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Play Smart trading cards featured in A&U magazine.
Play Smart is an honest and straight-forward approach to promote harm reduction, HIV testing and post-exposure prophylaxis. Trading cards are packaged with a sticker, condoms and lube. The back of each trading card features information you need to know to Get Your Game On & Play Smart.
via POZ magazine October / November 2010
Get Your Game On
by Cristina Gonzalez
Safer-sex trading cards from Visual AIDS
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A tattooed and muscled basketball player slips his hand down his short shorts, a sleek swimmer is awarded a condom medal, an oiled-down tennis player gets ready for a match—these aren’t your average sports trading cards.
These are just some of the images on the “Play Smart” trading cards released in June for LGBT Pride month by Visual AIDS and The Men’s Sexual Health Project. They tell you how to play it smart while getting some play.
Each card showcases commissioned artwork by photographers (two of whom are HIV positive), as well as information on safer sex, HIV testing and PEP (post-exposure prophylaxis). The names on the front of each card are those of the photographers—not the subjects. Each pack of trading cards comes packaged with a sticker, condoms and lube.
“Play Smart” trading cards are free for distribution and available in bulk for the cost of shipping and handling while supplies last. E-mail [email protected] for more information.
Through Positive Eyes gives photographic voice to people living with HIV in major cities around the world. It is based on the belief that HIV-positive people should pick up their own cameras and make their own artistic statements. In doing so, they create powerful tools for combating stigma, which is one of the most formidable barriers in reducing the spread of AIDS today.
Through Positive Eyes has been produced in Mexico City (August 2008), Rio de Janeiro (June 2009), and Johannesburg (March 2010). Next, the project will travel to Chennai, Kiev, and New York City.
The project is co-directed by London-based South African photographer and AIDS activist Gideon Mendel, who has been chronicling HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa since 1993. Since then his groundbreaking work on the issue has been widely recognized. Through magazine publications, multimedia web and video presentations, and his book, A Broken Landscape, Mendel has been commended for empowering his subjects rather than representing them as objects of pity.
Click here to find out more and watch the videos.
Collect Them All
In collaboration with The Men’s Sexual Health Project (M*SHP), which promotes sexual health among en who have sex with men in NYC and provides free on-site testing for HIV and STDs at sex clubs and parties, Visual AIDS freely distributes the Play Smart trading cars around New York City this past June during Pride Month. Distribution will continue throughout the summer and fall at various sites throughout the city, including bars, sports clubs, and LGBT organizations, while supplies last. A list of locations (including those outside on New York City) is available here.
via The New Gay by TNG contributor, Ted Kerr
A few months ago I wrote a lengthy piece about Visual AIDS’s latest broadside PLAY SMART. After some feedback from a friend I edited it down to be a more suitable, shorter, blog length. What was published was a focused critique regarding issues of representation within PLAY SMART. What I edited out was nuances, and questions about context, the complexity of creating a campaign for unknown audiences and praise for past Visual AIDS broadsides which I compared to PLAY SMART.
I made a mistake in editing the piece. Too much was lost, the piece came across as confrontational rather than promoting conversation, gone was the opportunity to discuss the difficulty in making and disseminating gay men’s health promotion to an interested and under-served global audience and missing was a chance to consider the need for context when judging a campaign.
Upon reading the first draft I realize I edited out an important section where Amy Sadao, Executive Director of Visual AIDS speaks at greater length about the impetus of the PLAY SAFE campaign beyond what I included in the shorter piece. She mentions the impact of eight years of Bush and states that PLAY SAFE was one of Visual AIDS’ first explicitly sexy campaigns – a point I failed to fully grasp. What does it mean to be able to do a sexy campaign after years of feeling oppressed?
Related, Nelson Santos in a conversation I had with him regarding PLAY SAFE, felt as though it was also the first campaign in a long time to target gay men that may have been left out in the past decade due to the need to focus on specific under-served communities. For me I take this now to mean – what about the Chelsea boys? The gym bunnies and middle class gay men well served by the market place and culture in general but perhaps because of their privilege are forgotten by health and real wellness providers. What about the gay men who are now entering a new stage of life and maybe need to be reminded of safer sex messages and learn about new developments? What about the gay men who have left the AIDS community because a place they once felt so at home at – now seems to have no room for them? PLAY SMART falls in the tradition of Visual AIDS reaching out, commissioning and creating work to speak to a specific community. It just so happens that the community is one that is very dominate, often at the cost of other communities. One of the obstacles in all community work is to remember the diversity within diversity.
