Here’s something for your amusement. It’s a British take on the coming-out process. There are five clips combined; the fourth one in particular is priceless.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fEdyBdx_Ls

I should own up to the fact that this video is here mostly for its entertainment value - it strikes me as very, very funny. It has only a rather remote connection to HIV stigma, although it’s there if you look for it. (It’s about turning homophobia upside-down - and homophobia is often a contributing factor to HIV stigma, right?) Anyway, what’s more to the point is that it’s an attention-grabber, something that in the world of blogging is deemed a very, very good thing. It lures people in, one of the challenges that HIV-related blogs invariably face. Which is why we’ve been discussing here  - see my last post - techniques that make blogs that address ***shudder*** HIV issues  more attractive to gay men in general and neg guys in particular.

Here’s one tried and true way to catch the eye of the average gay guy. Liberal use of pics like this . . .

Yet another way to attract readership is the judicious use of tags and keywords - we’re talking filthy, raunchy pig sex talk here. Just ask Nico.

Turning to more - ermmm - serious matters, and on the eve of the Gay Men’s Sexual Health Summit in Toronto, I wanted to say a few thank you’s. In particular, I want to acknowledge some of our fine allies who’ve included promoting this campaign in their outreach work. I hope to hell I’m not missing any, but here’s a list of those who I know have gone the extra mile.

AIDS Committee of Cambridge, Kitchener & Waterloo (ACCKWA)

Africans in Partnership Against AIDS

AIDS Committee of Durham

AIDS Committee of London

AIDS Committee of North Bay & Area

AIDS Committee of Ottawa

AIDS Committee of Simcoe County

AIDS Committee of Toronto (ACT)

AIDS Committee of York Region

AIDS Niagara

AIDS Thunder Bay

Access AIDS Network

Africans in Partnership Against AIDS

Asian Community AIDS Services

Black Coalition for AIDS Prevention

Centre Francophone de Toronto

HIV/AIDS Regional Services (Kingston)

Ottawa Public Health Department

Peel HIV/AIDS Network

Peterborough AIDS Resource Network (PARN)

Prisoners HIV/AIDS Support Action Network (PASAN)

Honestly, this has been a great group effort. Thanks guys and gals.

And for those attending the summit, I’ll be there on a panel talking about this very campaign. Say a polite hello - or talk filthy raunchy pig sex talk. Your choice.

I thought as a break from writing about stigma, I would write instead about the experience of blogging on this website.

Think doing forty-three posts about HIV stigma has been hard? Truth be told, it hasn’t. It’s no coincidence that the two of us who’ve been most prolific here - Brian and myself - are no strangers to the blogosphere; we both blog regularly elsewhere, in fact. I also know both of us think like bloggers, always tuned in to something - anything - to write about. It’s a way of life. Have that mindset and writer’s block seldom becomes an issue; things to write about just seems to appear. So it hasn’t been necessary to revert to this book (yet) . . .

Over the long haul, though, daily blogging can get challenging. Now I don’t exactly live in the fast lane, but rather a rural backwater I call Nanookville in my own blog. So that journal, with six-years of entries (2,132 in all) and a cadre of 526 readers, isn’t immune to descriptions of what I’ve had for lunch that day. Or pics of my pets; you do what you have to do. (For the morbidly curious, it’s on LiveJournal, and it’s here:  http://ruralrob.livejournal.com/  ) Of course, I’ve threatened to post pet pics on HIVstigma.com too, as a diversion from more heavy topics, but I’ve only reverted to that tactic once here. So far.  And no descriptions of my lunch here.  Yet!

It’s amazing, though, how many people don’t get blogging, don’t see the allure, don’t understand why anybody would want to share their thoughts, or even their life, in such a very public way. Mostly it’s because we know there are people out there - lots of them - who are curious about how we live our lives, even mine. So our stock in trade is life. We hide what we want to hide. We share what we want to share. Just like real life, really.

I’ll share something with you about the stigma website. You may not realize it, but some posts and responses to comments have been carefully crafted and pored over, sometimes after discussing the content with others working on the campaign. Once we even talked to a lawyer. Personally, I’ve always felt a sense of responsibility to say the right thing here. Having said that, it’s been a great chance for me to soapbox, to share my own take on life, love and HIV, hopefully not too obnoxiously. I’ve pulled relatively few punches, though, because that was our brief - to speak our mind, with few constraints. I hope I haven’t hurt anyone in the process - or lost too many friends.

Were we noticed? Nowadays, HIV-flavoured blogs are, of course, all over the net. Ours have been unique, I think, in their positioning as an integral part of a large-scale prevention campaign. That approach hasn’t been tried before, certainly not in Canada, or perhaps even the world. So that’s exciting. But if there’s a problem with using HIV-flavoured blogs as a prevention tool, it’s that, by and large, we’ve learned they attract mainly poz readers. It’s a generalization, I know, but neg guys aren’t always interested in reading about HIV. (I sure wasn’t when I was neg.). So I’m thinking that to attract a neg audience, or a poz audience that thinks they are neg, and to somehow engage them in talking about HIV, perhaps you have to come to the subject from a different angle. Like sex. Most everybody is interested in reading about sex, arent they? Hot monkey sex, even better. Maybe we need to get dirty.

Still, I think blogging about prevention issues has huge potential, and we’ve made a good start in demonstrating that. Now I can’t deny that I see things here we could have done better, but I’ll save those for the evaluation. Unless you want to give me feedback on that.

Anyway, enough of this blog induced navel-gazing. How about a pet pic instead? (I knew it would come to this.) This, my friends, is my beloved chocolate lab Dougall, and our dumb but much-loved basset hound, Dudley.

What did I have for lunch today, I hear you ask? Well it’s too early for lunch - ask me later. Last night’s dinner?  Roast turkey with mashed potatoes, gravy and broccoli. And chocolate cream pie.  Any more questions?

I got a spate of comments on my last entry as a result of people who read my other journal coming over here to take a gander at this site.  Good for them. My other journal is here, if you’re interested: http://ruralrob.livejournal.com/ It’s an almost daily chronicle of living in the country, sometimes touching on HIV stuff, but mostly not.   It’s my life.  And tons of photos I’ve taken in and around my little community of 700 people, located in the wilds of Eastern Ontario.

How rural am I? This is the view from my front porch .  .  .

I mention all this partly because it shows, I hope, that we are multidimensional, rather than just people living with HIV. I’m also (I think) the only rural guy on our panel of facilitators, and so I’m very conscious of whether this campaign will make sense to everyone, wherever they live My take is that the look of the site is urban and edgy, which is smart, given that Toronto is the centre of the gay universe, and where much of our target audience is surely located. But not all will live in big towns. So that reference to deciding what to wear to a Madonna concert won’t resonate as much here in the boondocks, where we are more concerned with what brand of rubber boots are best for winter - and fashion be damned

It’s my experience, though, that those of us gays who live away from large urban centres have many similarities with big city guys - and we sometimes share your recreational spaces - but we often lead quite different lives.   Some of us, I know, have isolation issues Toronto folks could only guess at, which fact impacts heavily on our ability or willingness to disclose our status to strangers, for example. Even outing oneself by going to a local AIDS Service Organization for help is a huge step for many. I know, I’ve volunteered at one such organization for years. So I understand these things, even though my own status is one of someone who is out about both my sexual orientation and my HIV status.

I’d love to hear from other folks who live away from large urban centres.   What’s your take on HIV and stigma?  Is it better where you live, or worse?  Harder to disclose, or not?   And do you feel this website speaks to you, or are you feeling left out? I’ll reply to all comments.

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