Sebastian’s suffering had come from AIDS—he had been on his deathbed in 1996 when the antiretroviral combinations had come into use and saved him. I had no worries about his being HIV-positive in the sense of contracting HIV—I had had sex with many men whom I knew for a fact were positive. But I couldn’t bear to face the prospect that he might die. Antiretroviral treatment had been introduced so recently that there was no certainty about how long people on it would live. I wanted an assurance of happiness, not the prospect of tragedy just down the line. Our mutual attraction and liking were so strong that our relationship continued in some form for years before turning into friendship, fortunately a close and enduring one.
The one wholly positive outcome of my emotional crisis, some months later, was that I got myself a puppy, something I had ached to do for years but hadn’t because of my peripatetic life. My puppy was a Portuguese Water Dog, and his black-and-white curls made him look more like a stuffed toy than a dog. Even at three months of age, he was so sweet-tempered that I felt blessed. I named him Lorca after my great idol Federico García Lorca—and I was soon convinced that the illustrious Lorca would have approved, as my Lorca had all the lovingness and decency that I imagined García Lorca had had in abundance. I finally had the child I knew I would never otherwise have.
EIGHTEEN
THINGS FALL APART
I was doing my morning yoga when I heard a plane roar past, sounding so close that I rushed up to the window, catching a glimpse of the massive jetliner as it seemed to almost touch the town houses on the far side of Grove Street and head, seemingly, for the Hudson River.
Shaken, I woke my father, who was visiting me at the time, saying that it seemed that a plane was crash-landing in the river. Rushing out minutes later to get to work at UNICEF, I met one of my neighbors, looking stunned, who told me that the television news was saying that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center’s twin towers in a terrorist attack.
At the crossing of Seventh Avenue, joining a crowd of strangely silent people staring downtown, I could see not one but two planes sticking out of the twin towers, the upper floors of the buildings wrapped in flames and smoke. For moments, I refused to believe what I was seeing, my mind telling me that surely a movie crew was simulating the events for a Towering Inferno sequel.
I called my father at home to tell him to stay put. I then caught a taxi to work, my instinctive response to horror being to work even harder at trying to do something useful. But the UN buildings were soon evacuated. I walked back home, staring at the figures shrouded in gray ash and dust who were streaming uptown.
For days, the sounds of ambulance and police sirens made the city sound like an elephant in mortal agony, trumpeting out its pain.
I grieved for a city I loved dearly—but also because the optimism I had momentarily felt for the new millennium had been wishful thinking. This millennium, like the one before, would be blood-soaked.
Things fell apart, everywhere.
George W. Bush’s Orwellian “war on terror” burgeoned. Afghanistan was invaded in Operation Enduring Freedom, Iraq was devastated in the search for “weapons of mass destruction,” Iran and North Korea were targeted as the “axis of evil.” The whole world was going to burn from Bush’s warmongering.
One evening, at the end of February 2002, my father called from his home in Kolkata, his voice so anguished that my heart thudded in anxiety.
“Son, I am ashamed to be a Hindu today,” he said—words that I had never imagined I would ever hear him say. “If I could change my surname, I would do so immediately. Have you seen what those scum are doing to Muslims in Gujarat, raping women, killing little children, butchering and torching people? This is not what my religion is!”
In that pogrom, an estimated two thousand Muslims were killed by Hindu supremacists, in several documented instances at the direction of BJP politicians and sympathizers in the police and bureaucracy. Thousands more were raped or brutally injured. An estimated 150,000 lost their homes and often every possession. The intervention of the state government, led by the BJP’s Narendra Modi (who was later to become India’s prime minister), could have ended the violence in hours, but both Modi and India’s prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee—often lauded as the BJP’s “moderate” face—stood by silently, inescapably suggesting their acquiescence and perhaps complicity.
Those atrocities marked my father’s loss of faith that his Hinduism was too complex to be enduringly politicized, with its embrace of philosophical ambiguities and absence of an all-defining holy book or centralized church. For me they marked the end of hopefulness. It was strange but telling that father and son—him a devout Hindu, me an agnostic who admired Hindu philosophy—were losing faith in their society’s future because of a party that claimed to represent the best interests of us Hindus, particularly of us elite, dominant castes who had always profited from venal appeals to “Hindu” orthodoxy or identity.
The world’s sexual outlaws were made scapegoats in those hate-filled times, along with drug users, Muslims, and other easy targets.
In many parts of the world, much of the tenuous recent progress in challenging our criminalization and stigma was a reaction to the devastation caused by the AIDS pandemic. Now reactionary changes in global AIDS policies, driven by the Bush administration, would do us grievous harm, especially in the low- and middle-income nations where the pandemic was at its worst.
In his January 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush described his newfound commitment to battling AIDS as a “work of mercy.” The pandemic was a baffling choice for Bush to adopt as his personal charitable cause. He had shown not a glimmer of compassion so far in his career for the million Americans living with HIV or the forty thousand newly infected every year, or the half million killed by this disease. In his years as governor of Texas, Bush had done nothing to address the state’s abidingly severe HIV problem. AIDS had not figured in his 2000 presidential election campaign: none of the populations among whom the United States’ epidemic was concentrated—gay men, injecting drug users, and African Americans—mattered to his electoral chances. In his first years as president, Bush considered closing the White House Office of National AIDS Policy.
