WARNING: EXPLICIT IMAGERY & COLLOQUIAL LANGUAGEShow Me Your Life - Sexwork where are our... where are our outraged religious leaders and our esteemed colleagues, where are our mothers and fathers and uncles and aunts, where are our mentors and guides speaking out together as strangers, throughout the depth and breadth of our communities with a shared desire to dispel that most despicable of appellations “male-child sexual abuse and rape.” Until this reality is acknowledged and boys are protected within our homes and communities, they need access to knowledge that will assist them to survive.
Tim Barrus: Enfants Prostitués
Tim Barrus (Director, Show Me Your Life; Founder, Cinemateque Films) The number of children on the planet who turn tricks to survive is in the millions. I have never met a sexworker, adult or child, who did not either have a history of abuse, or wasn't being abused as they worked the street. If someone else wasn't abusing them, they were abusing themselves. Prostitution is just one turn of the social screw that is physical and sexual abuse. Sex Work Is… — dangerous — a rush — a job — the razor’s edge — precarious — this place where no one is who they say they are and where identity is a self-created illusion — a landscape of addiction — difficult and hard work — where you will learn how to listen — a health hazard — a career where there is no health insurance for anyone — stigmatized and looked down upon by the community — often enough, an exposure to violence via pimps and tricks who will rip you off and not just financially but with the reinforcement of a head-space where you really begin to think and believe you could not do anything else to support yourself; even while the pimps and tricks are ripping you off, you are ripping yourself off by selling yourself way too short. Pimping and Tricking : Supply and Demand (Kelly Holsopple) I am here to tell you it has never been and never will be the intention of Pimps or Tricks to empower or liberate a prostituted adult or child socially, economically, sexually, or politically. Pimps want to get paid and Tricks, because they are predominantly male, want to get their dicks wet. That’s prostitution. A Pimp is a man or woman who induces, promotes, and profits from the prostitution of an adult (male or female) or a child (male or female). A Pimp uses physical and sexual violence to control and to sell an adult or child, forcing him/her into unwanted sex, and preventing him/her from escaping prostitution. Pimps prey on adults (male and female) and children (male and female), who often suffered incest, sexual or domestic abuse and other violence. The Pimp seasons their victims by wearing them down and making them psychologically, emotionally, chemically, and financially dependent. A Trick is a man or woman (predominantly a man) that believes they have the right to purchase an adult (male or female) or a child (male or female) to satisfy their sexual and violent urges. Tricks prey on prostituted adults and children whose lives are often unstable combinations of violence, poverty, homelessness, disease, post-traumatic stress disorder, and drug and alcohol addiction.
Tim Barrus (Founder, Cinemateque Films; Director, Show Me Your Life) Sexwork is a tent. Sexwork is a tent of secrets in a desert of ideas and desire. Sexwork is theatre, drudgery, strained, bring your grist to the mill, boy, shallow, off the deep end, timeless, telling, art, judgment, crucial to the species, helios looming with the sun; sexwork is as ancient as you can get. The thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. Sexwork is a commodity ordinarily seen as the renting of a body. Sexwork is actually the renting of a brain. Survival is the beginning and the end. We will have what you think is sex for money where I am the one who gets paid, and you are the one who buys my skill and time. But there is only one conquest in Sexwork. You are alive today. Or you are dead. There is a middle ground. It’s murky, and it’s a riddle, and it’s conflicted with shadows, questions, obligations, bones, laundry, scars, sadism, contamination, facility, craft, camels through the eyes of needles, tricks among the travelers, superstitions, and skill, and traps. The people conversant with the realities of sexwork include children (male and female), and adults, (male and female). In other words. Us. So let us talk of Sexwork and surviving this pandemic.