By not fully including Sadao and Santos’ points I replicated the problem of the Internet – removing context. It is impossible to think that Visual AIDS should be able to create a broadside that responds to all the diverse and possibly conflicting needs of gay men everywhere. Nor were they trying to. The Internet , and maybe even Visual AIDS’s warranted excitement, made what I can now see as a community specific broadside into a campaign with international reach, stretched beyond the broadside’s capabilities. I did the campaign no favours by failing to see the scope while focusing on only one important- yet ultimately singular- aspect of the campaign.
Issues of representation are important. The tyranny of the white fit body in gay male culture is a real factor in gay men’s health and undermines a lot of the good we may be trying to do. It is something that should be discussed and considered in our work. I did not fail by bringing up the subject. I failed when I did not include as much context to the PLAY SMART broadside as I could have. Visual AIDS is a small, hard working arts organization that is committed to using art to create awareness and opportunities around HIV and AIDS. While we should hold people and organizations within our communities responsible for their actions – and I say this to myself – it is also wise to view their choices within larger contexts and provide those bigger pictures to each other so that we can grow and evaluate and grow some more together.
What do you think of the PLAY SMART campaign?
Does it work for you?
Where do you think I missed the point? Or have I still?
To read the original unedited draft on The New Gay blog, please click here.
Play Smart Trading Cards is Visual AIDS newest set of Artist Edition Broadsides, promoting harm reduction, HIV prevention and AIDS awareness. Play Smart is packaged with a set of trading cards, sticker, condoms and lube. They are distributed for free.
While Play Smart has hit a home run with some viewers and blogs Bilerico, After Elton, Open Ceremony, Chelsea Now, we also wanted to share this critical review.
via The New Gay
July 16 2010. By Ted Kerr.
FOUL! Visual AIDS strikes out in new broadside
Every year New York based Visual AIDS, VA, “the only contemporary arts organization fully committed to HIV prevention and AIDS awareness through producing and presenting visual art projects,” unveils two new broadside projects created with different visual artists to promote “harm reduction, HIV prevention and AIDS awareness” to diverse audiences. According to visualaids.org, “Broadsides are a creative response to the lack of provocative and frank HIV-prevention messages in our city and nationally.”
Of the broadsides being released this year is a trading card project called PLAY SMART with photographers Aaron Cobbett, inkedKenny, Greg Mitchell, and Slava Mogutin in consultation with Dr. Demetre Daskalakis at the NYC based The Men’s Sexual Health Project, M*SHP.
Each photographer created a set of trading cards, one side featuring a photo of a man in sports drag and the other communicating ‘stats’. Rather than ‘player’ information, the PLAY SMART trading cards feature the ‘new rules’ of what Daskalakis calls “Smart Sex.” The rules include using a condom, getting tested, talking about HIV / sex with friends, partners and doctors, and getting information on post-exposure prophylaxis.
Visual AIDS supporters like myself and other community members are calling time out on PLAY SMART for its language and imagery.
According to Amy Sadao, Executive Director of Visual AIDS, some early push back on the broadsides came from a NYC POZ activist who asked after reading the name of the trading cards, “What? Am I having dumb sex? Are you calling me dumb?”
As Sadao and Santos explain the PLAY SMART theme and name emerged after the trading card size and sports motif were decided upon. Designed specifically to be given out at clinics Daskalakis runs within NYC sex clubs, it was thought that the trading card size, and sex-positive sport motif would ensure people picked up and retained the cards as well as absorbed the information provided.
As Santos recalls, “Using the word “smart” instead of “safe” was a way of refreshing the concept. People seem to tune out the words “safer sex”… but “smart” was a different way of thinking how to play, like using the proper equipment or talking to your teammate so you know what’s going on ‘on the field’.” Sadao says she hears the critique and, as with everything pertaining to the campaign, it is under consideration as VA thinks of how to roll out of the second phase of the trading cards.
For me the issue with the PLAY SMART trading cards is around how the narrow focus of whom is being ‘traded’ in the cards. All feature fit, able-bodied, predominantly white, men.
As those involved in gay men’s health know being able to navigate condom use, talk about HIV / AIDS with friends, family, doctors, and accessing Post-exposure prophylaxis is often a point of privilege based on race, class, ‘attractiveness / desirability’ and other factors.
