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Just days after the Stop AIDS Project’s
“HIV Is No Picnic” media ad campaign began appearing
in the press in October 2002, one of Ms. Weide’s friends
stormed into her office. Weide’s personal friend was, reportedly,
the lone person in San Francisco disturbed at the time by reality-based
ads accurately and honestly depicting what it is like to live
with HIV/AIDS. He demanded that his friend, Weide, exercise her
leadership connections by having the ads pulled from further
publication immediately.
Weide reportedly stormed out of her office
wholly out of control, threatening to fire the entire media department
at the Stop AIDS Project if they did not immediately pull the
ads from circulation. According to my source, a wild shouting
match ensued, ending in the happy result that SAPs media department
was unwilling to back down to their own out-of-control executive
director. The ads stayed in print, and were re-run in July 2003.
Hard feelings have ensued between SAPs line staff and Ms.
Weide, who appears to be running an agency in which her own staff
is in open revolt over her misguided management decisions. Between
the “HIV Is No Picnic” ad flap, and the condom distribution
contract snafu (see above), SAPs staff was, reportedly, in open
revolt during November 2002 over management decisions being made
by Weide.
This sorry state of affairs is to the detriment
of people living with HIV/AIDS, and it bodes ill for future HIV
prevention efforts in San Francisco. Learn more…
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Since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic,
San Francisco has been home to inconsistent and spotty HIV
prevention media ad campaigns. Indeed, the San Francisco
AIDS Foundation (SFAF) has sponsored at least 17 separate ad
campaigns — about one each year — during the 20-year
epidemic. SFAFs last media campaign — the artsy-fartsy
Assumptions, a.k.a., “How Do You Know What You Know”
ads — ended in 2001, at a possible cost of between $600,000
and a projected $1.44 million. Sadly, SFAF has not conducted
a media ad campaign for over two years (as of this writing, September
2003), during the same two-year period it has been positioning
itself to get its foot in Africa’s front door via its affiliate
organization, the Pangaea Global Aids Foundation. SFAFs two-year
failure to conduct an HIV prevention media campaign in San Francisco
while it simultaneously is funding its expansion overseas may
explain, in part, the purported increases in HIV/AIDS in San
Francisco.
Ad campaigns come and go in this town faster
than a person can keep track of, and just as quickly as one du
jour campaign is launched, media companies intent on new
revenue start developing the next du jour ads. (According
to their tax returns, since 1999 SAP and SFAF have paid —
at minimum — $593,298 to Cabra Diseno for graphic design
services; again, contracts for ad campaigns, like condom distribution,
are big business.)
After its initial four-month print run, the
“HIV Is No Picnic” ad campaign vanished from the print
media in February 2003. It vanished in part, because Weide's
friend and other people with AIDS in this town did not want to
see print-based reminders of the effects of AIDS, proving once
again that some people believe ignorance is bliss. Those
opposing the ads appear not to have considered, or cared, that
those who are HIV-negative might be influenced to stay that way
after seeing the alternative in an effective ad campaign.
The ads resurfaced In July 2003, after a five-month
hiatus. (So much for consistent, on-going prevention messages.)
In his guest opinion piece below, Keith Folger, manager of SAPs
Positive Force program explains why SAP decided to rerun the
ads: Because too many HIV- negative gay and bisexual men
keep claiming “nobody told me” what life would be like
after seroconverting. Folger claims SAP wants to keep “this
conversation going” by re-running the ad series because
the “saturation level for a realistic depiction of life
with HIV” hasn’t yet been reached. Folger agrees
efforts are needed to help dispel
the myth of HIV as a manageable, minor disease, and this ad campaign
certainly helps visually dispel that complacency. But Folger doesn’t address why a mere “two-week”
additional run will reach all of the “nobody told me”
crowd or whether the “saturation level” will be reached
in a two-week period, nor does he explain why SAP simply doesn’t
run this ad series indefinitely. Folger’s guest opinion …
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San Francsico’s newest political commentator,
one political insider writing under the name of “joefire
himself,” claims the Stop AIDS Project has “…
TOTALLY SCREWED UP educating an ENTIRE GENERATION in a way that
gave them positive reasons to remain [HIV] negative.” joefire's
really hot under the collar about the “HIV Is No Picnic”
ad campaign, and he has vowed to help pull the plug on SAPs funding
streams.
What’s joefire so upset about? Well,
it appears to be an issue of whether HIV-positive people are
not being supported “emotionally and practically” who
are insulted by the reality-based ads designed to help negative
guys stay negative.
