SEARCHING FOR A BREAKTHROUGH, CONTINUED FROM PG. 06
presents
PofE T the
WEEK
Photo credit – Angie Pulice
CHANCE Chance is the kind of dog that defies the stereotypes we have of “older” dogs. Chance is 10-years-young and has energy and a bounce in his step. He loves to play fetch with soft, squeak toys. He’s a superstar in our play groups here at the shelter. Chance has let us know that he’d prefer an adult-only home. Chance is a spunky little guy who would make a wonderful companion.
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hosted by Pitt, is designed to take people who are already part of organizations that are connected to LGBT populations in their home countries, so they can take advantage of that social infrastructure to conduct research. “We get applications every year from people who say, ‘There’s a price on my head, and if you don’t pick me I might die,’” Stall explains. “One of the commonalities of the global HIV epidemic is that it’s a very rare country indeed where gay men are not doing worse than the background population. What we’re hoping, of course, is that the scholars we’re training turn into leaders.” But before they could begin breaking down the stigma that contributes to one of the world’s worst public-health crises, they had to first escape it themselves. ERIC CASTELLANOS remembers with a disarming smile the period in her life when she contracted HIV. She was 20 years old, just a couple years after she’d fled the small, heavily Catholic Belizean town she grew up in, a place where no one seemed to understand — let alone accept — her gender identity. (Though Castellanos sometimes identifies as a man, she says she is comfortable with female pronouns for this story.) She’d hitchhiked to Mexico City and fallen for a man whom she’d met while volunteering at a hospice care center. But they were growing apart, partly because he was HIV-positive and Castellanos wasn’t. “This was my first love,” Castellanos recalls, “he was so fearful of infecting [me] with HIV.” Castellanos gave him an ultimatum: “We either have to go our own way or I have to get HIV as well.” He eventually agreed to start having unprotected sex, and eight months later, on Dec. 24, 1995, she tested positive. “It was a conscious act on my part to be HIV-positive,” she says. “Love makes you do crazy things.” It’s not a story she often shares — “I don’t want to encourage anyone to be HIV-positive” — but she says it helps explain how in the seven years since her partner died, she became one of the most prominent activists in Belize and the first to talk openly about her sexuality and HIV status in the media. Castellanos hadn’t planned to leave Mexico. She had mostly bad memories of a childhood in Belize, where her gender nonconformity lead her parents to insist on testosterone injections and took her to a clinic that promised to “cure” her homosexuality. But she’d lost the health-
PITTSBURGH CITY PAPER 02.11/02.18.2015
care she’d gotten through her partner and had little choice. When she arrived, she began noticing how marginalized the LGBT community was compared with Mexico. There was nothing like the gay clubs she’d experienced there, and “The [HIV] medication I was taking in Mexico didn’t even exist in Belize.” The stigma associated with HIV-positive people was immense. “The image people had of HIV was someone in bed dying, which contributed so much to discrimination,” Castellanos says. Belize has the highest rate of HIV in Central America, with a prevalence rate of 2.3 percent, and the rate is thought to be much higher among gay and transgender populations, according to amfAR. Castellanos began devoting herself to reducing the stigma of HIV, laying the groundwork for an organization that would advocate on behalf of the positive population. She started work on a degree in social work (still in progress) and eventually founded the Collaborative Network for Persons Living with HIV in Belize (CNET+). Though it started mainly as a support group, over the past four years the organization has grown to include everything from condom distribution to a text-message system to remind people to take their medications. And now, armed with some of the research methods she’s learning at Pitt, she’s hoping to tap back into CNET+ and survey hundreds of people to better understand what the barriers are to HIV testing in Belize. “It will give us so many tools to work from and design projects to work with the population and make recommendations to the government,” she says. Still, Castellanos isn’t expecting progress to be easy. Since she’s appeared in Belizean media as an advocate for HIVpositive people, she’s received numerous death threats. She doesn’t walk the streets alone in Belize — and after pressure from the U.S. embassy, Belizean authorities offer some security. “As much as I love my country and am so committed to change things there, in the days I’ve been here, I’ve had dreams of never going back,” she says.
“If two men are together and they show romantic affection in public, no one actually gives it a second glance,” Shery says of his experience growing up in Pakistan, a culture he describes as “homo-affectionate.” “On that front, it’s a little more comfortable to live there.” But while they can be affectionate, they can’t adopt children, hold property together or risk telling their parents about their relationship. (Shery asked that his last name not be used.) And since it’s expected that “children [take] care of you when you get old,” Shery says, “there are no old-age homes. It is scary if you’re by yourself. There is no safety structure.” One of the four international scholars at Pitt, Shery has long struggled to reconcile his sexual identity with Islam, his parents and, most of all, himself. “For 19 years I thought I was the only gay man in Pakistan. I didn’t have any friends who were gay. I was a little effeminate; I was harassed in my school a lot — even in the college and university, I segregated myself,” the 31-yearold recalls. Still, Shery landed a coveted wellpaying job as an engineer at Siemens/Nokia in Pakistan after college — hating almost every moment of it. He’d begun to meet gay people in Pakistan; his first exposure came at 19, when he discovered online forums where men would arrange to have sex with other men. “I wasn’t comfortable having sex back then,” he says, but it was a relief that other people had the same feelings. After five years as an engineer, he quit, told his parents he got fired, and considered showing up at a meeting for Naz Health Alliance, an organization that provides resources to men who have sex with men, and to transgender people. Even though he worried there would be photos of him at the meeting, and that he’d be publicly outed, he attended. The organization was just getting off the ground in 2007 as the AIDS crisis in Pakistan intensified. Between 2005 and 2013, the number of people suffering AIDS-related deaths in Pakistan increased fourfold — just one of the problems Naz sought to address. The organization had enough funding to open six community centers in five cities across Pakistan. It offers snacks
“AS MUCH AS I LOVE MY COUNTRY, I’VE HAD DREAMS OF NEVER GOING BACK.”
IN A COUNTRY where homosexual acts are
outlawed — and, in some cases, punishable by death — Shery isn’t afraid to walk in public holding his boyfriend’s hand.
CONTINUES ON PG. 10