[Excerpt of posting by Nicholas Snow, msm-asia, 19 November 2008.]
Launching the "Get Tested, Live Longer" HIV/AIDS Awareness Campaign
New public awareness campaign proclaims, "The absolute latest fashion is to know your HIV status." In his role as a credentialed journalist covering Bangkok International Fashion Week as he does twice yearly, NotesFromThailand.com publisher Nicholas Snow is making a major fashion statement from the grandstands and between catwalk shows, mingling with people who have known him or of him for years, with the debut of his new t-shirt design marking the launch of the "Get Tested, Live Longer" HIV/AIDS Awareness Campaign. Beginning with the first day of BIFW (Nov. 20, 2008) Snow is wearing his design on a black T-shirt.
Snow believes it is particularly poignant to launch the "Get Tested, Live Longer" campaign at one of Asia's leading fashion events presented by an industry chocked full of gay and bisexual men, as well as the men and women who love them. Collectively, the industry has a powerful influence on culture as a whole, so the ripple effect of such a statement could be enormous. In addition, Snow's project has been inspired by the Thai fashion industry, in particular by a recent t-shirt the local fashion guild designed to promote safer sex. Snow is coming out as an HIV positive person in the midst of this crowd to be of service to all of them.
The graphic message begins with "You now know you know someone who is HIV Positive." Snow is making such a dramatic statement because of the invisibility of openly-HIV positive people in Asia and the need for people to know that they know people who are, in fact, HIV positive. This serves the two-fold purpose of getting people to take HIV seriously enough to learn their HIV status, and to challenge the social and cultural stigmas facing people living with HIV/AIDS. Unfortunately, the majority of people in Asia who are HIV positive first learn of their status when they become ill. A person who learns their HIV positive status early after infection has the ability to then monitor with their health care providers CD-4 (T-cells) and viral load counts so they may begin a regime of medications when indicated, thereby dramatically increasing their chances of living a much longer, much healthier life.
Snow also believes that anyone concerned enough about their HIV status to seek out a test who subsequently learns they are in fact HIV negative can be educated and counseled as part of the process of empowering them to remain HIV negative. After decades of adhering to safer sex practices, Snow became HIV positive in August of 2007 because he failed to use a condom, not for good reasons, but for "human reasons" he says, including the fact that he was depressed and seeking comfort in sex; was with a partner who stated and believed he was HIV negative; had a false sense of security about remaining negative since he had been negative for so long as a sexually active adult; and finally, was unaware that the rate of HIV infection among men who have sex with men in Bangkok exceeds 30%.
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