My Feet Only Walk Forward

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Monday, November 5, 2012

A New Kind of Blackness: Remarks at Tufts University's Black Solidarity Day

This keynote was given today at Tuft's Pan African Alliance's annual Black Solidarity Day Rally. I was honored to be invited to keynote this amazing event.

Let me begin by thanking Tabias Wilson, Jameelah Morris and the rest of the Pan African Alliance and the Tufts community for inviting me to spend some time with you today. It's an honor and a pleasure.

I've spent a long time thinking about blackness. About, roughly, all of my 35 years walking around this planet. I guess that makes me some sort of an expert, but mostly it makes me confused, angry, celebratory, conflicted, colonized, dehumanized, aggrandized, powerful, vulnerable, righteous, and a whole host of other adjectives, some of which are pejoratives, most of which reflect the complex relationship to blackness that comes with living in this particular historical moment, in this particular body, at this particular arc in our development as black folks and as community. Let me not mince words, though, it is a beautiful day to be a person of African descent in this world.

Despite the struggles, despite Jim Crow being alive and well and feeding on our people, despite the KKKoch brothers, despite still pretending that military service is job training and a pathway to anything but more colonization of people that look like us, despite having lost enough collective monetary worth during the Recession that we now are looking at a community with the equivalent resources of our folks BEFORE the Civil Rights movement, it's a good damn day to be black.

Let me tell you why. And it has nothing to do with Barack Obama, though let my one overt partisan moment be to say this:

If you have the right to vote for President, unlike our immigrant brothers and sisters, folks living in our colonies, and the millions of mostly men of color that have lost the right due to felony convictions (Jim Crow is alive and happy as Hell)...and you do not vote because "voting doesn't matter," or "you are protesting the system," please take your selfish self-centered behind up and out of these here United States. Most likely someone died for you to have that right especially if you are a woman, person of color, non land owner. ESPECIALLY IF YOU ARE BLACK. Folks are still dying here and around the world because some folks decided to stay home in 2000 and 2004 and Bush got in the White House, lost his mind, and started two wars. Go vote. I hope you will vote for Obama, but not voting isn't a protest it is an abrogation of your most minimal democratic obligation.

I am proud of Barack Obama but that has nothing to do with why it is a good day to be black in America. It's a good day to be black in America because we are beautiful. Always have been. Always gonna be. But it's a good day to be black because we have a chance to grab ahold of our blackness and shake it out. It's time to pull it back out of the closet, air out the afro puffs and pin that blackness to a clothes line and take a good look at it.

You know it has some stains on it. You know there are some old patches and frayed edges. Well it's time to Shout it Out! The Tide I am here to talk about is a tidal wave of change that needs to start right here with each and every person of African descent, whether you were born in Africa and have decided to make the United States your home, a descendant of U.S. born slaves, a Black Latin@, or wherever that slave ship happened to land and drop off your ancestors. Bi-racial, or a racial smorgesbord that has the black experience in the mix. Blackness now, today, needs a radical redefinition.

Before I go into what needs to be done with that blackness on the clothesline, let me talk to the black men a little bit and about feminism. Feminism at its root means that both men and women get to express their full humanity without oppression, without prescribed ways of being that are rigidly policed and socially/politically/often physically punished when deviated from the norm, and allow both men and women the full range and expression of their vitality and spirit without taking away from the other. Indeed, feminism is, at its root, the negation of gender roles and the full expression of human experience as in a liberation framework---ie...you get to be all of you, and I get to be all of me, and together we are committed to building each other to our full potential.

For black men this becomes about survival. Black men are taught from the gate to be tough, hard, in control, "macho", independent, players, victims, and that our potential is circumscribed by history, circumstance, and ability--not to be punks, to be virile, the mandigo syndrome...and these ideals images and thoughts are reinforced through our own communities, often, media--too often--, and what we consume from mainstream dominant ideology. We resemble what we are presented by others as ourselves. We become charicatures because so many of those that would be our own role models are dead, absent, or in prison. We are socialized internally and externally, and unless someone or something intervenes to break the cycle of history, legacy, and socialization we often become what we were never born to be. We become angry, and turn that anger inwards and towards our own community. And as a wise woman once told me, there is a place for angry black men: jail.

