World AIDS Day
by Susan Stryker, Director, GLBT Historical Society
To commemorate World AIDS Day, and to express solidarity with those
protesting the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, this week's
feature highlights the AIDS education efforts of Seatle-based
P.O.C.A.A.N--the People of Color Against AIDS Network--which was active in
the late 1980s.
Stop for a moment and reflect on how much the world, and Seattle's place in
it, has changed in the 18 years since the AIDS epidemic became visible in
1981. Windows wasn't even a gleam in Bill Gate's eye back then--the Macintosh
whose "look and feel" it imitated was still three years in the future. A
"latte" was something you could by in North Beach or Greenwich Village.
Seattle had not yet become synonymous with Starbucks and Microsoft when the
first PWAs started dying of pneumocystis.
Now here you are, reading about World AIDS Day on the history page of a
queer-specific portal to the World Wide Web. There's a better than 90%
chance you're using some Microsoft product. Odds are, quite a few of you
are reading this feature while sipping something hot and caffeinated from
Stabucks.
As I write this, my personalized online news service is letting me know that
police in Seattle are pepper-spraying thousands of protesters who feel that
the World Trade Organization meeting there to hammer out 21st-century
economic policy is insensitive to issues like environmental degradation and
the exploitation of women's and children's labor.
In spite of 18 years of dizzying technological and social change, people are
still dying of AIDS in Seattle--though far more are dying in Africa and Asia
than in the United States. As the telecommunications revolution continues to
shrink the world and the transnational economy lashes it ever more tightly
together, it's far easier to see the global significance of this horrible
epidemic. It's far from clear, however, the extent to which cyberwealth will
be directed toward the eradication of AIDS and other issues of social justice.
In keeping with the old activist adage, "Think Globally, Act Locally," this
week's photo offer a glimpse of local AIDS activism in Seattle at the time
the city was becoming a capital of the electronic new world order.
AIDS NEWS, a comic-book style pamphlet, was distributed free of charge by
People of Color Against AIDS Network (POCAAN) beginning July 18, 1988.
It offers a good example of the kind of "culturally sensitive" education and
prevention materials that came out of the second wave of AIDS activism in
the late 1980s, in response to criticism that the earliest anti-AIDS
campaigns focused too much attention on middle-class white gay men living in major
urban areas. AIDS NEWS was directed primarily at young American Indians,
Asian Americans, and African Americans.
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