Lipscomb
Executive Director Kick – The Agency for L-G-B-T African-Americans
Detroit Michigan / 2005
www.e-kick.com