The truth or untruth of these socializations are related to our relative position to power, history, presentation, and ability to conform or not (willingly or not, consciously or not) to a paradigm that requires us to set our skin aside and adopt a way of being that imitates the master consciousness. This too is an ultimate expression of sexism and must be rejected through conscious practice. Further, I would argue it is sexism and a lack of feminist ideals and thoughts that are at the root of the pandemic of the single parent home, which, in and of itself, keeps the community widely struggling with poverty and in cycles of poverty.

Black men. Your liberation is inimically tied to women. It is not an option for you to be feminist if you want to be free. It is for all of our survival that black men must move towards an articulated black feminism, accountable to black women, and responsible for ourselves.

Let me let you in on a wee little bitty secret. Whether you were born in the Motherland and recently moved here or grew up here anyway, the blackness you experience is only partially your own. You may feel empowered and a fully realized person of African descent, but I am here to tell you right now today that your blackness has been shaped, influenced, and molded by oppressive institutions that have anything but your best interest in mind. The media, education, prison industrial complex, the nonprofit industiral complex, and all the other systems that were, listen closely here, created and built to maintain hegemonic white power.

And do you know how whiteness was legally defined in this country, beginning in the late 17^th century and then systematically constructed through a series of colonial state and later federal laws? As the basic opposition of blackness. Or, to be more specific, who was white and who was black and what that meant, entailed, and carried was and has been a function of law in this nation for the better part of all of its existence as a free standing state and for a good 250 years before hand. From the first laws passed by the House of Burgesses in Virginia to establish race based slavery to anti-miscegenation and Jim Crow laws later, what it means to be black has been fundamentally been defined by the legal system for a good chunk of our history.

And the greatest victory of that legacy of racial legislation is that through the combination of the media, the police state, and our own complicitness, the legal apparatus of our blackness is largely no longer necessary. We no longer need laws to force us to segregate, we no longer need laws for us to adhere to an anti-intellecualism, we no longer need laws to tell us to stay in our place and keep our heads down or don't buck the system or divide ourselves from one another based on skin tone and class, we do all that by ourselves, most of the time without thinking about it. If a brother or sister's hair is natural or they spent a semester in Ghana or is taking West African dance or can whip up mean plate of collards and neckbones (which I can....my greens will change your life), or can recite Tupac's biography, or has been to prison, or is hood, or is hard, or is straight, ..then that brother or sister is downer, blacker than say a light skinned lesbian that graduated summa cum laude from Tufts.

Pardon me but I call bullshit. Don't get me wrong, we need to embrace with a fierceness our historical roots whether that be our immigrant selves from Nigeria or our slave ancestors from a mill in West Virginia, but the downer than thou, black than you mentality has done nothing but foment separation, pain, and kept our ability for revolution and liberation in shackles and chains. It's time to set our liberation free y'all and it starts with building with one another.

I am standing in front of you a black, white, Ojibwe, Afro-Boricua, HIV positive, queer man. And I am just as black as any of you. You are my community, you are my salvation. I am in community with my queer and trans black family and being queer or trans doesn't make you less black than anyone else. It's time for us to realize that HIV stopped being a white gay disease a long time ago, it's now a black and Latina straight women's disease (as the fastest growing populations of HIV infection) and it's time to hold up our positive brothers and sisters as our own. No more high yellow and midnight blue conversations when talking about skin unless its to talk about how that high yellow or midnight blue person rocked your socks last night after that party and you are about to take his or her last name. I could give a damn about the style you wearyour hair, fried died and laid to the side or afro-tastic, I am with Miss India.Arie, I am NOT my hair!

I have a great-uncle that some of you may have heard about. His name is Carter G. Woodson. He wrote a book called the Miseducation of the Negro. It is time that we stop miseducating ourselves. Hear me now, and hear me clear, that blackness on the clothes line needs to be washed clean of the things that we have let divide ourselves from ourselves. It needs to be ironed and beaded and treated with loving care and expanded to include all shades of blaqness and all the power that holds while letting go of the powerlessness. Ain't nobody in this world going to give us our liberation. We need to break those chains ourselves, and we have to start by holding each other close in a way that says clearly that I am you. You are me. And I will do the work to undo the legacy of oppression, racism, sexism, heterosexism, abelism, classism, immigration status, and skin privilege that keeps me from you and you from me and us from the mountaintop because I am climbing y'all, and I mean to take every one of you with me, if you'll just hold my hand. I need you, and we need each other.

