9 | OutBoise Magazine | NEWS
This is the awful environment in which Charlie
OutBoisemag.com | Issue 13 | December 2015
of activism becomes a regularly scheduled event.
Sheen decided to publicly disclose on Nov. 17 that he
was one of well over a million people in the U.S., and
But let’s not forget what the point of all this is.
one of roughly 35 million folks on the planet, who are
The point is that having HIV doesn’t make someone
living with a particular virus inside their bodies.
a bad person. Being a person living with HIV is not
comparable to any other state of existence: You’re
You’ve already heard more than enough about
not a smoking gun, you’re not a car with no brakes,
Charlie Sheen lately; you probably don’t need me to
you’re not a ticking time bomb. You’re a person liv-
retread that ground. (In case you do, note that The-
ing with HIV, a treatable virus.
Body.com and all of the websites who team up for
this column have written some outstanding content
Avril Nolan shouldn’t feel like she has to sue
covering various angles of the story online.) But the
somebody to avoid being associated with it. Charlie
Nolan defamation case testifies to just how desper-
Sheen shouldn’t feel like he has to go on national TV
ate Sheen’s situation must have become that he felt
and tell the world he has it so that people will stop
he needed get his status out in the open – out into a
blackmailing him.
public that, generally, still finds HIV-positive people
worth contempt, ridicule, aversion and disgrace.
Living with HIV isn’t loathsome; the way we treat
people with HIV too often is. We need to do bet-
Every Dec. 1, humanity marks World AIDS Day. We
ter – and we can, each of us, one person at a time.
see HIV covered extensively on the Web, in newspa-
Hopefully Avril Nolan and Charlie Sheen will help.
pers, on radio and on TV. We witness public aware-
Hopefully, one day soon, HIV anti-discrimination ads
ness events, testing campaigns and speeches – at
will be unnecessary, defamation lawsuits won’t need
least one of which will have taken place somewhere
to happen, and the decision to disclose one’s HIV
pretty close to you, given that HIV affects every type
status in public will be a matter of personal prefer-
of person in every region of the country (and the
ence, not compulsion.
planet). Experts rattle off all sorts of big, sobering,
scary numbers, and they talk about prevention,
Myles Helfand is the editorial director of The-
treatment and the search for a cure. Politicians
Body.com and TheBodyPRO.com. Find him on Twit-
politicize, activists advocate, blowhards bloviate.
ter @MylesatTheBody. This column is a project of
Plus, Positively Aware, POZ, TheBody.com and Q
The efforts around World AIDS Day often seem
Syndicate, the LGBT wire service. Visit their web-
shallow or pointless to many of us, and I’m sure a lot
sites — http://hivplusmag.com, http://positivelya-
of them are. It’s easy for a grass-roots movement to
ware.com, http://poz.com and http://thebody.com
lose some of its sense of soul when its primary day
— for the latest updates on HIV/AIDS.