He cared so little about the pandemic’s calamitous global toll that he failed to join world leaders at the 2001 UN General Assembly summit on AIDS, even though he had the shortest distance to travel. Instead, in the preparatory negotiations on the Declaration of Commitment, the global road map on AIDS that would be endorsed by leaders at the summit, his administration led some of the world’s most reactionary governments—including Egypt, Libya, and the Vatican delegation—in undermining the document’s emphasis on human rights.
They deleted every mention of sex workers and gays from the declaration, perpetuating the denial of the past and sabotaging vital prevention efforts for those populations. The Bush administration even scuppered UNAIDS’s efforts to have the assembled leaders endorse the International Guidelines on HIV/AIDS and Human Rights, killing the one opportunity to have that meticulously developed guidance adopted widely around the world. And just days after the UN Summit, USAID chief Andrew Natsios, opposing the summit’s pledge to fund lifesaving antiretroviral treatment for the tens of millions in poorer countries infected with HIV, proclaimed that Africans would not take the drugs in accordance with the prescribed schedule because they “don’t know what Western time is . . . They know morning, they know noon, they know evening, they know the darkness at night.”
Unsurprisingly, realpolitik led Bush to break with this callous record. The 2003 State of the Union address justified Bush’s impending invasion of Iraq as well as the launch of his worldwide “war on terror.” “As our nation moves troops and builds alliances to make our world safer, we must also remember our calling as a blessed country to make this world better,” Bush pronounced. The $15 billion in foreign assistance provided by the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) was to be the public relati
ons cover for his militarism.
Though the United States was now providing nearly twice as much to the global effort against AIDS as the rest of the world’s richest governments combined, those billions of dollars brought with them a legion of problems. The Bush administration concertedly began to use the funds to impose destructive policies on the governments of poorer countries, the United Nations, and grassroots and civil society groups. At precisely the point when Bush was insisting that the world accept his trumped-up claims about “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, those diktats were yet more proof of his schoolyard-bully approach to foreign relations.
One set of these demands focused on HIV prevention strategies. Bush’s AIDS team pushed to replace evidence-based programs with interventions inspired by puritanical Christian notions. (Another set of demands, eventually defeated, related to AIDS treatment, with the Bush administration putting American profits before saving lives by insisting that pricey branded drugs made by American pharmaceutical giants be used in all the countries aided by the United States—rather than the cheap, easier-to-use, and equally effective generic copies that were being used in the larger UN-led global effort.) The epidemic could be defeated by encouraging Africans to embrace “biblical values and sexual purity,” proclaimed Senator Jesse Helms.
“Abstinence-only” programs were what Helms and President Bush, both animated by Christian fervor, had in mind. (I was perennially astounded by the sanction given to Christian dogma, however obscurantist, in shaping US public policy matters, far dwarfing the role Hinduism is permitted in India and making a mockery of the United States’ claims to separate church and state.) Those programs maintained that heterosexual intercourse within marriage was the only acceptable form of sexual behavior and contraception and the only fail-safe means of preventing the spread of HIV. The truth, of course was that “abstinence-only” interventions were demonstrably ineffectual. Every domestic US abstinence-only effort ever evaluated had failed to reduce rates of teen pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases. Abstinence and fidelity were valuable options only when promoted within a comprehensive approach to safe-sex behaviors, alongside condoms, so individuals would know all the effective ways of protecting themselves from HIV and choose those best suited to them. Yet PEPFAR earmarked—and certainly wasted—a billion dollars for abstinence-only education abroad.
The damage was magnified because, astonishingly, the Bush team simultaneously attacked the efficacy of condoms in preventing HIV. The government’s most respected health bodies—such as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—were forced to censor their public advice on condoms. In contrast to their original, clear recommendation that condoms are “highly effective” against the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, they now said that condoms “cannot guarantee absolute protection,” a misrepresentation calculated to sow doubt and fear.
Groups worldwide receiving US government funding were barred from discussing condom use with young people and even most adults. It was permitted only “for those who practice high-risk behaviors,” defined as “prostitutes, sexually active discordant couples, substance abusers, and others.” (“Discordant” refers to a couple in which only one partner is HIV-positive.)
To deny people accurate information about the efficacy of condoms was reprehensible at any time, but in the age of AIDS it was criminal, arguably no different from culpable homicide. In much of sub-Saharan Africa, with often one in ten and in some places one in three adults already infected, every adolescent and adult faced a frighteningly high lifetime risk of contracting HIV. Tellingly, more than half of all new infections were occurring in young women and men by the time they reached their mid-twenties. They needed every bit of useful information about how best to navigate that terrible danger, not to be cruelly denied knowledge about the only effective and affordable barrier protection that existed.
And then, more concerted still, were the Bush AIDS team’s strategies on HIV prevention specifically among drug users and sex workers.
