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Rampant: how a city stopped a plague
Media Watch
Chapman Pictures
Rampant: how a city stopped a plague
Neal Blewett, Australian Minister for Health 1983–90 Rampant: how a city stopped a plague Directed by Victoria Midwinter Pitt Chapman Pictures, Australia, 2007 57 min To obtain a copy of this film, or for more information, please contact Chapman Pictures at [email protected]
“The amount of sex that was going on in Sydney pre-AIDS was ridiculous”, asserts Rampant’s Steven Allkins, DJ and denizen of Darlinghurst, Sydney’s gay quarter. Nestled alongside Darlinghurst is the red-light district, King’s Cross. Both areas attracted drug addicts—“the city’s most hated group”, notes the film. It was a time when homosexual sex in Australia was punishable with 14 years in prison, twice the penalty for rape. Darlinghurst’s Taylor Square Clinic, specialising in sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), was established in 1981. It was never short of patients. Julie Bates, an activist for sex workers, points out that although prostitutes were keen on protective measures, “clients insisted on a condomfree service”. Besides, if the vice squad raided a brothel, condoms supplied evidence for the prosecution. Meanwhile, homosexual men, explains Allkins, regarded the idea of wearing condoms as “unfathomable”, “we couldn’t get pregnant”, he adds. Taylor Square’s waiting rooms were full of like-minded men with mildly inconvenient STDs—“a good place to cruise”, recalls one of Rampant’s interviewees. “An uncommon cancer diagnosed in homosexual men”, reported the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1981. Men who have sex with men in Australia began to contract the same, mysterious illness. Sydney’s St Vincent Hospital examined its blood supplies. The results surprised everyone: over 400 “healthy” men tested positive for the newly identified virus. The Red Cross requested that men who have sex with men, drug users, and their sexual partners refrain from donating blood, but the damage had already been done: one-third of Australia’s haemophiliac population were infected with HIV. Directed by Victoria Midwinter Pitt, Rampant offers a punchy and engaging explanation of how Sydney managed to halt the AIDS epidemic. Vociferous activists in tandem with a principled Minister for Health—Neal Blewett—and his acute Senior Advisor, the openly gay Bill Bowtell, helped to form the “Australian model”. The model, which had taken shape by 1987, encompassed a wide-ranging needleexchange programme, explicit advertising campaigns encouraging men who have sex with men to use condoms, funding for sex workers’ cooperatives, and concerted— and controversial—attempts to raise public awareness. Opposition figures such as fire and brimstone preacher Fred Nile—seen here inveighing against “homosexual swimming festivals”—were defeated by what the film ironically terms a bunch of “pooftahs, junkies, and whores”.
It is a remarkable tale, and Rampant recounts it with verve. Nevertheless, on occasion the film overreaches. Rampant’s scope is too narrow for its central argument: that the Australian model should be adopted all over the world. It’s a rather insular documentary: we don’t learn how HIV/AIDS affected the rest of Australia, let alone other countries and continents. Australia’s first AIDS-related death, for example, occurred in Melbourne in 1983, a fact that goes unmentioned in Rampant. Moreover, the director has a tendency to assume prior knowledge of Australian politics and culture. This can be frustrating. The film casually alludes to the political climate of the time, for instance, but doesn’t elaborate. There’s an unsatisfactory comparison with the USA: Fred Nile is likened to the late Reverend Jerry Falwell, leader of US pressure group the Moral Majority. It all raises more questions than are answered: how firmly entrenched in the Australian establishment were figures such as Nile? (We see Falwell photographed with Ronald Reagan, was Nile equally well-connected?) Why have Australia’s impressive preventive strategies failed in other places? Is it all down to the tenacity and perseverance of the homosexual and sex-worker communities? If so, is a lack of dynamism in similar communities elsewhere the reason that their countries have been unable to emulate the Australian model? Such omissions undermine the film’s thesis; a pity, given that its essential point is sturdy enough: it is far more difficult to persuade people towards abstinence than it is to cajole them into safer practices. Rampant provides some compelling evidence: 1% of Australian drug users are HIV positive, compared with 20% in the USA; the USA’s general incidence of HIV is ten times that of Australia’s; there has not been a single case of transmission from a female sex worker to an Australian man in 25 years; and Australia’s death toll—around 6500—is far lower than the 50 000 that experts had once predicted. But there’s no meaningful attempt to place the events of Sydney in context—an avoidable oversight, given that Rampant runs for less than an hour—and without this, it is difficult for the audience to draw conclusions. Victoria Midwinter Pitt has fallen into the same folly as the Reverends Nile and Falwell: preaching to the converted.
Talha Burki
Erratum Senior K. Global preparations for an avian influenza pandemic. Lancet Infect Dis 2008; 8: 409. WHO has not ordered and has no plans to order 50 million doses of Prepandrix vaccine.