In a curious private communication, joefire
wrote: “I, too, believe that the ads used to educate people
and encourage folks to remain [negative] ought to be realistic
— but I flatly refuse to except any level of realism that
isn’t representative.” [An aside: joefire,
these ads are more representative than you think, or are prepared
to face. Trust me, visit a healthcare facility and you’ll
learn first hand that the photo imagery used in these ads are
more representative than you want to believe.] joefire
continued: “For me that means more than showing what
I’ll just call ‘the more pathetic side’ of living
with HIV! The mental and emotional health of an entire generation
— not to mention their ability to live normal lives is on
the [line]. That means something. That, unto itself,
has value and to my way of thinking saving some negative guy from becoming positive is
NOT more important than doing whatever can be done to support
those in our community who are negative.”
[Emphasis added.] [Another aside: I wonder whether joefire meant to write “…
support those who are already positive,” or whether he really
meant that supporting a negative person
in other unstated ways is more important than keeping that person
from becoming positive (i.e., seroconverting).]
Well, there you have it: The battle
over whether public health funds should be used to help people
stay HIV-negative may be being subsumed to providing emotional
and practical support to those who have already contracted HIV.
How’s that for prevention? joefire’s perspective …
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In
the August 25, 2003 issue of Newsday (New York), Michelangelo
Signorile — a former editor of The Advocate, a national
gay magazine, and an author — weighed in on the “HIV
Is No Picnic” ad campaign. Signorile asserts that
“AIDS and the pain and ugliness surrounding it — including
death — are hidden from view today.” Signorile
further notes:
- “What
all of these bus shelter ads have in common is that they drive
the point home that HIV — as well as the side effects of
the drugs that now combat it — is a living hell. You’d
think ads like these would be running in national gay magazines
and would be slapped up on bus shelters in gay ghettos across
America. Yet, scandalously, here we are, almost 25 years
into the epidemic, and the only place you’ll see anything
like them right now is in San Francisco, where they were produced
by the Stop AIDS Project, and only in the past year.”
Signorile’s
Newsday op-ed, titled “HIV Is Awful — Even With
the New Drugs,” can be found on-line on Newsday’s web site, or
here. He also notes that “AIDS
has been whitewashed in the media and popular culture,”
and like Folger (above), comments on the film The Gift.
Oddly, Signorile neglects to mention why he didn’t
weigh in on this ad campaign when it first appeared in October
2002, preferring to wait until the ads resurfaced in July 2003
to write his essay. Signorile does not mention that the
“HIV Is No Picnic” ads originally ran in San Francisco
for a scant four months, disappeared for five months, and were
followed by the two-week run in July 2003. This is hardly
time for the ads to have a long-term impact that could be measured
and evaluated for efficacy. Yet into the fray, jumps Signorile’s
critics.
In
a coy piece of his own, Curt Hicks, of the Cook County [Chicago]
Department of Public Health, dismisses Signorile as a mere “public
relations consultant and gossip columnist, not a Behaviorist
or Social Psychologist.” Hicks’ comments, one notes, appear on the Gay Men’s
Health Summit message group on Yahoo (for more on the Health
Summit, see Give
Peace a Chance … below). [If his e-mail disappears
from the Yahoo group, it can be found here.] Well
excuse me, but when, Mr. Hicks, did they pass a law that says
you have to have a degree in psychology in order to be privileged
enough to weigh in with any opinion whatsoever on whichever
topic? If that were the case, columnist’s around the
globe would have to resign en masse, starting with Matier and
Ross from the San Francisco Chronicle. Good grief,
that would mean Walter Cronkite may have mislead us for years
with social commentary if Walter had no “Behaviorist”
credential to his name. In one fell swoop, Hicks dismisses
a basic first amendment right, preferring to label Signorile’s
essay “Refer Madness.” The “AIDS Inc.”
machine sure knows how to brand any of its critics in an attempt
to stifle valid public debate!
Beating
up on Signorile, Hicks cites Bandura’s “social learning’
theory, but strangely does not mention that the “HIV Is
No Picnic” ads were produced using a “social marketing”
theory. Hicks notes:
- “And
it [‘vicarious conditioning’] may work, if it works
at all, only to the extent we’ve gotten good advice from
a similar medium that tested out in reality as true. Speed
limit signs keep their meaning to most folks on streets with
frequent enforcement, but lose their meaning in the absence of
occasional radar guns.”
Rather
than exploring what other HIV prevention interventions could
be paired with the “HIV Is No Picnic” ads to reinforce
the message on gay men’s radar screens, Hicks fails to explore
how the ads could be “paired with depictions of happier
results from safer behavior.” Instead, Hicks states:
“To reach [young gay men], we must look for the intersection
of risk reduction and their currently existing motivations.”