Thank you all for having me here today with you to talk just a little bit. Be blessed.

Why Voting Matters: Barack Obama...I got you.

I have written a number of blog posts about Barack Hussein Obama (30 mentions to be exact). Last May, I wrote a blog titled Why I Will Be Voting for Barack Obama, and I stand by all that I wrote in that blog as well. If you want to know why I am voting to support our president, please check out one of those two links above.

I am writing today to talk about the practice of voting itself. Yesterday, I posted this status on Facebook:

I know I should not have to say this, but I am. If you have the right to vote for President, unlike our immigrant brothers and sisters, folks living in our colonies, and the millions of mostly men of color that have lost the right due to felony convictions (Jim Crow is alive and happy as Hell)...and you do not vote because "voting doesn't matter," or "you are protesting the system," please take your selfish self-centered ass up and out of these here United States. Most likely someone died for you to have that right especially if you are a woman, person of color, non land owner. Folks are still dying because y'all decided to stay home in 2000 and 2004 here and around the world thanks to wars started by Bush. Go vote. I hope you will vote for Obama, but not voting isn't a protest it is an abrogation of your most minimal democratic obligation. Don't vote; relocate. Danke! Gracias! Merci! Obrigado! Salamat po! Grazie!

I stand by this Facebook status emphatically, but I want to explain a bit more about why I believe voting to be important even within this broken system, particularly after receiving some well thought out and meaningful push back from a former colleague and someone that I adore as a human and as a thinker, Patrick Barret from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. You can read Patrick's full discourse on my Facebook page by scrolling down a bit and clicking on the comment feed under the above status. But one of his comments struck me in response to my statement that we have an obligation to participate [in democracy via the minimal act of voting]:

"Yes of course we do, but not blindly. We are plenty smart enough, and we're morally obligated, not to just participate aimlessly, with no analysis of what works and what doesn't. The system's broken, and in my opinion, that obligates us to avoid fulfilling Einstein's definition of insanity."

I agree with Patrick. The system is broken. Democracy is limited more now than at anytime since the official dismantling of Jim Crow era poll taxes/lit tests/etc. Using the vehicle of the prison industrial complex and restrictive ID laws and court room shenanigans, the vote is either directly or effectively stripped from millions upon millions of mostly people of color and poor voters. That, of course, is not coincidental since a working poor/oppressed class of folks that see themselves as having a legitimate opportunity to use the electoral system to effect change would buck the two party system and create a much fairer (as fair as can be possible while still operating under capitalism). It would be a democracy that was at least multi-party if not explicitly socialist in its leanings. That's my belief and the trends of the 60s of radical social groups that were broad based holds this up as do the union organizing of previous decades, etc. So it is in the interest of power to limit the franchise as much as possible and to those that have some particular interest and investment in the current system. It is easier for the working poor to see themselves in cahoots with a struggling and shrinking middle class which identifies with American dream aspirations rather than having the working poor and middle class seeing themselves as fundamentally the same as the working poor and having the middle class risk what small privileges still exist for a chance at a revolutionary democratic movement that would pay out real liberation dividends via a time of struggle.

Yet even with that broken reality, I believe that our system is not yet so monolithic and gone that the two parties are one party from rhetoric to recent history WE KNOW THAT TO BE UNTRUE!

The system is broken. It needs to be fixed. But the reality is that who sits in the White House DOES matter. It matters to those of us living with HIV if the president in the White House is going to fund Ryan White and at what level, Medicaid and other social programs. It matters to working class people of color and poor whites if the president in the White House is going to rush to or manufacture a war for political and financial gain. It matters who is the White House when it comes to basic human rights protections for queer and trans folks. It matters for many reasons who sits in the White House.

