I Hate the Term: Hard to Reach
it brings up all the wrong images/ when i hear the term: hard to reach, it makes me want to puke/ it purports that as a source it means you are speaking truth to power when, in fact, it’s sheer bullshit designed to keep people and racial minorities in their place/ put sexual minorities in there, too/ this garbage was invented by the CDC and the people who run HIV dot gov./ those of us who are hard to reach are hard to reach for a reason/ what the fuck is there to reach for/ we believe the people who run the institutions are fucking assholes, and we are correct because they are, indeed, flaming fucking assholes/ and once again, these are the people who get to smear you because they control the access to language/ the insinuation by the term – hard to reach – puts responsibility on the person who is being referred to/ the people and the systems around that person who is being referred to are not at fault in any way because they control the terms of the ideas that say the hard to reach are the guilty ones because they are irresponsible/ they did it to themselves/ they are hard to reach because they are stupid, bad people/ the prevailing authority gets to choose who is hard to reach and who is not/ because they hold the power/ hard to reach is about power, and who has it, and who does not/ it has nothing whatsofucking ever to do with who did what to whom and it describes virtually no one with HIV as heroic in this fucking struggle to survive/