CONNECT :
A Free HIV Self-Testing Project Words by Jenny Jung SAMESH, short for South Australia Mobilisation + Empowerment for Sexual Health, is a partnership program between SHINE SA and Thorne Habour Health. It aims to bridge the concerning gap that exists in SA’s sexual health services, in education, training and advocacy for multi-cultural, gender diverse experiences. HIV has never been more preventable and treatable, and SAMESH is dedicated to delivering these tools so that HIV becomes a thing of the past in SA. Their CONNECT project may be the most innovative cure to the inaccessibility of HIV testing yet. SAMESH is piloting several vending machines across SA that provides free Atomo HIV Self-Test kits and thus eliminating various barriers to getting tested. Its target groups include gay men and other men who have sex with men, migrants, and international students. Their project has been consulted with a cultural advisory group to ensure that it is culturally sensitive, and even the instructions are available in eight different languages. Dr Nikki Sullivan, is the project coordinator of the CONNECT program on SAMESH’s end, where in partnership with other service providers and support services, she drives the project. Before coming to SAMESH, Nikki was an academic at the Macquarie University in cultural studies for 25 years, with an expertise in queer culture, and LGBTQI history and practices. She left the university sector to return to Adelaide and work for the history trust of SA. She was first the curator of the Migration Museum, then a manager at the Centre of Democracy. Across all her roles, her main focus - her life focus - has always been inclusivity, and advocating for marginalised groups. She began working with SAMESH as a volunteer when she was offered the role of project coordinator. I met up with Nikki to discuss the CONNECT project and gain some insight into the culture around HIV testing.
While the culture has shifted to being more sex-positive and encouraging of STI testing, HIV testing is often overlooked, feared, or brushed off as irrelevant. How do you think this approach came to be, and how relevant do you think HIV testing is for the young people here at university? I think that from the beginning of the epidemic, really, there’s been this association of HIV with particular groups of people. So initially, back in the 80s, they used to talk about the 4 H’s: Homosexuals, Haemophiliacs, Heroin users, and Haitians. So basically, it was racist. - It was like ‘these are the 4 groups of people who are most likely to get HIV and they’re all people we don’t care about’. I think what has stuck from those years is the association of HIV with gay men and with intravenous drug 28
users. So I think people who don’t identify as gay men or don’t use intravenous drugs, think; ‘It’s not something I’m going to get’. But actually that’s not the case at all. If you look at the different situations in African countries you’ll see they are very different to the situation in Australia, where historically it has been that gay men have been much more likely to become positive than heterosexual people. What we now see in some