HEAR ME CLEARLY! No person in the White House is going to give us our liberation, But I do not ascribe to the notion that who you vote for in this corporate democracy doesn't matter. Eight years of Bush and the Great Recession that followed proved, unequivocally, that, in fact, it does matter. It matters in a cost of lives. Mayhaps I am not as "down," as those that are willing to suggest that voting doesn't matter because the system is inherently flawed. Voting doesn't matter in the way that it should. I spent years working with Patrick Barret, David Cobb and others on just these issues. And I continue to advocate for real and meaningful democratic practice. And if I need to do so, I will continue to repeat that voting is only your most minimal obligation to democracy. But I will vote tomorrow. I will vote for Barack Obama. And I encourage every one of you to vote, attempt to vote, or raise Hell in one way or another if you find your right to vote denied while at the polling station...and then...no matter what the outcome of the election tomorrow night, get ready for the real work of democracy that comes each and every day afterwards.

Saturday, November 3, 2012

Post-Sandy Support for LGBTSTGNC Community via ALP and Allies

I am proud to serve as a member of the board of directors of the Audre Lorde Project. I received this email today from Cara Page, Executive Director, which is full of resources and tips for queer and trans folks of color impacted by Hurricane Sandy. ALP's Brooklyn Office is open with extended hours to serve our communities.

Greetings ALPers, Friends & Family,

Times like these remind us of how important it is to build collective power and safety no matter the conditions we are facing. Now is the time to come together and support each other even more. We know we are resilient! As New York rebuilds from the storm our communities are experiencing even more of the heightened policing and surveillance we have already been fighting against.

We want to open our doors for a place to chill and gather. We are fully operational at Brooklyn ALP Office (85 South Oxford St.) until our Manhattan offices are back up and accessible. At the Brooklyn office we will be providing extended hours for community to come on through for a little comfort and warmth. We have drinking water to fill up your water bottles, and power to reboot phones and computers. We have phone and internet to keep connected! Even if you have power but might not be able to reach family or community and you just want to come by for company by all means come on through! If you have cabin fever and want to come out and volunteer we also have some small projects. We will let you know when you get here. (SEE OFFICE HOURS BELOW)

We want to recognize the ways we have been building safety within our communities and the many grassroots efforts we are building. We have been in touch with our partnering organizations like FIERCE, QEJ, Sylvia Rivera Law Project and Streetwise & Safe and know they are doing alright and supporting their base. We know that CAAAV has been organizing for the safety and well being of Chinatown residents in lower Manhattan. They have put out a call for donations of flashlights, batteries, food (perishable and non-perishable), and bottled water. ALP has offered to be a drop off location for people to coordinate getting these things to CAAAV. If you have a vehicle and the time please let us know! Also Red Hook Initiative; a supportive space for LGBTQGNC located in the Red Hook Community is open and providing water, food, and electricity & clothing. They are located at 767 Hicks St., Brooklyn NY 11231. And Third Root Community Health Center in Brooklyn (380 Marlborough Road) will be holding a storm support event on Saturday, November 3rd, from 1-6 PM.

During this difficult time we want to also offer safety tips to our LGBTQTSGNC of Color communities on how to navigate trauma and negotiate safe spaces in the aftermath of the storm:

Shelters: If you or someone you know is experiencing violence or harassment in a shelter. See National Center for Transgender Equality attachment for strategies on how to ask for support specific to navigate shelter safety for Trans and Gender Non-Conforming folks or go to: http://www.gdnonline.org/resources/NCTE%20Trans%20Hurricane%20Preparedness.pdf.

Police: There is increased police presence in many neighborhoods, avoid traveling alone at night see know your rights information at the following link- http://changethenypd.org/content/know-your-rights-help-end-discriminatory-abusive-illegal-policing

Travel: With increased travel time and limited public transportation avoid traveling alone and always let at least one person know where you're going. Ask for a quote before taking a cab [Gas scarcity means many cabs are charging more than usual] Make an alternate plan for your route in case there are unexpected transportation changes.

Resources: Anti-Violence Project (AVP) 24 Hour Bilingual Hotline is up and running and can offer safety tips to intervene on interpersonal violence! 212-741-1141

Community: Please depend on each other and don't be afraid to ask and give help to each other. If you are throwing an event or gathering, consider collecting donations.
Please remember to take care of yourselves! Do not underestimate the impact this can have on our emotional & physical well being. Oftentimes our individual and collective bodies respond to incidences of trauma in many ways without even knowing it. You could be more tired, more restless, etc. Be mindful of your body and feelings and pace yourselves!

