Hated To Death ~ Connecting HIV/AIDS & Intolerance

I wear many professional hats, and one of the other professional hats I wear is in the field of HIV/AIDS. So, I've been thinking a lot recently about the connections between the work I do here at ICTE on intolerance and the work I do at Hunter around HIV/AIDS.

While on the face of it these may seem completely disparate, there is actually lots of interconnectedness. One of those points of connection is evident in this story, via Human Rights Watch. I'll just excerpt a little of this story, actually from last year, but still oh-so-relevant:

On June 9, 2004, Brian Williamson, Jamaica's leading gay rights activist, was murdered in his home, his body mutilated by multiple knife wounds. Within an hour after his body was discovered, a Human Rights Watch researcher witnessed a crowd gathered outside the crime scene. A smiling man called out, "Battyman [homosexual] he get killed!" Many others celebrated
Williamson's murder, laughing and calling out, "let's get them one at a time," "that's what you get for sin," "let's kill all of them." Some sang "boom bye bye," a line from a popular Jamaican song about killing and burning gay men.

If you want more on this, you can read the entire 81-page report Hated to Death: Homophobia, Violence, and Jamaica's HIV/AIDS Epidemic".