No one has responded to that post.

Are you all dead?

Are you all asleep?

Look -- there's something important going on here.

We who live in America and the EU understand the connection among gay males between the suppression of MANHOOD and HIV.

We understand that the suppression of MANHOOD leads to effeminacy which leads to anal which leads to HIV infection.

But in the Washington Post article, we saw something new, and for the first time:

And that's how the suppression of a MANHOOD ritual among African MEN, a ritual which included male circumcision, resulted in massive HIV infection in Africa and the deaths of millions of people.

That's millions.

Here, I'll spell it out:

M-I-L-L-I-O-N-S

How many millions?

Do any of you know?

1 million?

2 million?

5?

10?

20?

30?

NO.

31,938,764

Why is no one commenting about that?

Does NO ONE else see the connection?

NO ONE?????????

Because it's really important.

What those few indigenous African leaders, like Museveni, who've tried to develop uniquely African responses to AIDS, have said to the world is that first the Europeans came in and fucked Africa and Africans over through exploitation of the land and the resources and the people and through denigration of African culture;

and now they're coming in again and fucking Africans over with condoms.

Here's the deal: There would have been NO GENERALIZED EPIDEMIC in Africa if those Southern African tribes had been allowed to continue to practice MC in those MANHOOD rituals.

Why am I the only one picking up on this?

Is it because you think MC (MC = male circumcision) is bad?

It's not bad.

It's an ancient MAN2MAN practice.

MALE Circumcision.

MEN circumcising MEN.

It's not bad.

You know who doesn't like MC?

Analists.

GAY MALE CULTURE doesn't like MC.

That's another clue that MC is NOT BAD.

See, what's going on right now is that evangelicals are flooding back into Africa to take care of all those poor suffering African souls.

WHO WOULDN'T BE SUFFERING IF THE MOTHER FUCKING EVANGELICALS HAD STAYED THE FUCK OUT OF THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Again, why am I the only one who's making this connection?

Why?

I know there are a lot of guys in here of African descent.

How many Africans died as the result of the slave trade?

And how many Africans have died as the result of the suppression of MC?

If the Washington Post is correct -- and it is correct, because I just queried one of the lead researchers, the guy who won't let me use his name, but can you blame him given that UNAIDS has known about MC since 1989 and didn't endorse it until December of 2006 --

and he told me that MC used to be widespread in Southern Africa just as it is to this day in the rest of Africa --

but that missionaries put a stop to it.

That being the case, AIDS in Africa is another instance of the mass murder of Africans by Europeans.

It's not a natural disaster.

It's a man-made disaster.

Missionary-made.

It was made by people who were uncomfortable with sexuality, with male sexuality, with Men, and with an African ritual in which Black teenagers were circumcised and thus came of sexual age.

Why were they circumcised?

So that they could have sex safely.

In The Politics of MC, I quoted from Dr Green's paper in which he in turn quoted traditional healers who understood that lack of circumcision was a problem.

How great a problem?

We know that HIV originated in Africa.

Suppose that HIV has been floating around Africa for centuries.

And that MC was an indigenous African response.

Just suppose.

Let's come back to the question of MANHOOD.

No doubt many of you think that in America we're talking about "gay men" and in Africa we're talking about "straight men" so we're talking about two different groups.

NO.

We're talking about MEN.

And we know that when you deprive MEN of their MANHOOD there are problems.

Here's today's lead story from 365Gay dot com:

Sydney Gays Celebrate Mardi Gras

by 365Gay dot com Newscenter Staff

Posted: March 3, 2007 - 4:00 pm ET

(Sydney, Australia) Actor Rupert Everett and 250 men dressed as pop singer Kylie Minogue were among 8,000 revelers who marched through Sydney late Saturday for the 29th annual Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.

The yearly parade began as a street demonstration in 1978, but has since morphed into one of the city's biggest outdoor parties, attracting thousands of spectators from around the world.

New South Wales state police said about 350,000 people packed the sidewalks of Oxford street -- the center of Sydney's gay scene -- to catch a glimpse of the colorful floats bearing messages both political and playful.