In Solidarity, ALP Staff

Please see our Brooklyn office hours below:

Friday, November 2nd (1- 7 PM)
Saturday, November 3rd (1- 7 PM)
Monday, November 5th (1- 7PM)
Tuesday, November 6th (1- 7 PM)
Wednesday, November 7th (1- 7 PM)
Thursday, November 8th (1-7 PM)

CITY WIDE FOOD & WATER DISTRIBUTION SITES:
There will be food and water distribution sites throughout the five boroughs. The details of these sites, including the exact locations and hours of operation, can be found here: http://www.nyc.gov/html/misc/html/2012/foodandwater.html

The locations are as follows:

Brooklyn
Coffey Park at Richards Street
West 25th Street and Surf Avenue

Manhattan
West 27th Street between 9th and 10th Avenues
East 10th Street between Avenues C & D
Catherine Street between Cherry and Monroe Streets
Pitt Street and East Houston Street
Central Plaza at Division Street
Stanton and Pitt Streets

Queens
Beach 51st Street and Rockaway Beach Boulevard
Red Fern Avenue and Beach 12th Street
Beach 84th Street and Rockaway Beach Boulevard

Staten Island
Mill Road and New Dorp Lane
Yetman Avenue and Hylan Blvd
The American Red Cross has also established feeding locations on Long Island.

The Audre Lorde Project is a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Two Spirit Trans and Gender Non-Conforming People of Color community organizing center focusing on the New York City area. 147 West 24th St. 3rd Floor, NY, New York 10011 Tel: 212-463-0342 * Fax: 212-463-0344 Web: www.alp.org

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Hetrick Martin Institute Emery Awards After Party!!!!!

Brandon Lacy Campos (HMI Young Professionals Council) and partner Nicolas Gérard invite you to join us for the Hetrick-Martin Institute's Emery Awards After Party. Each year, after the formal dinner, when the bow ties are loosened and award

s have been awarded, the real fun begins.

And talk about partying for a cause. The Emery Awards After Party is an amazing soiree featuring an open bar with the finest assortment of top shelf beverages, a rockin' gift bag, and featuring DJ Andy Bell of Erasure fame...and this year there will be a live performance by an artist sponsored by MTV...wanna know who? Lemme tell you how.

Not only will you get an amazing party out of the price of a ticket (that costs no more than a dinner out on the town), but also you will be supporting the Harvey Milk High School, which provides a comprehensive high school environment for at-risk queer, trans, and questioning youth. HMI and the Harvey Milk School serve more than 2,000 young people a year through a variety of social services, arts, education, and political organizing efforts.

Tickets are $125 each, but a portion of each ticket is tax deductible, and, though it is a significant sum of money for many folks, it is no more than the price of a good dinner and after dinner drinks on a Friday night in Manhattan...without the show, goodies, free booze and queer/trans gliteratti. On October 29th choose to spend that night out with us.

Buy your tickets at www.hmi.org/afterparty. Tell them Brandon and Nico sent you.

Friday, October 19, 2012

Poetry to Pay the Rent (and a new book project)

So as folks know, I recently left my job at Queers for Economic Justice. The hope is that this is a step towards my dream of becoming a full time writer and performer at some point in the not so distant future, but most definitely, in the immediate future, it is time to finish the edits on my novel, Eden Lost, and send that along to my publisher and to start pulling together the poetry (and more art from David Berube) for my second poetry collection: Songs My Ancestors Sing To Me When I Am Dreaming.

Making the first (little) big steps towards sitting in a cabin somewhere in the woods (but not too far from the city) and writing full time (ish)...is realigning the work that I am doing in the world to bring that eventual reality to manifestation.

The immediate repercussions of being unemployed is that I am also unencumbered of income to work on this project and pay for pesky things like food and rent.

And please don't get me started on the IRS and what they just did to what little money I had left.

So I am turning to you, my community, to help me make Songs My Ancestors Sing To Me When I Am Dreaming by asking you to support my work on this project over the next two months.

