As a HIV-positive person, I have watched the Charlie Sheen controversy unfold with sadness and horror
That a woman should be lionised for proposing to marry Sheen despite his status is absurd
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Your support makes all the difference.Paying upwards of $10m to keep a secret safe, Charlie Sheen went to extreme lengths to hide his HIV status from the public. The admission he made yesterday, under considerable duress, now releases him from a personal “prison”.
As someone who is also HIV positive – there are 35 million people living with HIV/Aids worldwide, the vast majority of whom are in sub-Saharan Africa – I am terrified by the frenzy with which this story has been received. Associated, still, with a sense of the extraordinary, HIV continues to summon fear and intrigue. Attitudes towards the virus have sadly changed little.
Not since the targeting of promiscuous gay men, intravenous drug-users, and sex-workers in the 1980s and 1990s have we seen such public opprobrium reserved for the HIV positive community. That Sheen was not so much pushed out of the HIV “closet”, as thrown, is a damning indictment on us all. After a cover feature in the National Enquirer outed him, without permission, the actor had little choice.
Perhaps the hardest part in coming out about my own diagnosis was overcoming this ascribed guilt. As someone who contracted the virus aged 20 in my first and only circumstance of unprotected sex, overcoming this sense of guilt was the hardest part in coming to grips with my own diagnosis.
In focusing on aspects of Sheen’s sex life we actively make life harder for people newly diagnosed: such reporting not only permits, but encourages, the idea of shaming in public those living with the virus.
Sadly, reporting of the Sheen story in Britain was hardly more conscientious than it was in America. Some headlines implicitly suggested long-term relationships between HIV negative and HIV positive men and women are something of an alien phenomenon.
The truth, however, is that all HIV positive people being treated with the right drugs have their viral load lowered to an undetectable level. This means HIV positive people can not only live with, or marry, negative partners, but that passing on the virus to another sexual partner becomes almost impossible once treatment is under way.
The fact that Sheen has known his status for four years suggests he is almost certainly receiving treatment. That a woman should be lionised in some headlines for proposing to marry Sheen “despite” his status is absurd.
And it goes to show that certain sections of the media must resist propagating the myth that HIV is a death sentence to both the people it affects, and those who come peripherally into contact with it. In a time in which HIV rates have never been higher globally, never has there been a more urgent time in which to talk more openly about sex, STIs and (most of all) HIV.
While treatment options have never been better, the reception of Sheen’s diagnosis clearly highlights how public and media perception simply haven’t kept pace with medical breakthroughs. The lengths to which Sheen went to buy the silence of those who knew of his diagnosis and the media witch-hunt which eventually forced his hand are shocking facts to face up to given this is 2015.
Worlds Aids Day is little over a fortnight away and exists so that we can show solidarity with those who live and have died from the virus. The appalling way in which the media has dealt with the revelation of Sheen’s HIV status demonstrates how much further we must go to encourage an open dialogue about HIV.