Em.'s In & Outs

The other day I was looking to polish up my Portuguese (I still haven't ordered Harry Potter 6 in that language, oh my!) when I bumped into the movie Carandiru at Queen's Video.

The story takes place in Sao Paulo and relates the past life of prisoners in what used to be Latin-America's biggest jail. Based on a real story, the final scene tells about the 1992 massacre, in which the Brazilian police (which, I witness, is scary and beats up homeless kids in the streets of Sampa) killed over 100 prisonners over a riot that explosed over a banal disagreement. Interestingly enough, prisonners were trying to literally use their HIV positive status as a biological weapon to try to save their lives. Basically, it tells the story of a double, even a triple, a quadruple stigma : that of HIV AIDS, Injectable Drug Users, Prisonners and Homosexuality.


It also made me think of another movie my mother and I watched the other day, Brokeback Mountain. I wonder how the story would have changed if the AIDS pandemic was going on in the 1960s; would the protagonist still have been killed or would people have been too scared to even approach gay men from the fear of becoming infected? It seems like the whole cowboy, and usually conservative mentality in Texas would have been more likely to suggest total abstinence than anything else to prevent the spread of HIV AIDS... There would probably be so much more cases here in North America if the outbreak started earlier in time, when the then stronger religious ''tradition'' resulted in people not wanting to be tested because of the resulting stigma...

AIDS was now by the U.S. declared an issue of National Security. I wonder if that's all it takes for them to start taking action to curb it...