PREP MANIFESTO
Author: SPIT! (Sodomites, Perverts, Inverts Together!) – Carlos Motta, John Arthur Peetz, Carlos Maria Romero
Year: 2017
- Because AIDS is not over
- Because AIDS is a crisis erroneously perceived as ‘controlled’ in the developed world
- Because AIDS has redefined the boundaries between class and race, rich and poor, white and brown
- Because AIDS has redefined the boundaries between north and south, urban and rural, healthy and ill
- Because the PrEP regime has significantly impacted the political, social, and cultural bedrock of HIV/AIDS
- Because AIDS and PrEP treatments have engendered pharmaceutical greed in the form of access to treatment
- Because PrEP is a deal with the devil of capitalism and the devil likes to barter with the privileged and affluent first
- Because the price of PrEP is not dictated by the people most affected by the disease
- Because the ability to end an epidemic that decimated a generation has existed but has been consciously withheld
- Because it is inhumane to kill for profit
- Because PrEP is the product of the years of labour of AIDS activism
- Because PrEP embodies at once the liberatory sexual ethos of the pre-AIDS crisis while retaining HIV/AIDS stigmatisation of the 80s, 90s and 2000s
- Because of how PrEP is situated in regards to the criminalisation of HIV status non-disclosure
- Because PrEP may reiterate the stigmatisation of disability
- Because PrEP has taken the anxiety of death and mortality out of some of our sex lives
- Because PrEP is the saviour of the cocksucker
- Because AIDS discourses has shaped the ethics of sexuality
- Because PrEP is the bridge between the serodiscordant, the infected and the uninfected, the positive and the negative
- Because PrEP gave us negative statuses, and AIDS medications gave us viral load undetectability
- Because gay desire shouldn’t be confined by moralism, religion, stigma, and shame
- Because we should fuck whoever and however many people we want
- Because we want to bareback and get loaded, seeded, and bred without being shamed
- Because our desire is the backbone of our communities
- Because PrEP has changed digital cruising culture
- Because PrEP has altered the representation of sexual identities
- Because PrEP has shifted the negotiation of sexual encounters
- Because PrEP has affected the disclosure of status
- Because PrEP has influenced practices of consent
- Because PrEP has changed gay porn and the sex industry
- Because PrEP regimes have made permissive what was once considered ‘transgressive’
- Because PrEP protects sex workers
- Because PrEP isn’t just a men’s issue
- Because AIDS and PrEP form and dissolve communities at an equal rate
- Because PrEP continues to be constrained by the social politics of inequality
- Because we refuse the hierarchy of health crises
- Because there is no such thing as a health crisis that is bigger or lesser or more or less important
- Because PrEP has been hailed as a victory for the assumed ‘end’ of the AIDS epidemic
- Because we are the survivors and the inheritors of a plague that has killed millions
SPIT! standing for Sodomites, Perverts, Inverts, Together!, is a collective formed by artists, activists and writers Carlos Motta, John Arthur Peetz and Carlos Maria Romero. SPIT! wrote a series of manifestos that respond to contemporary pressing issues of sexual and gender oppression. SPIT! collaborates with a fierce group of artists who interpret, (in cases) rewrite, and perform them initially as part of Frieze Projects London 2017. Along side the performances they also published The SPIT! Manifesto Reader – an anthology of historical and contemporary queer manifestos post 1960. The reader is available online: www.carlosmariaromero.com/spit-manifesto/
We thank SPIT! for the kind permission of publication.
Foto: Tupamaraz On The Streets, Raul Vidales, Bogotá 2018