Petrelis Files

Ex-POZ Editor Wish is True:

No HIV Ads in SF, 1-Year and Counting

A little more than a year ago, a debate in the HIV activist community raged on about the hostile and fear-based social marketing prevention campaigns, with many activists, myself included, demanding AIDS groups, public health officials and graphic designers who fund and create the ads, produce hard results that the campaigns actually accomplish something tangible, like reduced infection rates or increased HIV testing. Such proof of effectiveness was not forthcoming.

Last fall activists in San Francisco proposed a two-year moratorium on all HIV social marketing efforts, in order to give the targeted gay male community a time-out from a quarter-century of relentlessly controversial ads.

One longtime activist, Walter Armstrong, former editor of POZ magazine, went so far as to call for an end to _all_ campaigns in a Bay Area Reporter article:

Messages that imply an irresponsible community can further stigmatize gay men and thus encourage new infections, said Walter Armstrong, former editor-in-chief of the internationally distributed Poz magazine. Recently troubled by the Los Angeles "HIV is a gay disease" campaign, Armstrong is among a growing chorus calling for an absolute end to all HIV social marketing.

Such drastic measures "may seem controversial or even counterproductive on the surface. . .but I think this would, at best, force us and the prevention 'establishment' to find more scientific, more innovative, more responsive forms of HIV prevention and, at worst, just silence all the slogans that have never been anything but truisms, half-truths, or outright lies, starting with 'Safe Sex Is Hot' back in 1986."

Armstrong said such campaigns are always steps behind what gay men are already doing; "it wasn't until the mid-1990s that the big gay groups officially ranked oral sex as low risk, despite the fact that gay men had never used condoms for blowjobs."

The BAR story appeared in November 2006 and was tied to an ad campaign, funded and created by the S.F. Department of Public Health, that promoted disclosure of one's HIV sero-status before sexual activity and obliquely encouraged sero-sorting, whereby HIV poz men sleep only with other poz men.

What does Walter Armstrong say today? He sent me this comment:

"The one thing I would say now (and wish you would add) is that, a year later, I'm not aware of any efforts—certainly, not from me or anyone I know—to create true 21st-century gay HIV prevention in the absence of all the stupid ads. We need to follow through on that."

That DPH campaign was the last advertising effort in San Francisco promoting HIV prevention. For more than a year now, the local gay population has not been assaulted by any HIV-specific prevention ads.

There have been toned-down non-controversial ads addressing speed use and syphilis testing that lightly touched upon HIV transmission, but were very much focused on meth and syphilis infections.

In January the BAR reported the S.F. AIDS Foundation would soon unveil a new ad campaign to stir up the gay community. From the BAR:

[Executive director Mark] Cloutier has since hired Amon Rappaport, formerly with the Marin Institute, as a full-time staffer to develop the foundation's marketing in-house. Rappaport started December 4 and will be paid $125,000 annually. Cloutier first met Rappaport in September when he interviewed him for the foundation's director of communication position. [...]

He said the task he has given Rappaport is to design a campaign that can assist gay men in taking care of one another and that speaks to them in a positive manner.

"Many campaigns don't seem to necessarily identify with the positive motivations that gay men have in taking care of themselves and others. They often start with a frame of 'You are doing something wrong' and using a social marketing campaign to start a conversation about it," said Cloutier. "The question I have is how do we supply information and align campaigns with the deeper intentions of gay men to take care of themselves and their partners to continue to drive the infection rates down?"

Cloutier said he hopes to launch the foundation's new ads this spring.

Well, the spring months came and went and the foundation didn't follow through on the promise of the new campaign. I guess all the money they spent developing the HIV prevention ads, like the campaign, simply was flushed down the drain.

I don't know if the health department or the dozens of AIDS service organizations would agree with me that we've seen an unqualified official one-year moratorium on the ads, a moratorium that I sense won't end sometime soon, and we're still quite far from realizing Walter Armstrong's push for an end to HIV prevention social marketing.

But one thing I think we all can concur on is that San Francisco has been free of such campaigns for more than a year.

Now would be a good time for AIDS Inc to again debate the efficacy of social marketing, and, if they finally have verifiable proof HIV prevention ad work at controlling new infections or drive up testing rates, to share that proof with the community.