Simply because they look like some sort of pre-Stonewall SF character. And because the name of the company is athleticfucker.com and they have funny jazzy-coffee bar music on their pages. I’ve been reading a lot about HIV/GRIDS/AIDS in the really old but still beautifull written ‘The Coming Plague’ by Laurie Garrett. Amongst books like these, Garrett’s discusses the real life surprises around us and the horrors that can and do unfold. With 3.1 million AIDS deaths in 2005 according to UNAIDS, and more than 25 million since the discovery of the first signs of the epidemic in 1979-81, Garrett’s 1995 book seems an ever greater indictment of the horrific doctrine-led policies of the Reagan administration of the time, which continue to infect the policies of current US administrations. With health funding dependent on notadvocating condom use, UNAIDS predicts up to 6.6 million new HIV infections in 2005.
I randomly got to a site called positiveadam.co.uk which is a kind of diary of a boy my age who’s got HIV. …and he is a boy. He may be sleeping around, having unsafe sex and taking drugs but he’s still a boy. It’s scary and it’s dramatic and it’s like the movie Philadelphia but without the 80’s look, the loft-living and the lawyer types. It’s everyday AIDS and that’s the most terrifying consequence anyone could have envisaged AIDS becoming. The worst-case scenario multiplied by 100.
The guys who originally were diagnosed with GRIDS (‘Gay Related Immunodeficiency Syndrome’), were sleeping with upwards of 200 men a year. They didn’t know what they were catching, they just knew they were coming down with something. It turns out, it was terrible and they wouldn’t know it for a long time, because nobody cared. When I jump from reading Larry Kramer, to Garrett, to Stonewall’s Ben Summerskill, it can get a bit overwhelming. Some people just really don’t care and they still don’t get it.
When I put in my del.icio.us links news about how GUM clinics are underfunded and crowded with people, I’m not kidding. A load of my friends and I want to go to one where we live just because it’s a kind of good idea. We’re not taking part in risky behaviour but it always pays to be safe, right? Well if you want to go, you have to call them between 8:45 and 9AM in the morning to make an appointment, and they only make appointments up to two days in advance. Well, good luck getting a slot because it’s pretty much the busy-signal all the way through. If you’ve got a busy schedule and would like a guarantee you’ll be seen on Thursday rather than just risking it, you’re out of luck. It’s fantastic that they only have a two-day waiting list, but of course that’s only because they won’t make the list any longer.
It’s not encouraging fickle and scared people who don’t have the moral support of friends and partners to go and get checked out. They’ll wake up at 7AM, freak out and worry, forget to call and then it’s 9 o’clock and the moody woman on the end of the phone says you’re too late and you’ll have to try again some other time. I even went down to the clinic with my friend and all they’d do was give us a phone number. This is, of course, after we found the building because it wasn’t on any of the hospital maps we looked at, it wasn’t on the front gate of the building it was in! We had to ask two employees of the health service where the building was, and the only sign there was anything there was a tiny plaque right next to the door, with women smoking cigarettes blocking the doorway. But we’re there now, can they do anything like organize an appointment? No!
Do we have to ask for leaflets on Hep-B and contraceptives? Yes of course we do, because they’re not prepared to volunteer any information.
The health services were caught out by the onset and spread of HIV/GRIDS/AIDS whatever, but the thing is, 25 years later they’re still being caught off-guard. When HMO’s are arranged to treat old, dying white people they ignore the coming plague of preventable ‘lifestyle’ diseases that cost almost nothing to prevent but cost millions upon millions to treat.
Doctors can’t treat fat people, those with diabetes, or HIV positives because they’re too timid to shout at people and say ’stop eating that shit’ or ’stop fucking around’, you idiots! They always revert to a wait-and-see approach that is killing literally millions of people each year.
And it’s all in the name of being polite. So I say, go be an athleticfucker if you’re going to be one at all.
Popularity: 1% [?]
I wish I were an athletic fucker. Neither word is currently applicable.
I aspire, at one point or another, to be both of them.