Philanthropy’s Failure
Suits give money to other suits. People who look like them, sound like them, and share the same value structures which are usually badly articulated and surrounded by shared social code. I work with boys who have HIV and do sex work. Like me.
Although, I am no boy. But they are. We call them the hard to reach. They are every color in the rainbow.
At the moment, we’re homeless.
We hope that can change in a couple of days because we will be doing some bondage scenes in Vegas where we get to tie up three or four rich white guys who will pay us. It is the only way we survive. You can’t call eating out of dumpsters survival. More like humiliation. You can’t even call bondage sex.
Perhaps it’s just entertainment for rich white men. I wouldn’t know. All I know is that HIV will kill you, but what won’t.
You people are missing the forest for the trees.
Question: Why are the hard to reach the hard to reach. Just ask the CDC. The CDC expects us to access its outreach through poster campaigns employing stick figures telling us we had better get tested. When was the last time you were viscerally inspired by a stick figure on a poster stuck on a wall in a clinic toilet.
A lot of this DOES have to do with access. Access is not an abstraction.
Access to housing.
Access to HIV meds.
Access to information.
Access to food.
You take all of this for granted. We do not take anything for granted.
No one wants to hear it. Rich people in foundation offices throw us back into the street like we are garbage to them. But we keep trying. I do not know why. There is no hope to be found anywhere in the Life.
The boys in our little group of 12 keep telling me (the adult) I have to try. So we might all stay together.
I try but my heart is not in it. I am tired of the hostility. I am tired of the stigma. There are days when I cannot move.
I cannot figure why we are the hard to reach when we have been screaming to be reached for a long time.
HARD TO REACH is just another name for THEY ARE NOT WORTH THE EFFORT.
We are worth the effort to keep alive.
You try eating out of dumpsters.
Check out the numbers of gay adolescents who sleep in shelters because their families have kicked them out.
You have failed us. All of you have failed us. The idea of family has itself failed and failed again.
As I write this, we’re on our way to Vegas.
How ironic that our peripheral support comes from men who want us to tie them up.
What we want is a home. Where we can stay together. Where we can stop doing sex work. Where we can breathe. Where there is food.
Hunger is cultural pathology.
But there is no help with any of this. We just take our meds when we can.
Why are we the hard to reach.
We are the hard to reach because that is the box you have caged us in.