Thanks to the good folks at Tufts University, Rutgers University, and Bethany College, I will have by the beginning of December enough funds to cover most of my expenses from October and November from invitations to speak at these institutions. It is my hope to use October and November, while I am in the hiring process for a new and exciting position, to write and really focus on this book project while the copy edits are being done on Eden Lost (and, a portion of the money I raise through this effort will go to support paying said copy editor, Kamal Fizazi). In order to really be able to focus on this work (and eat, have a phone and a place to sleep), I need to raise $3,000 from you, my readers and the folks that have, for so long, supported my work between now and December 1.

The benefit to you is this:

1. The good feeling of helping break the starving artist paradigm (its a myth, we love to eat).
2. For every donation of $25 or more, you will receive a personal haiku written for you!
3. For every donation of $50 or more, you will receive a signed copy of my book, It Ain't Truth If It Doesn't Hurt and a haiku!
4. For a donation of $100 or more you get all of the above as well as put on a list for an advanced signed copy of Eden Lost once it goes into publication!
5. And for a donation of $250 or more, you will receive all that, a bag of chips (really I will send you a bag of chips), PLUS your name listed as a funding partner in Songs My Ancestors Sing To Me When I Am Dreaming along with a signed copy once it too goes into publication.

Any support that you can provide from $5 to $500 will be greatly appreciated and valued. Investing in artists is good for the soul and it is also good for community. Poetry is part of our life blood but unfortunately poets are often spirit rich and dollar poor. If a poem of mine or anything else that I have written has spoken to you or your experience, please consider making a gift via PayPal today:

www.paypal.com and you can find me via my email address: brandonlacycampos at yahoo dot com.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Clean; You be Too aka FUCK YOU BIYOTCH!

Pardon my French (I love saying that now that I have a Frenchy partner), but the next time you are posting an ad for a piece of ass or a dick for that ass and you post that you are clean and looking for clean, I sure hope you mean that you have washed your ass in bleach and are looking for someone that has done the same....because if you are using "clean" to refer to yourself as being HIV negative, then let me be so kind as to tell you that the connotative definition of your identity is that being HIV positive is dirty.

Considering that I take up to three showers a day, I dare you to prove that you are cleaner than I am. You are very likely to be much more ignorant (ignant in ghetto speak) than I am, but cleaner. I doubt it.

Confused? Every single motherfucker walking around this planet is carrying some sort of communicable virus. Nearly 20% of everyone walking around is positive for genital herpes and if you include canker sores and cold sores, which is the same herpes simplex (yes canker sores and the sore on your cock or anus are exactly the same virus)...then by your own definition you ain't clean. And, PS Chicken Pox is a form of herpes.

Need more clarity, 98% of humans have some type of herpes simplex one or two, 20% have genital herpes and 50-80% have oral herpes (chancer sores), which means, biyotch that you most likely do too.

But I digress.

Today, I reposted a great ad from Mr. Friendly, an amazing human being/ad campaign that is looking to fight HIV stigma. It was all about the word clean used to describe people that are HIV negative. I had a note in my phone to write a blog on the word clean, and I have for a month. That ad/meme today gave me the motivation I needed to do so.

I am clean. I am very damn clean. I just took a shower. And if my own God said that it isn't want you put IN your body that makes you unclean but what comes out of it (spiritually) then no virus can possibly make me unclean. But your willful, hurful and ugly ignorance sure can piss me off.

And don't get me started on this ads that are looking for bareback sex but only with "clean," individuals. Lord don't get me started. I have written extensively on the right of all people to engage in natural aka bareback sex...and I personally love it and have practiced it in an informed manner with harm reduction strategies, but HIV has nothing to do with whether or not a person is clean, nor does skin color, gender, religion or any other category that has been, over the ages, been described as or segregated as socially and culturally dirty.

You want an end to HIV, that starts with an end to stigma, and the smallest way you can do your part besides staying negative is by being an ally to folks living with HIV and eliminating word choices that reinforce ugly and hateful paradigms that scream OTHER, OUTCAST, UNCLEAN.

Seen those words before? Yeah, they have been used to refer to everyone from lepers to members of the Untouchable caste. Every person, from cradle to grave is clean and worthy of love and no one enjoys a monopoly on being pure or pristine. Your actions determine your spiritual health, not your HIV status and surely not any other diagnosis that carries stigma.

