#facesofhiv

[facesofedmonton]

Completed: 30 Faces of HIV Edmonton

This concludes our thirty faces of HIV Edmonton project to commemorate HIV Edmonton’s thirtieth anniversary. Thank you for following the series. Capturing these portraits and stories has been a moving experience for us, and we hope that it has touched you and added to your understanding of HIV. Please consider making a donation to HIV Edmonton to support the valuable work they do in our community. 

[facesofedmonton]

“Even my husband at the time, he came down with AIDS, and when he died in 1989, at his funeral, nobody would say that he had AIDS. We were just enraged. We fought to make it public so it would start being addressed. We had been together for seven years, and he was playing around, and for some reason I didn’t get it.”

“I was the minister of the Metropolitan Community Church and when the folks like Michael Phair got together and applied for a grant to do something about AIDS, they couldn’t receive the grant because they weren’t established as a not-for-profit organization, and they didn’t have charitable status and all the rest of this. I was a friend of Michael’s, so he asked if the church could take our cheque, and I said, ‘Yes.’ And then we paid whatever bills he submitted to us. So we enabled them to work for a year until they got their own not-for-profit. So yes, I was sort of in on the ground floor.”

“The one good thing that came from AIDS is that the community solidified and worked together to face this threat ... There are some of us old farts still kicking around from back them, but we probably lost about a generation. As a minister, I did funerals, memorial services, and certainly talked to the people who had HIV. I didn’t get to talk to many parents because so many parents, when they found out their kid had AIDS, they were also finding out that their kid was gay, so they were so in shock that most of them didn’t want to talk to a minister."

[facesofedmonton]

“Visual AIDS is an archive project that started, I think, twenty-six years ago. It was started pre-HIV medication so when a lot of artists were dying off. Artists and friends of artists in the New York area were concerned that their art practices would be forgotten, and all their work would just be thrown out. It started as a grassroots foundation and it grew. So now it’s the largest archive of work and acts as a hub. The work doesn’t always deal directly with HIV, but they deal with issues revolving around HIV such as vulnerability.”

"Lately I’ve been interested about the issue of criminalization surrounding HIV, specifically of non-disclosure of HIV where people have been charged, particularly in Edmonton actually—which has some of the most heinous criminal charges laid against people who were convicted of sexual assault, administering biological substances, or attempted murder for not telling their partners they have HIV and then having some kind of intimacy or sexual contact, regardless of transmissions. I don’t know why Edmonton has a gross history of that. It’s just ignorance.”

“The courts strengthened the idea that consent should be the ultimate protection so that people with HIV were seen as having negated consent for not disclosing, so that’s the genesis of where these problems became exponential. How do you undo this idea of consent if we’re medicating people in order that they can have autonomy to make their own decisions about consenting and telling people if they’re positive? Does that have to happen? It used to be the case that the courts in Canada would accept the idea that someone’s virological load or ability to transmit is negated because they’re on medication. So the courts went a step further and asked that people use condoms so the only two conditions they would accept without disclosure were if they met those two conditions—they had to have a negligible viral load and they have to had used a condom. Otherwise potentially the law has the ability to come down with these awful charges. It’s fascinating to me, and it also makes me very angry."

[facesofedmonton]

“I’ve worked at the Boyle Street Community Centre for twenty-one years, so I’ve actually watched a lot of people grow up here … There’s been some really great parts of that, but it’s kind of sad too because you don’t want people to be here forever. A lot of people have moved on, but some I’ve known since they were tiny kids.”

“I’m a registered nurse. I love cross-cultural nursing in general and street culture is one that I absolutely love. I think one of my biggest compliments was when one of our guys came up and asked me when I quit using, and I thought, ‘Cool, I look like I use drugs, that’s really great! It’s the hair probably. But I think it was more because I can integrate fairly easily now, which I really like. I always get upset by the idea that service providers have to have strict boundaries and you can’t let anyone know anything about you—this is a community, so we all need to get to know each other. The other thing is we have great staff. I love mentoring. I love their great ideas and excitement”

[facesofedmonton]

“Street works has always been about HIV prevention. It is a program that’s run by a council of agencies. HIV Edmonton has been the chair of that committee  for at least fifteen years, so we’ve always been closely tied. Here at Street Works, we target folks who are using injection drugs or who are involved in the street-based sex trade, particularly around HIV and Hepatitis C.”

“We’ve been very lucky to have great collaboration between places like HIV Edmonton, and the Northern Alberta clinic and Street Works and Boyle-Mccauley Health Centre. All of these organizations, we work together really well and I think we can wrap people who are feeling a little lost and marginalized, because of their HIV, in a big hug of trying to give people support and the right kinds of services, right. We don’t overlap on our services. We each are different, but we see the value in working together, I think that’s really key."

[facesofedmonton]

“I was thirty-six when I was diagnosed. I guess for me, what it’s meant is it delayed my life a lot. I thought I was going to be dead. I had little kids ... Now, my daughter has a law degree, she opened her own business, then she got elected in Calgary and now she’s the Minister of the Alberta Status of Women and Services. On World AIDS Day, my daughter had the opportunity to do a speech at the Alberta Legislature and she introduced me, her mother. It was a very touching speech. She almost started to cry because she said she remembers wondering if her mom was going to die. I know what she lived through. If her mom would have been diagnosed with breast cancer, she could have had the support of her teachers, friends and neighbours, but she had to worry about them finding out. I’m sure you’ve had friends come stay overnight. But if the parents found out that the mother was positive, do you think they’d ever come back again? I think people still don’t get that there are people out there who’ve lived this totally alone their whole life. They still don’t talk about it or tell people, they’re still afraid of it.”

[facesofedmonton]

“What’s one of the biggest challenges?”

“Money. Funding, like any non-profit. We’re not unique in that sense. There’s a growing expectation of what we could and should be doing, and so we’re always having to make tough choices about where to focus our energy. Funding levels have stayed relatively static over the last few years. It’s tough ... The younger generation is blasé about AIDS because it’s that generation that knows about AIDS through TV shows. They think that because the treatment is a pill, what’s the big deal—I can go and have fun."

[facesofedmonton]

“I’m Chair of the HIV Edmonton board. I’m gay so this is a cause that speaks to me because of my community. It’s a good organization that unfortunately has a lot of stigma with it still and so it needs people stepping up to help the organization drive forward its mission and its mandate. The organization has always been well run and people are passionate about the work they’re doing. From that perspective, it’s easy to engage with since the staff are passionate and they do really good work. It’s small but mighty.”