476
www.thelancet.com/infection Vol 8 August 2008
Chapman Pictures
Rampant: how a city stopped a plague
Neal Blewett, Australian Minister for Health 1983–90 Rampant: how a city stopped a plague Directed by Victoria Midwinter Pitt Chapman Pictures, Australia, 2007 57 min To obtain a copy of this film, or for more information, please contact Chapman Pictures at [email protected]
“The amount of sex that was going on in Sydney pre-AIDS was ridiculous”, asserts Rampant’s Steven Allkins, DJ and denizen of Darlinghurst, Sydney’s gay quarter. Nestled alongside Darlinghurst is the red-light district, King’s Cross. Both areas attracted drug addicts—“the city’s most hated group”, notes the film. It was a time when homosexual sex in Australia was punishable with 14 years in prison, twice the penalty for rape. Darlinghurst’s Taylor Square Clinic, specialising in sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), was established in 1981. It was never short of patients. Julie Bates, an activist for sex workers, points out that although prostitutes were keen on protective measures, “clients insisted on a condomfree service”. Besides, if the vice squad raided a brothel, condoms supplied evidence for the prosecution. Meanwhile, homosexual men, explains Allkins, regarded the idea of wearing condoms as “unfathomable”, “we couldn’t get pregnant”, he adds. Taylor Square’s waiting rooms were full of like-minded men with mildly inconvenient STDs—“a good place to cruise”, recalls one of Rampant’s interviewees. “An uncommon cancer diagnosed in homosexual men”, reported the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1981. Men who have sex with men in Australia began to contract the same, mysterious illness. Sydney’s St Vincent Hospital examined its blood supplies. The results surprised everyone: over 400 “healthy” men tested positive for the newly identified virus. The Red Cross requested that men who have sex with men, drug users, and their sexual partners refrain from donating blood, but the damage had already been done: one-third of Australia’s haemophiliac population were infected with HIV. Directed by Victoria Midwinter Pitt, Rampant offers a punchy and engaging explanation of how Sydney managed to halt the AIDS epidemic. Vociferous activists in tandem with a principled Minister for Health—Neal Blewett—and his acute Senior Advisor, the openly gay Bill Bowtell, helped to form the “Australian model”. The model, which had taken shape by 1987, encompassed a wide-ranging needleexchange programme, explicit advertising campaigns encouraging men who have sex with men to use condoms, funding for sex workers’ cooperatives, and concerted— and controversial—attempts to raise public awareness. Opposition figures such as fire and brimstone preacher Fred Nile—seen here inveighing against “homosexual swimming festivals”—were defeated by what the film ironically terms a bunch of “pooftahs, junkies, and whores”.
It is a remarkable tale, and Rampant recounts it with verve. Nevertheless, on occasion the film overreaches. Rampant’s scope is too narrow for its central argument: that the Australian model should be adopted all over the world. It’s a rather insular documentary: we don’t learn how HIV/AIDS affected the rest of Australia, let alone other countries and continents. Australia’s first AIDS-related death, for example, occurred in Melbourne in 1983, a fact that goes unmentioned in Rampant. Moreover, the director has a tendency to assume prior knowledge of Australian politics and culture. This can be frustrating. The film casually alludes to the political climate of the time, for instance, but doesn’t elaborate. There’s an unsatisfactory comparison with the USA: Fred Nile is likened to the late Reverend Jerry Falwell, leader of US pressure group the Moral Majority. It all raises more questions than are answered: how firmly entrenched in the Australian establishment were figures such as Nile? (We see Falwell photographed with Ronald Reagan, was Nile equally well-connected?) Why have Australia’s impressive preventive strategies failed in other places? Is it all down to the tenacity and perseverance of the homosexual and sex-worker communities? If so, is a lack of dynamism in similar communities elsewhere the reason that their countries have been unable to emulate the Australian model? Such omissions undermine the film’s thesis; a pity, given that its essential point is sturdy enough: it is far more difficult to persuade people towards abstinence than it is to cajole them into safer practices. Rampant provides some compelling evidence: 1% of Australian drug users are HIV positive, compared with 20% in the USA; the USA’s general incidence of HIV is ten times that of Australia’s; there has not been a single case of transmission from a female sex worker to an Australian man in 25 years; and Australia’s death toll—around 6500—is far lower than the 50 000 that experts had once predicted. But there’s no meaningful attempt to place the events of Sydney in context—an avoidable oversight, given that Rampant runs for less than an hour—and without this, it is difficult for the audience to draw conclusions. Victoria Midwinter Pitt has fallen into the same folly as the Reverends Nile and Falwell: preaching to the converted.
Talha Burki
Erratum Senior K. Global preparations for an avian influenza pandemic. Lancet Infect Dis 2008; 8: 409. WHO has not ordered and has no plans to order 50 million doses of Prepandrix vaccine.
476
www.thelancet.com/infection Vol 8 August 2008