Clean? Yeah I am clean. Now if you want to talk about my bedroom or the mutant dust bunnies under my bed, then we can have a conversation.

Check yourself...or I promise you...I will.

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Volttage: A Dating and Hook Up Site for POZitively Sexy People

Back in late April-ish, my Facebook wall was bombarded by several of my loved ones that posted a call for HIV positive models to participate in a new project that Jack Mackenroth, the HIV positive gay man of Project Runway fame and with a boogina that makes me think of sin and putting on a bib. FIRE IN THE HOLE!

Oops sorry...that was my outside voice.

Anywho, several of my friends encouraged me to send Jack some of my pictures for this project. He was looking for HIV positive models, and my first response to my friends was....ummm 1) I am not a model, 2) You are asking me to send half naked pictures, sober, not on a sex site, with the possibility that I could end up half naked on a website for the entire world to see, 3) do you EVEN know me.

I love rejection just about as much as I love failure. Rejection, which is a main component of the impact of stigma on people living with HIV, becomes more than just a "shitty" moment for those of us living with the red rider. Rejection becomes the default for many of our interactions with folks in the community in whom we may have interest. Show me a poz man that hasn't experienced at at least half a dozen instances of shocking and hurtful ignorance when disclosing his status, and I will show you the magical leprechaun that I keep chained in my pantry making Lucky Charms whenever I have a hankering.

So, imagine, then submitting your pictures to a famous stud with no body fat and asking him to MAKE A judgment on your attractiveness.

Yeah...ummm...while I have a healthy and sometimes overly healthy ego, the one place that breaks down is around my body, but...BUT....I thought what the Hell, and I sent the pictures along. Nothing special, just some shots I took with Photo Booth on my Mac.

I don't think it even took five minutes for Jack to respond booking me for the shoot.

Besides my ego there was a very specific reason that I made the choice to submit my photos. The project Jack was working on was a well developed, sexy, fun dating and hook up site and app for HIV positive queer men. In the light of my personal and political work over the last year or so, and recalling the times when I failed to disclose and the shame, guilt, and holy Hell that created, I decided to put my own body image shit aside to be a part of this project.

A hook up site with financial backing that is aimed at eliminating stigma and supporting the HIV positive community...AND...here is the critical piece...holding up and recognizing that HIV positive people GET to be sexual beings, GET to be human, GET to be loved, GET to objects of desire, and GET to look in the mirror and feel wanted.

You see, it's a rare HIV positive person that doesn't get their diagnosis and spend a little time or the rest of their lives reduced to their disease. And...AND...unlike any other communicable and potential life threatening disease (HPV, Hepatitis C, and so many others) HIV is the ONLY one that is criminalized, and it is the only one where all of the public health strategies are aimed at one thing: stopping HIV positive people from having sex or putting so much fear and shame into positive folks that they have sex rarely and furtively. Well, we all know just how much that has worked out. All the scientific data has shown that FEAR is never an effective tool for prevention. And criminalizing a virus aka a basic identity of a person living with the virus is exactly the same as criminalizing religion, race, creed, etc. And before anyone out there opens their mouth to say, "HEY...but you can't infect someone with "blackness." Well, guess what...until 30 odd years ago, miscegenation laws existed EXACTLY because white folks viewed the mixing of the races as "infecting" white folks with blackness.

Yes, there is an obligation to disclose your HIV status. But an obligation to disclose does NOT absolve YOU from making a sexual choice that you later regret. Except the cases of rape or incest or maybe an intentionally needle stick, the transmission of HIV should play absolutely no factor in the criminal legal system. In fact, it is has been shown to keep people from getting tested.

Smooth move straight folks. Bigotry wins again.

But, again, I digress.

So, about a month later, I showed up to an apartment in Brooklyn where Jack asked me to strip down to my underwear (I wasn't wearing any), and then he said, "No problem," and pulled out a stack of maybe 60 pairs.

Fashion gays are out of control.

In the end, the photos turned out ABSOLUTELY amazing. And two days ago the site went live. On the first day 500 people signed up for it. This really will be a game changer. The first step to building power in any community is first claiming your own empowered space. Thank you to Jack for helping the community take it first steps at reclaiming our pozitively sexiness!

Much love. Check it out: www.vol++age.com.