LGBTQ CHURCH/ PROFESSIONAL SERVICES

By David Fray

Don’t fear

We all know that at the end of October is Halloween, in many countries, a time for remembering the dead and now more commercially associated with the supernatural, horror and ‘trick or treat’. Some people love to be thrilled by a sense of fear, it certainly gets the blood pumping when goosebumps send you the shivers. But real fear is no joke, it is one of the strongest emotions we experience and can have dramatic effects on our behaviour.

The HIV information campaign produced by the British government in the ‘80s used fear as a motivating tool. The images of tombstones and icebergs created a fear of HIV in the general population and marginalised communities where HIV was prevalent. The aftershocks of those campaigns are still affecting people today some 40 years later.

Fear of HIV can dissuade people at risk from getting tested. This is particularly sad, as treatment is so effective now that there is ZERO risk of a person with an undetectable viral load passing on the virus to somebody else through sex. We use the mantra Undetectable = Untransmittable, or U=U for short.

“The HIV information campaign produced by the British government in the ’80s used fear as a motivating tool”

For people living with HIV the greatest burden of this fear is stigma. Stigma makes people fear being discriminated against, or treated differently in their relationships, communities, workplaces and services such as the NHS. The best way to combat this fear and stigma is through educating people that HIV is controllable and people living with it can now lead healthy lives.

Living in an age of Covid, we know that HIV is simply a virus, and that fear and misinformation can cause people to make irrational decisions that may even increase infections, (think of anti-vaxxers, and not getting tested for either virus).

There is nothing supernatural about HIV. In its education campaigns, the Martin Fisher Foundation tells us that HIV isn’t scary anymore. We have known about HIV for over 40 years, and it is time to put the stigma and fear of the 20th century behind us. We can’t move forward if we are stuck looking backwards.

The Sussex Beacon’s Peer Mentoring service can help people living with HIV develop skills and strategies for sharing information about their status. Visit www.sussexbeacon.org.uk to find out more.

In our project More to me than HIV, we are fighting this fear and stigma by normalising living with HIV. We will show a wide range of portraits of people, all of whom are living with HIV, but contrary to the images of fear, are living ordinary and sometimes extraordinary lives, just like anybody else.

Our participants will be professionally photographed by Angus Stewart, and the images will be displayed at an exhibition in the Jubilee and satellite libraries in the city of Brighton & Hove.

If you’re living with HIV, and would like to show that world that there is nothing to be scared of, please visit www.moretomethanHIV.life.