One of the largest displays featured some 250 Minogue impersonators dubbed the "Impossible Princesses," while another float titled the Unkultured Klub of Karma Kleaners honored the former Culture Club band's lead singer, Boy George.

...

250 men dressed as Kylie Minogue.

This is Kylie Minogue:

And a float honoring Boy George:

Australia, like Africa, has a RAGING AIDS epidemic.

Indeed, it's been compared EXPLICITLY to Africa's.

Except that Australia's is among gay men.

This is from a post I made on World AIDS Day 2006:

HIV infection rate rises to epidemic levels in gay community

November 26, 2006

SYDNEY'S gay community has an infection rate of HIV that is similar to that of countries in Africa.

As organisations prepare to mark the 25th anniversary of recognising human immunodeficiency virus, they warned that infection rates were on a steady increase in Australia.

Garrett Prestage, a lecturer at the National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research, said that, in the inner-city area, 10 to 18 per cent of the gay population was HIV infected.

In Lesotho in Africa, the rate was 20 per cent last year, UN figures show.

Last year in NSW [New South Wales], 954 people were diagnosed with HIV and nearly three-quarters of them caught the disease through homosexual contact. By comparison only 109 people in NSW were reported to have had the mumps last year.

"For gay men, HIV is a massive epidemic," Dr Prestage said. "If you are a gay man living in central Sydney, you are living with rates of HIV that are equivalent to sub-Saharan Africa."

...

Actually, they're higher than sub-Saharan Africa's -- but that's a fine point.

And here's a little news report from a couple weeks ago:

HIV rate surges in Cairns

yahoo via ABC news Australia

Tuesday February 20, 2007

There has been a spate of new HIV infections in Cairns in far north Queensland.

Queensland Health figures show 13 men have been diagnosed with the illness in the past two months, the same number usually recorded over a year in the far north.

Dr Darren Russell from the Cairns Sexual Health Service says the increase is disturbing.

"This is very unusual," he said.

"We would normally only have this number over a whole year.

"Most of these cases have in fact been really new infections. That is, these men have acquired it in the last 12 months.

"So we're having a little epidemic of HIV and the cause is unprotected sex."

Is there a connection between 250 men dressed as Kylie Minogue in Sydney and a surge in AIDS in Cairns?

Oh yeah.

How many men do you think will get infected during Sydney Mardi Gras?

And how many of the men dressed as Kylie Minogue will be or already are infected?

So: in the West, MEN are deprived of MANHOOD and get AIDS.

In Africa, MEN are deprived of MANHOOD and get AIDS.

Pay attention.

Figure it out.

Stop thinking about "gay" and "straight."

Start thinking about MEN.

You're a MAN.

What happens to you affects MEN in Africa.

What happens to MEN in Africa affects you.

And when I say Pay Attention I mean it.

You don't donate, you don't post, you're DEAD.

My lover wanted to LIVE.

He was active and engaged with the world.

You're nothing.

What's the point to being alive and being nothing?

None.

FIGHT BACK

OR DIE.

Bill Weintraub

© All material Copyright 2007 by Bill Weintraub. All rights reserved.

Bill Weintraub

Re: The Suppression of Manhood and the Rise of AIDS

3-5-2007

Here are three follow-up articles for those interested.

The first is Drs Halperin and Bailey's 1999 article in the Lancet pleading with their colleagues to pay attention to the already existing studies on MC -- and to do more.

The second is an op-ed Dr Halperin wrote for the SF Chron in 2000 which talks about, among other things, MC, missionaries, and Southern Africa.

And the third is a profile of Dr Halperin which was just released by the Harvard School of Public Health.

It details his struggle to get recognition of the role of MC in preventing HIV infection.

Here's an excerpt:

The association between uncircumcised men and increased HIV risk was documented in 1989 by a team led by William Cameron of the University of Ottawa. In a prospective study in the Lancet, the researchers showed that uncircumcised men in Kenya faced more than eight times the risk for HIV-1 infection than their circumcised counterparts.

