05/12/2020
The BBC in the North West has come under sharp criticism from several leading HIV charities after an article on how the red ribbon had been used on a tree to raise what the BBC journalists described as “awareness” of Covid19 coronavirus. As the popular LGBTQ newswire Pink News noted, exactly how much more awareness of coronavirus is needed given that the world has been in a state of crisis due to it since last winter. It dominates the news channels and newspapers, and information and counterinformation on the unregulated internet. Indeed, since we are all now aware of coronavirus in great detail, perhaps it is time that the BBC followed Dame Esther Rantzen’s advice when she chided them for scaring people with their reportage and urged them to put on a package of light entertainment programmes for older people stuck at home in isolation. The two largest HIV charities, Terrence Higgins Trust and the National AIDS Trust both commented how disappointed they were that the BBC had chosen to misappropriate the red ribbon, known globally since 1990 as the symbol of HIV awareness and turn it into something else. Some people were even less pleased. One gay man took to twitter and argued that “the establishment couldn’t give a stuff when gay people were dying in the eighties… and now we’re all supposed to care that so called normal people are getting sick everywhere and change our lives”. But other members of the community responded with a much, much less confrontational stance, arguing that society can learn from the LGBTQ population’s response to HIV and that the stigma associated with Covid mirrors that shown in the early days of HIV. “We need the compassion and love that we showed for HIV” wrote one woman, “and we need to build community”. People wishing to do just this, might like to know that there are several online resources. Trans+ charity Gendered Intelligence has just published a brand new guide to living well in a time of Covid, with links to dozens of community groups, from online virtual nightclubs to rent unions. In addition, a list of mutual aid groups based on local democratic principles is listed on the website of the famous anarchist newspaper Freedom.