Oh, brother! More of the same old tired psychobabble
emanating from the same old “prevention” workers trying
to protect their turf. Haven’t we heard this
cop-out before, and isn’t that precisely what has failed
in the past 25 years? If Hicks’ propaganda for a daffy
utopia was scientifically sound, wouldn’t we have already
seen a drop in the number of new AIDS infections annually?
After all, we’ve been trying the Hicks et. al approach
for going on 20 years (including many of the failed Stop AIDS
Project workshops), and this daffy utopia has yet to materialize.
What,
precisely, is Hicks proposing? That we continue funding
the flirting classes, trips to art galleries and the zoo, and
those awful Gay Life workshops from the San Francisco
AIDS Foundation — most recently the reappearance of the
SFAF workshop “Oh My God, I’m 40! Now What?”.
What intersection is Hicks proposing: More of the
Stop AIDS Project’s “Bar Nights,” where HIV prevention
messages intersect with alcohol at so-called “workshops”
and “events” that fail miserably to draw more than
eight people to them? If SAP can’t “intersect”
— err, interest — more than eight gay men to attend
SAPs “Bar Nights” (at which few, if any, of the attendees
can be considered “young” by any stretch of the Hicks’
imaginiation), how will “risk reduction” ever
marry up with young gay men’s “currently existing motivations”?
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So
in our urban jungles, we’re left facing competing urban
myths. SAP claims — without citing a shred of scientific
proof — that the “HIV Is No Picnic” ad campaign
may help dispel young people’s beliefs that acquiring HIV
is not a big deal. SAPs belief in the rightness of this
ad campaign is laudable.
Hicks
and Signorile — also without citing scientific data —
weigh in with opinions about the ad campaign’s potential
efficacy as a prevention intervention. Sadly, we’re
left with urban myth, and not one scrap of evidence that this
ad campaign may one day slow the rate of new HIV infections.
Myth, we’re presented from both sides, not fact.
It
is odd that SAPs’ critics cite any material whatsoever from
the Gay Men’s Health Summit (GMHS). Observers have
noted that GMHS is the brainchild of one Eric Rofes, who we remember
as the Executive Director of San Francisco’s Shanti back
in 1993, who was eventually asked by Shanti’s board of directors
to resign during a scandal involving $2.6 million in federal
AIDS housing money. [Note: Although Rofes falsely denies
this, Shanti confirmed Rofes had been asked to resign volunatrily
because its board was prepared to fire him if he didn’t
resign voluntarily.] The San Francisco Department of Health
eventually recovered this money from Shanti, and Rofes luckily
escaped going to jail. Rofes, in rehabilitating his tarnished
image, was the leading organizer of GMHS, but there is no more
proof that GMHS is any more “scientifically sound”
than is the Stop AIDS Project. More from daffy utopia land.
So
in defense of the ads, where is SAP with an armload of “scientific”
evidence? Can’t they drum up any from the Ad Council?
Where is the data from the local materials review panel
analyzing how the ads may have been tested on focus groups? Why
isn’t Signorile — or SAP — citing the potentially
favorable materials review panel data? Alternatively, why isn’t
GMHS or Hicks citing potentially unfavorable materials
review panel data themselves in opposition?
Yet
again, the folks at SAP may be trying a new “controversial”
prevention approach simply for the hell of it, absent scientific
soundness. After years of not being able to cite scientific
data that demonstrates their interventions have merit, they may
simply have launched the ads as an experiment, thinking nobody
would inquire about underlying data.
Unlike
SAPs workshops and street-based outreach — both of which
SAP has repeated for years without a noticeable dent in the number
of HIV and AIDS cases in San Francisco — this ad campaign
has had a mere 18-week run in the media. This ad
campaign deserves to be carefully evaluated; to do so, more time
is needed to run the ads consistently and then scientifically
evaluate whether they have had an impact. Throwing in the
towel simply because the ads offend HIV-positive gay men in the
Castro — or offend Darlene Wedie’s“friends¨
— is not an option.
And
if Hicks is correct that the ads need to be “paired with
depictions of happier results from safer behavior,” then
“game on.” Bring on the paired ads and the happier
results! Bring on ad’s from HIV-negative gay men describing
how they stayed that way, and why. Pair the two messages, and
let’s see if that might get the message onto young men’s
radar screens, before we lose yet another generation. [After
all, we’ve yet to see ads from HIV-negative men who have
praised the workshops for having kept them negative; possibly
there might be at least one person out there who has attended
SAPs workshops, and stayed negative as a result. If one
— heck, ten — can’t be found to offer testimonials
that can be paired with the reality-based ads, then isn’t
that proof the workshops are misguided and should be shut down?
Let’s
give some peace, and give the ads a chance. Who knows?
They might just be the first intervention
SAP has developed that actually turns out to work … if only
Darlene Weide would just stop meddling with her own media department.
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