Street Smarts (1993)

Young sex for sale, young bodies at risk

S.F. AIDS Foundation targets street hustlers

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, JUNE 1, 1993 -- The San Francisco AIDS Foundation today unveiled a new HIV prevention campaign featuring 25 Polk area bus shelter posters aimed at street youths engaged in survival sex for pay. It is the first campaign in the nation to recognize the responsibility of "johns" in the reduction of the spread of HIV/AIDS.

The threat of AIDS is ever-present in the lives of the boys and young men who work on Polk Street. "Some of them engage in sex with johns, or 'dates,' who pay extra to.have unprotected sex with them," says Elliot Ramos, S.F. AIDS Foundation youth campaign development coordinator. 'That puts both partners at risk for HIV. Our campaign is not about judging the hustlers' or the johns' behavior. It's about saving lives."

The 4'x 6' posters--readily visible to Polk area hustlers--show a leather- jacket-clad young man holding a condom; he's standing near a parked car in which a man is seated. The phrase "Street Smarts," at the top of the poster, refers to the need for HIV and safe sex awareness as a basic street survival tool. The tag line is "No Condom No Date!" The message: for sex workers and their clients, practicing safe sex is imperative to survival.

The San Francisco AIDS Foundation is also distributing 200 health-care "fanny packs" to Polk area sex workers over a three-month period. The packs include a toothbrush, a comb, cards printed with help-referral phone numbers, condoms, and sexual lubricants. They are being dispensed by 18th Street Services outreach workers and through Larkin Street Youth Center. The idea: to provide hustlers, an economically disadvantaged group, with basic safe sex and hygiene tools.

The young men who wind up working on Polk Street often have come to San Francisco to flee abusive families and.school conflicts, or to explore their sexuality. Instead of relief from those problems, they discover an imbroglio of threatening street conditions: drugs, hunger, lack of health care, poverty, hopelessness, and the threat of HIV infecticn. Some young men prostitute themselves to survive; others do it to establish their place in the world.

In the past few years, surveys conducted at Larkin Street Youth Center have shown that, with repeated prevention education, condom usage increases--resulting in a decrease in the HIV infection rate among this population.

"But street life isn't pretty or fun," says the AIDS Foundation's Ramos. "That's why this campaign takes a proactive approach, through repetitious educational prevention measures, to encourage hustlers and their clients to protect themselves from the threat of HIV infection."