Diversity is not represented in the cards. If anything PLAY SMART works against social factors we know to be true;
So while the information PLAY SMART wants to get out is very helpful, the images of the card may prevent someone from thinking that the cards are for them, or worse may work to reinforce poor self esteem, heighten senses of not belonging and ensure that the information is never obtained or retained by the intended audience.
PLAY SMART, aside from being culturally and otherwise insensitive also plays into the tyranny of fit white males as the dominate ideal of who is gay, who gets to have gay sex and who can / should be desired and protected.
The supremacy of white fit bodies is such that it rules out other conversations that could come from PLAY SMART. We can’t talk about condom use if we don’t talk about social isolation. We can’t discuss the need for frank discussion of sexuality unless the cultural differences around sexuality are on the table.
Of course PLAY SMART is not all bad. One could argue that in a way PLAY SMART is advocating for a holistic approach to HIV / STI prevention. By using a sports theme the broadsides can be understood as suggesting ’smart sex’ is a lifestyle choice- taking care of your body is not just about getting fit but also condom use, getting tested etc.
In the end PLAY SMART falls short. It is just sexy. It is just eye catching. Celebrating the male form and being sex positive is much need in gay men’s health work but what is not needed are messages – intended or not – that silence, disappear and under mind bodies already repressed and undervalued in society (often further within gay communities).
Visual AIDS is an amazing, thoughtful, proactive organization that has lead the way in how art can galvanize energy and ideas around HIV / AIDS. PLAY SMART, in my mind does not represent the best of what VA can do – but along the way does raise valuable questions about limits and expectations of campaigns. If I can venture a guess I would say that Visual AIDS has taken a hit on this one, will go back to the locker room to regroup and will come out swinging better than ever next time.
Ted Kerr is a writer, artist and activist with a focus on HIV / AIDS, queerness and expression. He was HIV Edmonton’s first Artist in Residence and currently contributes to Queermonton – a column about queer life in Edmonton for VUE Weekly. He was a founding member of Exposure: Edmonton’s Queer Arts and Culture Festival.
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Part of Visual AIDS mission is to "provoke dialogue," so please feel free to share, comment or contact us with your thoughts and suggestions at [email protected]
Each year, the NGO Delegation to the UNAIDS governing body (called the Programme Coordinating Board or PCB) submits a report to the Board. This is an important opportunity for to present the unique perspectives of civil society on the developments and issues around the AIDS pandemic. Broad input from civil society informs the NGO report, particularly regarding key issues on the agenda, but also regarding persistent or emerging issues “on the ground.”
The June 2010 board meeting will include agenda items such as non-discrimination; men who have sex with men (MSM); and a thematic focus on sexual and reproductive health services linked to HIV.
Please take a few minutes to complete this anonymous questionnaire, which is divided into three sections. The first section asks general information about you. The second section asks about how stigma and/or discrimination are impeding access to prevention, treatment, care and support. The third section asks about the programming of UNAIDS’ (including the ten Cosponsors) to tackle stigma and/or discrimination in your country or region.
Visual AIDS
catalogues
Chris Beyrer: War in the Blood : Sex, Politics and AIDS in Southeast Asia
David Roman: Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS
Ed Cohen: A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body
Edmund White (ed): Loss Within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS
Gabriele Griffin: Representations of HIV and AIDS : Visibility Blue/s
Gregg Bordowitz and Sasha Archibald: Robert Blanchon
(Visual AIDS Publication)
Imani Harrington (ed): Positive/Negative : Women of Color and HIV/AIDS: A Collection of Plays
Joseph Wesley Zeigler: Arts in Crisis: The National Endowment for the Arts Versus America
Michael P. Brown: RePlacing Citizenship: AIDS Activism and Radical Democracy
Nancy E. Stoller: Lessons from the Damned: Queers, Whores, and Junkies Respond to AIDS
Peter F. Cohen: Love and Anger : Essays on AIDS, Activism, and Politics
Randy Shilts: And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic
Roger Hallas: Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image (Asia-Pacific)
Sarah Moore: Ribbon Culture: Charity, Compassion and Public Awareness
Ted Gott (ed): Don't Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS
Thomas McGovern: Bearing Witness
(Visual AIDS Publication)
Wendy Steiner: The Scandal of Pleasure : Art in an Age of Fundamentalism
Social Change Initiatives