Ten years after that study, Halperin and Bailey published their own paper in the Lancet. In their 1999 piece, they reviewed the decade of research that had ensued since the Cameron paper. Four out of six additional prospective studies had also shown significant relative risks for HIV infection among uncircumcised men. Twenty-seven of 38 cross-sectional studies found a significant association between lack of circumcision and HIV infection.

The pair highlighted the incredible differences of HIV infection rates within the same parts of the world, drawing attention to low rates in most of west Africa, as well as in the Philippines, Bangladesh, and Indonesia, compared to much higher rates in parts of east and southern Africa and in Thailand, India, and Cambodia. Halperin and Bailey argued that differences in surveillance and prevention efforts alone could not explain the patterns. In fact, they noted that nearly all men in the areas where there were low HIV infection rates had been circumcised, usually by puberty, whereas most men in the areas with high rates had not been circumcised.

And they described the research that presented a biological explanation for why circumcision decreases HIV risk during heterosexual sex. Circumcision seems to protect men because the underside of the foreskin "is like an Achilles heel for HIV infection in men,'' said Halperin. "The foreskin is vulnerable to tearing and bleeding during sex. And the inner surface of the foreskin is loaded with Langerhans, macrophage, and CD4 cells, which are targets of HIV.'' The uptake of HIV in those immune cells, due mainly to the lack of a hardened, or keratinized, skin coating over the inner foreskin mucosa, is about nine times greater than in the mucosa of the female cervix, which had long been thought to be the most vulnerable part of the body of cells to HIV infection, he said.

Halperin and a small group of like-minded researchers soldiered on. From 2001 to 2005, Halperin served as the senior Prevention Advisor for the Office of HIV/AIDS at USAID. One of his duties involved developing and overseeing pilot programs in Zambia, Haiti, and South Africa that introduced male reproductive health services, including the availability of safe adult male circumcision.

His colleague, Robert Bailey, with whom Halperin wrote the Lancet piece, went on to lead a randomized, controlled trial in Kenya investigating the association between circumcision and HIV risk. It was this trial, along with one conducted in Uganda by a different research team, that was halted in December 2006 because the results so strongly suggested that circumcision halves a man's risk of contracting HIV from a woman. Just last week, the Lancet published the final data from the Kenya and Uganda studies, which now suggest the reduction in risk could be as high as 65 percent.

Now, another study in Uganda funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is looking at whether male circumcision directly reduces transmission rates among women. In any case, noted Halperin, if fewer men are infected, women would benefit indirectly.

The risk reduction provided by circumcision appears as good, if not better, than what may be expected from a still nonexistent HIV vaccine. "This virus is incredibly challenging for the development of a vaccine,'' said Halperin. "It mutates very quickly. It is very hard to pin down. The first vaccine trials have not been very promising so far, and most experts on vaccines don't believe we will find anything close to a 100 percent vaccine, even if we get one. It's not that kind of vaccine. If we get one, it will probably be only partly effective. Or it may only slow the progression of HIV to AIDS. And even the most optimistic researchers say we may not have one of those ready for use for another 10 or 20 years, at the earliest."

Halperin continues to conduct and analyze research on global sexual behavior, in addition to investigating and publishing on the extensive data regarding male circumcision, including the real-world programmatic implications of that evidence. For several years, he has explored the use of the so-called "ABC" approach to HIV prevention (Abstinence, Be faithful/reduce partners, or use Condoms consistently). He is particularly focused on researching the "B" part of the approach, trying to determine the role that multiple and concurrent sexual partnerships play in HIV transmission, especially in high-prevalence regions of Africa.

...

So:

In 1989 (!!!) Cameron found that MC protected by a factor of eight: "uncircumcised men in Kenya faced more than eight times the risk for HIV-1 infection than their circumcised counterparts."

In 2003, a mere 14 years later, the Reynolds study in India found that "Uncircumcised men have an eight fold higher risk of becoming infected with HIV compared to circumcised men..."

