Filed under: africa, health, sexualtiy | Tags: africa, AIDS, dan savage, gay sex, helen epstein, hiv, promiscuity, stranger, uganda
I’ve been reading the thoughtful, non-puritanical writing of Dan Savage for years now, both in his weekly sex-advice column “Savage Love” and in his nonfiction books like Skipping Towards Gomorrah: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Pursuit of Happiness in America (2002).
What I admire about Savage is his reasoned, articulate (albeit polemical) perspective on gay politics, sexuality, and morality. In the clip below, he responds to an audience member’s question, “How many partners is too many?”
Savage’s thoughts on promiscuity catches my interest because it aligns with some other thinking I’ve been doing on promiscuity in other cultures, namely in Africa. I’m just begun to advise a solidarity trip to Uganda with twelve B.C. undergraduates, and one of the books we will be reading is Helen Epstein’s The Invisible Cure. Though many have chimed in on public health policy in African countries, Epstein argues that most Westerners approach HIV/AIDS in Africa as a problem to be solved: through abstinence, or condom use, or better sexual health education.
However, in The Invisible Cure, Epstein argues for a paradigm shift: an empathetic approach to Afrocentric solutions to health crises, and a challenge to understand a way of life foreign to Westerners: a culture, in some African countries, in which a man may have several wives or sexual partners. Here is an interview with Epstein on the HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa, as well as her understanding of promiscuity in this culture:
Promiscuity. In the U.S., we discuss sex and sexuality most often through a moral lens. Are we sex-positive? What should be allowed and forbidden? How do we achieve gay rights and breakdown a heteronormative society?
In African nations like Uganda, we discuss sex through a lens of public health. How do we reduce the HIV/AIDS crisis? What is the best method of prevention? Who is being infected, and how is the disease transmitted?
Hard to get out of a Western mindset, but always food for thought.
Filed under: africa, religion | Tags: africa, AIDS, Bush, catholicism, condom, pope, prevention
In visits to Cameroon and Angola this week, Pope Benedict says that condoms could only make the HIV/AIDS crisis worse. The Vatican is pushing abstinence and monogamy to fight AIDS in Africa–rather than condom use–as did the Bush administration.
Twenty-two million people are living with HIV/AIDS in Africa. As reported by CNN, there is also a significant rise in converts to Catholicism. Therefore, the Pope’s comments are of critical importance to the millions of congregants on the continent.
Is this debate merely a question of the best route to HIV/AIDS prevention? What role does religion play in establishing governmental policies? How do the words of one man–granted, an important man–play in the individual decisions of others?
Filed under: literature | Tags: AIDS, franz wright, medicine, poetry, rafael campo
Great article by James Parker in The Phoenix this week about local poets Rafael Campo and Franz Wright, who write about the body in sickness and in health. (Full disclosure: Campo is indeed a doctor, my own, in fact.)
Long before he was my PCP, Campo intrigued me with his devotion to forms, particularly the sonnet, and the way that he subverted the norms of the Shakespearean norm and wrote poems about AIDS and death.
Franz Wright, too, manages to reinvigorate his work through his struggles with hospital wards, Catholicism, and other matters of the heart.
Bravo to Parker and The Phoenix for giving space to poetry, a real commitment these days when all the media wants to talk about is politics, the economy, and celebrity gossip.
