From Truthout:
LGBTQ communities are celebrating a joyful Pride season as COVID restrictions ease, and an end to a different epidemic is in sight — the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Unlike COVID, there is no vaccine for HIV, a virus that has shaped queer life and activism for the past four decades. Still, drugs that treat and prevent HIV are so effective at suppressing the virus that experts and health agencies say the epidemic could come to an end by 2030 if the right policy decisions are made. To reach this goal, advocates say archaic state laws that criminalize the most marginalized people impacted by HIV must be updated or repealed altogether.
HIV criminalization may sound like a thing of the past, but 32 states across the country still have laws on the books designed to punish people who have tested positive for HIV by creating or enhancing criminal penalties for various behaviors. In multiple states, people who have tested positive for HIV could face years in prison and even be registered as a sex offender if a former sexual partner accuses them of failing to disclose their status — even if they had safe sex or take medication that suppresses the virus and fully prevents transmission to others. In most states, these laws are HIV-specific. In 2020, only 11 states had laws that attempt to criminalize or control behaviors that could expose others to sexually transmitted and communicable diseases besides HIV, such as hepatitis.
HIV laws are often based on misconceptions of how HIV is spread that were disproven years ago, according to the Centers for Disease Control. In many cases, the laws are so vague that they can apply to various consensual sex acts, even though oral sex, for example, poses little to no risk of transmission. Some laws make it a crime to expose another person to bodily fluids even if no sex or injection drug use was involved, despite the fact that it is virtually impossible to transmit HIV that way. (HIV and other pathogens can be transmitted when people share syringes for injecting drugs, so it’s crucial that clean syringes are available to anyone who needs them.) In Louisiana and other states, an HIV-positive person could be charged with a felony for spitting on or biting someone else, even though we’ve known for decades that HIV is not spread by saliva. The maximum sentence under Louisiana’s law is 10 years in prison. Continue reading >>>
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