In life, you can find yourself falling into situations that you don’t want to be in.

Sometimes, that situation is life itself.

We at Smash Street are using video to explore what this means and how it feels.

The medical infrastructure that constitutes facilitating surviving both sexual exploitation and HIV has become a tortuous way of life for boys who have been abused. Specifically, we find ourselves living lives that revolve around a consistent, ludicrous, and forced attachment to constant and unrelenting examinations, as if our lives were a fetish for a medical community focused on punishment, not treatment for HIV.

The idea that there are young people who would rather die than become so intensely connected to a system that feels not unlike being raped again is anathema to society which cannot afford the luxury of people who want to leave it.

Because everyone might.

Leaving it is a choice. Not a requirement.

The reality of unremitting pain is not an idea modern medicine wants to look at it as it has no answers.

In reality, it does have answers. Medical marijuana would be just one. But we live in medieval times. In reality, no one wants to pay for it. Looking away from the issue of pain effectively reduces the medical community’s viability. We do not want to be here because the medical nightmare our lives have become from the constant focus of demeaning retribution, pain, and shaming causes us to articulate these struggles in the form of constructing metaphors that tell the story of our lives. Show me your life is a tale told in the rectitude of a thousand voices and disguises.

For my part, I’m wearing a black surgical mask when speaking to the camera.

Identity is ephemeral. It is not a concrete wall. It is permeable and melts like snow.

Pain. Cost. Examinations. Focus. And limited access to medications is the reality that conflicts with the public relations image propagated by the HIV community that paints a one size fits all picture that is itself a rhetoric of hyperbole perpetuating the idea that HIV can be successfully managed by everyone infected when, in fact, HIV and the medical infrastructure employed to sustain a system of support that is anything but support is managing you. Not you it.

Life becomes untenable.

We add into this mix the ideas of hurt and love in a soundtrack that asks more questions than can be answered.

Love?

Hurt?

Life at any cost?

Maybe for you. But how do you get away with imposing both life and humiliation on the rest of us.

The medical community claims it humiliates no one.

Yet to humiliate is to objectify.

Everyone knows what the medical community is.

There is no appropriate support system built into the paradigm designed to assist people – referred to as the Hard To Reach – who bear the weight of rape, prostitution, and the kind of humiliation common to the sort of exploitation that sustains assaultive mechanisms that underpin injury, maltreatment, invasiveness, and abuse.

Abuse is rendered the very treatment it is supposed to be so effective at becoming the solution, not the resolve of a failure we refuse to look at.

We objectify the patient. We torture the patient. We humiliate the patient. We replace his way of life to sets of procedures that begin in waiting rooms that demean everyone. We throw shit at the wall of public health to see what sticks.

Nothing does.

The cure that is not a cure is worse than the disease that is both a plague and a disease. It remains an epidemic.

When Death is Best will simply illustrate this human puzzle through the lens of boys who live and struggle with the realities – not the PR lies that prop the illusions up by institutions resolved to punish, not validate, authenticate, or sustain, people living with HIV.

I wear the black surgical mask so you do not know who I am. I fear censure, threats, and defeat. I fear being rendered mute. They are always trying to take my voice away as it is.

I am not on your side.

I am on their side.

Let the video we are making now be their voice.

This is designed to facilitate discussion. Death is taboo to discuss which does not mean we will not discuss it because breaking taboos is what we do and we will discuss it as we discuss everything.

Death is best as it is defined by the human beings who would seek to go there.

Even if they are children.

https://tim-barrus.format.com/about