Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
The scourge of AIDS has made many people think more than ever before about protecting themselves.
Jul 24, 2000 | South Africa has lately been at the center of the world prostitutes movement. The International Network of Sex Work Projects is currently based in Capetown. And not far from Capetown, the recent 13th International AIDS Conference was held July 9-14. But whether it occurs in Geneva or Durban, this event is a magnet for sex workers' rights activists and is a must-attend for anyone who plays a leadership role in the world prostitutes movement.
Right now, as I sit in New York, playing hooky from the biggest event of the year, alliances are forming and shifting, dying, reviving. Political love affairs are breaking down. Some are being tenderly nourished. Covert enemies are smiling at each other as they salivate over each other's funding. New factions are sprouting as former enemies are forced to share hotel rooms. Australians are dissing each other to their foreign allies, Latin Americans are making North Americans feel guilty and North Americans (especially from the U.S.) are trying not to offend anyone from Europe or any developing countries.
AIDS is a tragedy of epic proportions, claiming millions of lives. But AIDS has also made the prostitutes movement a global one. Before AIDS, the movement sought its alliances among feminists, and this limited our growth. During the past decade this has changed and most of the important alliances tend to be AIDS related. AIDS is terrible, we all agree, but it helped our movement come of age. Many activist prostitutes have built innovative careers in public health, social and medical research and elsewhere because of AIDS.
In real life, far from the politicized atmosphere of the sex workers summit in Durban, working prostitutes also benefit from the very thing they fear. In the 1980s, when my friends in the life became aware of AIDS, some clients had trouble getting used to condoms. And one working girl I know expressed the problem personally. She told a client: "If you've ever had to sit next to the hospital bed of a friend who is dying of this disease, you'll appreciate the need for a condom!"
Yes, '80s foreplay was sometimes heavy-handed. But she wasn't kidding. One of this girl's best friends from high school, a gay man, had just died.
Later, when just about everyone in our sphere -- clients, working girls, madams -- had converted to the cause of condoms, she told me: "Thank god for AIDS -- when I think of all the men I used to see without condoms, I just can't believe it!"
Her sorrow over a friend who died of AIDS was, is, still real. But AIDS gave her a good reason -- an "excuse" -- to use a device that had been unfashionable for a while. Condoms made her work a lot safer in general. Risks she had previously taken for granted pre-AIDS now seemed intolerable. Like any other person who has experienced technological improvements on the job, she was amazed at what she had once been able to live with.
Other prostitutes agreed with my friend. It was comforting to know you weren't being exposed to chlamydia, pregnancy or gonorrhea. Men, the selfish beasts, weren't so easily persuaded by the specter of curable ailments or of pregnancies that didn't affect them. The incurable specter of AIDS became a handy angel of guilt hovering over our beds, urging our customers to wear condoms.
Pre-AIDS, when condoms were not always the norm, it was normal to get tested at least monthly for a range of STDs (sexually transmitted diseases). This wasn't just time-consuming, it was expensive. But worth it, of course.
"Before AIDS," one friend reminisced, "I used to spend $200 a month on gonorrhea cultures and lab tests. Once I actually had to get a penicillin shot." And once, she even got pregnant, as a result of the imperfections of the diaphragm method. Condoms have made her life safer and saner by reducing her medical and emotional overhead.
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