I needed to be entirely sure that the world I wanted was safe.
That was when I contacted the Southwest Center for HIV and AIDS. The lady that I talked to, an HIV tester walked me through the process of getting tested and what happens if your test comes back positive. She was the one who explained to me that the testing has progressed to a 15 minute rapid test and that things were double, sometimes triple checked, before someone was diagnosed with HIV. This lead me to the certainty that I have now; that not only is this ban an unnecessary problem that can easily be fixed, but that my vision was absolutely aligned with Banned4life. I am sure that all of the things that I wanted were right, attainable, and safe. So my vision is that the MSM ban is taken out of play. It becomes irrelevant, just a note about HIV in history books, a reminder that some mistakes can be undone even years later.
Now, because I knew what I wanted now, what a lot of people wanted really, I needed to find a way to make that happen, to make it attainable. So, I started thinking about things that I could do to get this ban rescinded. I thought of the obvious of course, storming the FDA in a hostile takeover but, after thinking it over for a minute, I decided that would most likely get me arrested and not achieve my goal. Moving on to
to the next one, I knew I could make a petition, but that was already being done and had more signatures already than I could get in a year. After that my idea was to make people aware of the ban; the more people that know, the greater the chance of change, right? Well, I decided to keep thinking because that seemed like a poor intervention to a problem that spanned more years than I have had life. In the end I decided on two things; join Banned4life’s campaign because they have the same goal as me, and get people to sign their petition since it is already in existence and they accept any support.
So, intervention picked and ready to go, I set out and ultimately accomplished nothing. I
contacted Banned4life through their “contact me” section on their website, but as great as Banned4life is, they do not give you any of their information. I emailed then on their website but they had no available email for personal contact and they left no phone number on their website. All I could do was contact them and wait for a response. None came. I will admit that I did all of this research and learned some really incredible things about HIV/AIDS, the testing of viruses like that, and the unfairness of some health bans. Sadly, I did not implement my intervention, I never had the chance.