The HIV+ T-shirt.
(As aired on All Things Considered, November 20, 2003)

 

ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Today the South African government announced the details of a plan to distribute free anti-retroviral medication to people with HIV. The task will be huge. Nearly five million South Africans have the virus, and the plan calls for a treatment center in every local health district within a year. One of the activist groups that lobbied for this program is the Treatment Action Campaign, the TAC. Commentator Joe Wright has been volunteering for the TAC working on educational materials, helping with some of their fundraising. He could not help but compare the TAC to the AIDS groups he's worked with in the US. For him, one of the most striking differences is the T-shirts the activists wear.

JOE WRIGHT:
In San Francisco, where I first really confronted AIDS, activists wore the ACT UP T-shirt that said, `Silence equals death.' The T-shirt was saying, `If you don't stand up for yourself, you'll be killed.' AIDS activists refused to be silent, and in the process, they transformed how the United States responded to AIDS. The Treatment Action Campaign, a South African AIDS activist group, has its own activist T-shirts. The backs of the shirts vary, announcing different events or campaigns. But in front, all the T-shirts are the same. In huge block capital letters, the T-shirts simply announce, `HIV positive.'

This summer, the Treatment Action Campaign, or TAC, held a national congress with delegates from around South Africa. Most of the TAC activists in attendance were wearing the `HIV positive' T-shirts as they debated about strategy, elected new officers and sang the songs of their struggle.

I asked people about the shirts and the reactions they get when they wear them. After all, the shirt isn't like the commonplace red ribbon that says, `I care about HIV.' The T-shirt practically shouts, `I have HIV.' And so that's the first question many people ask whoever is wearing the shirt: `Do you have HIV?' I found that many Treatment Action Campaign activists make a point of evading this question. Sometimes they disclose their own HIV status, but often not right away. By responding this way, I think TAC activists are saying, `It's not your HIV status that matters most, but your HIV politics.'

The idea of the shirt started five years ago as a bold response to the murder of an activist by her neighbors who didn't like that she'd disclosed her HIV-positive status publicly. And the T-shirt didn't start out being popular. Here's Sipho Mthathi, an activist who runs TAC's training program.

Ms. SIPHO MTHATHI: Before 1999, if you would walk in the street with that T-shirt, many people would insult you and they would call you names. But today, the minute people see you wearing the T-shirt, they run to you and they say, `Can we have the T-shirt? Where is the nearest support group? Where can we get treatment? Where can we get help?'

WRIGHT: In the last several years, the T-shirt has grown into something much more than a statement against stigma and discrimination. Here's Sipho again.

Ms. MTHATHI: The meaning of the T-shirts has now reached a stage where it says we don't accept that we don't get treatment. We don't accept that our governments don't listen to us. We don't accept that society treats us differently and undermines us. We're going to fight for our rights because as human beings we have rights, and if we don't fight for those rights, then what does our existence mean?

WRIGHT: The `HIV positive' T-shirt is a tool for starting conversations, for educating people, for locating allies. But I think the T-shirt's success comes from the blatant confrontation it creates. The TAC activists are brave enough for that confrontation in part because most of them are deeply angry. They are angry because people around them are dying for no good reason, and in many cases because they themselves may die soon for no good reason. And I've found that some of the angriest people I met were people with AIDS who were lucky to be alive because they somehow managed to get medicines even as their loved ones died for the lack of medicines. Exactly because only luck saved them, they are angry to be alive.

And so the activists who wear the`HIV positive' T-shirt force their government and their society to notice them. They refuse pity. They refuse to hide. They refuse denial. To wear the T-shirt is to fight back.

 

copyright 2003 joe wright
broadcast and transcript, copyright 2003 national public radio