One of its first efforts was a global campaign to ban “needle exchange” programs, in which injecting drug users are given free sterile needles and syringes in exchange for used ones so that they do not share injecting equipment potentially infected with HIV or hepatitis. The World Health Organization, UNAIDS, and other leading health institutions ranked needle exchange as one of the most vital steps in preventing the spread of HIV through injecting drug use. Numerous Western European countries and Australia had contained epidemics of HIV among drug users by giving out millions of free syringes and needles and providing other elements of harm reduction.
In sharp contrast, the United States’ “war on drugs” approach of criminalizing drug addiction and repressive antidrug strategies meant that every administration since Ronald Reagan’s had banned the use of federal funds for domestic needle exchange programs. Now senior Bush officials summarily told UNAIDS, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), and other UN organizations to stop recommending needle exchange in their policies and remove all references to such efforts from their websites and public materials. It began to cut off funds to service organizations on that pretext. With half a million people worldwide contracting HIV every year from contaminated injecting drug equipment—the world’s fastest-growing HIV epidemics were fueled by intravenous drug use in Asia and the former Soviet Union—the Bush campaign had deadly human costs.
Sex work was the other, larger target. The United States Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Act of 2003, the legislation that created PEPFAR, portrayed sex work as indistinguishable from sex trafficking of women—a breathtakingly mala fide conflation between willing sex workers and actual victims but the basis by which it sought the “eradication of prostitution.” (Tellingly, this position was no different to that of the archaic and confused 1949 UN Suppression of the Traffic in Persons Convention—itself springing from the early 1900s hysteria over “White Slave Traffic”—that had demonstrably done grave harm to sex workers the world over. With very few exceptions, modern sex-trafficking laws have actually been framed to punish sex workers as well as other “undesirables,” particularly sexually active single women, mixed-race couples, people having pre- or extramarital relationships, and even consumers of pornography.) Henceforth, all recipients of US foreign assistance were required to sign a pledge “explicitly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking” or lose funding. The Bush administration could now openly dictate how organizations worked with sex workers around the globe.
Efforts that “promote or advocate the legalization or practice of prostitution and sex trafficking” were explicitly banned. That sweeping clause proscribed sex workers from mobilizing or advocating for the rights they felt they needed, at one stroke undoing the arduous years of efforts that had won sex workers some say in policies affecting them. It was another example of the age-old pattern of the powerful disempowering the weak while claiming to have their best interests—or the greater good and moral purity of society—at heart.
A signature on the antiprostitution pledge entitled US government officials to vet projects for compliance. Because the wording of the provisions was vague and open-ended, almost anything could be considered a violation, giving them unlimited room to deny or withdraw funding from groups that opposed or displeased them. Even the use of the terms “sex work” and “sex worker” could be taken to imply support for prostitution. The Bush administration wanted the old pejorative of “prostitutes” or preferably “trafficking victims.”
It was an astonishing turn of events: The pioneering grassroots groups that had long worked effectively with sex workers in India and elsewhere were suddenly being told by an alien government that they had to prove that they were not promoting prostitution. And to prove that, they had to accede to a pledge that deceitfully conflated willing sex work with sex trafficking—specifically defined under international law as criminal abuses involving abduction, violence, fraud, debt bondage, and coercion stemmin
g from traditional social status. That was a death knell for any rational discussion about sex work around the world.
But the assault on sex workers’ lives only intensified. Just some months after launching PEPFAR, Bush declared in an address to the UN General Assembly that, besides its “war on terror,” the United States would lead the world in a global war against sex trafficking. As with the language of PEPFAR’s prostitution gag rule, sex work was intentionally confused with both child prostitution and trafficking. Asserting that “hundreds of thousands of teenage girls, and others as young as five” are trafficked into the sex trade every year, Bush called the sex “industry” a “special evil” amounting to “modern-day slavery.”
Countries that failed a unilateral, annual US assessment of their performance on combating trafficking, chiefly sex trafficking and sex work, faced US-imposed sanctions, affecting US foreign assistance and even billions from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund—losses that could devastate vulnerable nations—under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) that had been pushed through by the Republican-controlled Congress in the last months of the Clinton administration and was now given destructive muscle by Bush. (In telling contrast, President Clinton had staunchly opposed the TVPA, arguing that unilateral sanctions imposing contentious US-defined norms were counter-productive and that lasting gains could be achieved through multilateral cooperation using the new antitrafficking treaty—the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children—that the US had spearheaded. Clinton’s refusal to conflate voluntary sex work and consensual migration for sex work with sex trafficking drew the fire of religious conservatives and prohibitionist feminists, who charged him and Hillary Rodham Clinton of being “pro-prostitution.”)
It was a barefaced bid to claw back some moral high ground after the catastrophic damage being done to the United States’ reputation by the Bush administration—among other things, news of the horrific abuses at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison was just emerging, with evidence that the US military and the CIA were using torture, physical and sexual abuse, rape, and sodomy against the men, women, and even children detained there, severe violations of the Geneva Conventions that amount to war crimes.
An Indefinite Sentence Page 26