But that still wasn't enough for AIDS Inc and its lackeys at UNAIDS.

Piot and his buds dragged their feet for three more years and two months, specifically until 12/19/2006, before finally agreeing that MC was an important intervention and that "AIDS-stricken Southern African nations should develop a policy of mass male circumcision to fight the disease."

So: 1989 was the year that MC was first brought, by a researcher named Cameron, to the attention of the AIDS Prevention Establishment, and although Cameron's findings were right on the money, MC was ignored.

In favor of condoms.

Which was an intervention developed for use with gay men in the US and EU.

In terms of human suffering, misery, and death, how important is the year 1989?

It's important.

If you go to this page on avert dot org (disclaimer: I don't like avert dot org, but I think their stats in this instance are fine) and scroll down, you'll find a chart detailing deaths per year in South Africa starting in 1997.

The people who died in 1997 probably got infected ca 1989 - 1991.

316,000 people died in 97.

365,000 died in 98.

380,000 in 99.

Could those lives have been saved?

YES.

A program of mass male circumcision would have saved minimally 65% of those lives.

In 1999 alone that would have been 247,000 people who did NOT die.

Let's forget Cameron and 1989 for a moment.

How many people died in Africa between 1999 -- when Halperin and Bailey made their appeal in the Lancet -- and 2006?

About 2,000,000 per year.

About 14,000,000 total.

In 2004, 567,488 people died in South Africa alone.

That's in one year.

That's more people than have died in America (estimated at 550,394) over the entire 25+ years of the epidemic.

Why did all those millions die?

Because in the 19th century European missionaries, heterosexualized European missionaries, went into Southern Africa and, protected by European military might, disrupted and destroyed MANHOOD rituals which included male circumcision.

That's what happened.

The Havard School of Public Health:

[Halperin and Bailey] highlighted the incredible differences of HIV infection rates within the same parts of the world, drawing attention to low rates in most of west Africa, as well as in the Philippines, Bangladesh, and Indonesia, compared to much higher rates in parts of east and southern Africa and in Thailand, India, and Cambodia. Halperin and Bailey argued that differences in surveillance and prevention efforts alone could not explain the patterns. In fact, they noted that nearly all men in the areas where there were low HIV infection rates had been circumcised, usually by puberty, whereas most men in the areas with high rates had not been circumcised.

That's it.

Circumcision is the key, and in Southern Africa, heterosexualized European missionaries destroyed MANHOOD rituals which had kept African MEN and WOMEN free of HIV for -- years, decades, centuries???

We'll never know.

I think HIV traveled from Africa to Belgium to America, where it took off among gay men, and was then re-introduced to Africa.

But that doesn't matter.

Truth is, once African men had been stripped of the protection afforded by MC, they and their women and children were just the walking dead.

So: MANHOOD MATTERS.

Heterosexualization in the West ghettoized and effeminized men who were strongly same-sex attracted, and left them vulnerable to HIV.

Heterosexualization in the form of Western missionaries deprived African men of their age-old cultural protections against STD, and left them vulnerable to HIV.

And tens of millions died.

And more will die.

One more thing:

Does anyone remember Haiti?

I daresay not.

But in the early years of the epidemic here in America, the only two groups affected were "homosexuals" and Haitians.

There was a joke that made the rounds of the very closeted -- and racist -- gay male community:

What's the hardest part of being diagnosed with AIDS?

Telling your family that you're Haitian.

Why did those Haitians have AIDS?

Lack of MC.

Modern-day Haitians are the descendants of Africans who were brought to Hispaniola as slaves.

You can be sure that their ancestors, who came from west Africa, Angola, etc, were circumcised.

But that was taken from them.

Today, most Haitians, who are desperately poor, are not circumcised -- though they would like to be.

Middle-class Haitians are.

The poor aren't.

And they continue to die -- of AIDS.

Bill Weintraub

© All material Copyright 2007 by Bill Weintraub. All rights reserved.