“HAPPENING NOW! VOCAL leaders Van and Wayne are getting arrested outside Speaker Paul Ryan’s office in Washington DC. His dangerous plan to cut Medicaid and Medicare will be a nightmare for low-income ppl living with HIV.
On #WorldAIDSDay we are louder & more committed than ever to fighting for our right to lifesaving, affordable health care!”
Can we talk about the guy in the gloves and about how police usually interact with LGBT and HIV+ protestors? Because there’s a long history of police (unnecessarily) wearing gloves to arrest certain kinds of demonstrators, and that action carries some strong messages.
During a demonstration mounted by ACT UP calling upon the American Medical Association to cake a more pro-active approach to the AIDS crisis, demonstrators were accompanied by Chicago police officers wearing rubber gloves. In part, the gloves were component of police procedure; the officers did not bring their own gloves, but were provided with gloves by the department, ostensibly to protect them from infection. The demonstrators, however, perceived a clear ideological message in this procedure, maintaining that the police (both the department as an institution and the individual officers who donned gloves) considered all the protesters to be “diseased.” The demonstrators also asserted that the police monitoring the protest displayed homophobia Von instance, many activists reported that police officers made anti-gay comments as they accompanied the march). The gloves, in the activists’ eyes, therefore symbolized both the paranoia regarding people with AIDS (the myth that one could be infected simply by touching them) and also homophobia (the mainstream social, religion, and pseudoscientific constructions of my people as “sick” that predated the AIDS crisis).
Literally anyone could be HIV+ positive. You can’t tell from looking at them. Why don’t police always wear gloves if they think they’re at risk of contracting HIV simply from handcuffing someone?
Stigma around HIV/AIDS leads to the dehumanizing treatment of people living with HIV and of people in high-risk communities. These stigmas inspire policies that neglect HIV/AIDS treatments for vulnerable populations. We’ll need to speak out and act up more than ever in the next four years if we don’t want to see the history of Reagan repeat itself under Trump.