Ext: From high overhead, we see the frozen Russian landscape slip beneath us as our flight takes off for Asia. A cacophony of sounds and voices. We wade through the maddening crowds. The boys for sale are almost invisible. Almost is the operant idea here. We see them set against the heterosexual landscape even as it melts like ice. We see the hookers waiting. We see a landscape saturated with the quid pro quo of sex. We see the bare bones of survival. Everything around them flashes with a contrived beat and a forced light. Smokin’ heroin. Chasing dragons. They are only there. The men who seek them out know where to look. Knowing how to blend in, too. It is the year of the hyena. It is always the year of the hyena. It is the planet of hyenas. There is the stereotypical tragedy of a lost childhood. But it’s about more than that. The loss is the loss of life itself. What does homelessness mean. What does survival sex mean. What does abandonment mean. We see them talking about what they want. They want to be loved. They want to be wanted. I find this an almost stunning commonality. “I want someone to love me.” You think they are so hardened. We are ALL wrong about so many things. How hardened they really are — beyond exterior assumptions — is one of those things we are so wrong, wrong, wrong about. Survival is a journey, too. But there is more to life than merely surviving it. And they know that. If you took the time to travel like a tourist beyond the realm of exploitation; if you were to know any of them, any of them, you would discover that they know that. They know who and what they are. And they also know that there is so much more to life, and they are doing their best to hang tightly to what constitutes a life where hope is almost always just outside their outstretched reach. And ours. "What's in a Name" by Bernedette Muthien call me coolie call me coloured call me Anything you Like but in the mirror my reflections're fractured still me
crystal and plastic have rims but I don't verb too well
so don't fuck with my ancestors generations of walking in shit's luck
sticks & stones broke our bones & names'll always hurt us but we're still a round & f**king angry
"Sexual violence against men and boys" (www.fmreview.org)The problem of male-directed sexual violence remains largely undocumented. We do not know about the relationship between conflict-related violence and sexual violence within institutions such as militaries, police forces and penal systems. The reluctance of many men and boys to report sexual violence makes it very difficult to accurately assess its scope. In the last decade, sexualized violence against men and boys – including rape, sexual torture, mutilation of the genitals, sexual humiliation, sexual enslavement, forced incest and forced rape – has been reported in 25 armed conflicts across the world. If one expands this tally to include cases of sexual exploitation of boys displaced by violent conflict, the list encompasses the majority of the 59 armed conflicts identified in the Human Security Report (www.humansecurityreport.info). Sexualised violence against adult men and boys can emerge in any form of conflict – from interstate wars to civil wars to localized conflicts – and in any cultural context. Both men and boys are vulnerable in conflict settings and in countries of asylum alike. Both adult men and boys are most vulnerable to sexual violence in detention and during military operations in civilian areas and in situations of military conscription or abduction into paramilitary forces. Boys, are also highly vulnerable in refugee/IDP settings. The issue of disclosure is further challenged in localities where homosexual activity attracts legal penalties. Sexual violence is however a mechanism by which men and boys are placed or kept in a position subordinate to other men and has no relationship to generally accepted notions of homosexuality as consensual relations between adult male partners. Sexual violence is an exercise in power and humiliation.
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Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)
Real Stories Gallery invites journalists, attorneys and censors, our esteemed colleagues and fellow citizens, to please bear in mind the destructive power associated with representing visual imagery and/or words. The small cellphone snapshot, and all within our workshop, could, for instance, be made to mean anything, simply anything in a new context. We thank you for reflecting on why sexually abused boys are sharing their stories with us all today. We thank you for your time, for your professionalism and for your compassion in the face of the trafficking of a retrovirus that does not discriminate and has resulted in today's HIV/AIDS pandemic. male-child : a human being under the age of 18 years old. The sexually abused & raped female-child is acknowledged and spoken of collectively around the world as an appalling reality.Yet, today, there are also hundreds of thousands of male-child sexual abuse and rape victims, and these children it appears are less spoken of or championed. The sexual abuse & rape of a male-child is all about the perpetration of acts of humiliation and submission that leave the abuser feeling a fleeting surge of power. They are about violence. It has nothing to do with homosexuality or men who have sex with men; sexual relations between consenting male-adults. The human rights abuses suffered by male-children demands for us to revisit our collective perceptions of masculinity. And to urgently acknowledge the reality that such acts of extreme physical and psychological violence, place male-children at risk for the transmission of HIV and being left to survive in environments with inappropriate healthcare; indeed, often without any care at all, except for the astonishing love and empathy offered by others who are sexually abused, raped and exploited. A testament, indeed, to the strength of love; something that can survive horror and all attempts to stamp it out. Yes, there are also a few overstretched NGOs trying to walk across the wobbly floor woven from uncertainty; however their desire to do something realistic to alleviate the trauma and put an end to these human rights abuses, is consistently challenged by fellow citizen's planting cultural minefields and erecting social barbed wire fences created from myths and complex paranoias of being associated with the realities of these male-child lives. these are the people... we do not exist familiar in any room/ as long as we remain invisible, you never have to look at our little black books/ at who our tricks were (in some cases still are)/ their husbands and their fathers and their brothers and their girlfriend’s husband, too, and their ministers and their doctors and their stockbrokers and their cops and their politicians and their bosses and their co-workers and their colleagues and their priests and the people they tell their secrets to/ these are the people who pay to fuck us/ where are our... where are our outraged religious leaders and our esteemed colleagues, where are our mothers and fathers and uncles and aunts, where are our mentors and guides speaking out together as strangers, throughout the depth and breadth of our communities with a shared desire to dispel that most despicable of appellations “male-child sexual abuse and rape.”
Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu (Nobel Peace Prize Winner 1984; Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation; Friend/Parent) The wave of hate that is underway must stop. Politicians who profit from exploiting this hate, from fanning it, must not be tempted by this easy way to profit from fear and misunderstanding. And my fellow clerics, of all faiths, must stand up for the principles of universal dignity and fellowship. Exclusion is never the way forward on our shared paths to freedom and justice (March 2010). Real Stories Gallery is a web-based visual arts & storytelling workshop, reflecting on the relationship between HIV/AIDS & Human Rights Abuses. It is a sketchbook of witness, evolving daily with images and ideas, created with passion and compassion by concerned men, women, adolescents and children. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Charter of the United Nations, 1948), an international law reinforcement of the Nuremberg Trial Judgments, upholds the rights of one nation to intervene in the affairs of another if said nation is abusing its citizens, and rose out of a 1939–1945 World War II Atlantic environment of extreme split between "haves" and "have nots." The transmission of HIV affects humanities' children, everyday. Everyone's assistance in raising awareness makes a profound difference and greatly assists those working on the frontline. For instance, our colleagues who will be attending the United NationsHigh-Level Meeting on HIV/AIDS in New York, 8-10 June 2011. The policing and prosecuting of these crimes against our most vulnerable community members, BOYS and GIRLS, will make a difference in the transmission of HIV and in providing appropriate healthcare. "It's all about choices; standing up for the Rights of the Child (under 18s) and assisting our neighbours who are struggling to stand up…”
**The children still waiting believe these protocols should be mandatory, rather than optional.
“Fragile” by Bernedette Muthien in your eyes that shift with the anxieties of these times i see the deepest compassion imaginable for the perpetrators in all we are the survivor-victims we're forced to be and in your wide open eyes i see reflected my very own soul and for your single act of kindness i offer you my fragile heart
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 10, 1948 Article 27.
timbarrus/ Sssshhhh… (11/22/10) I’ve become involved with Real Stories, but the boys don’t trust it yet. They keep expecting that some authoritarian Big Brother Bureaucrat Suit from the system will take over the headquarters of Real Stories and jail the lot of everyone there. That is usually what happens… REAL STORIES are always, always dangerous. Anywhere you find them and they’re subverting the rhetoric culture likes to make itself pretty with. There is nothing pretty about AIDS. Not. One. Thing. You want your stories to be a romance. You want your stories to be the kind of stories where no one has to look the truth in the face. People have AIDS today because other people are making money. You know how to exploit. You know how to patronize. You know how to destroy. You know how to scandalize. You know how to belittle. You don’t know jack shit about love, and you don’t understand how to build a fortress around that love and brotherhood, in order to be safe. From you.
childhood stories... I was raised as millions of kids are today - listening to stories; often ones that made me feel. The ones I listened to many times in my particular community, told of a boy raised in a family by parents who loved and protected him. It didn’t matter to me the story was about a boy and I was a girl. I always experienced a pulling at my heart and knowing instinctively that the love and protection this boy-child experienced was a good thing, for a child to experience. And today, as a mother, I find that I have not changed my mind. I still believe a child should feel loved and protected, and cared for, by all those who play a role in the upbringing of a child. The boy in the story, grew into a man. And he was killed in a simply agonizing manner; a popular death sentence for many at that time where he lived. He was nailed to a wooden cross, after being ridiculed and tortured, in his case for loving mankind and speaking out at hypocrisy.The thought of the pain this man experienced, always made me wince as a child, listening to the story. And I was, as still am, very certain indeed that I should not like to experience such ridicule or torture or slow painful death. Today when I look around me and listen to the stories shared by male children, of the cruelty they experience and of the apparent turning away with a shrug of "it's all so overwhelming, what can I do." I sometimes wonder in those moments what the boy who was murdered, what his father, the man who raised him may do, here. Yes, I should have liked the opportunity to speak with him, because in my opinion he did a super job of parenting a boy in what appears to have been a time and place filled with a pandemic of cruelty and prejudice and hardships for ordinary people. Although the boy's mother sounds a wonderful person, she possessed an almost other worldly kindness and goodness. So I feel as an ordinary person, it would be easier for me to chat with her husband and that he would probably be able to offer me more practical parenting advice in relation to today's pandemic of cruelty and prejudice and hardship for children in the communities around me. Yet, oddly, when I come to think of it now, I realize I have not heard many stories about the boy's father. And I am left wondering why this was, is. Why in all the stories I have listened to, along no doubt with millions of other children, is there so little mention of the strong kind very ordinary male role model, who guided the boy each day; probably telling him stories, making sure he had food, teaching him skills, sharing silly jokes, gently and firmly scolding him perhaps, hugging him for sure when he had nightmares or was feeling unwell. Yes, I think I should have liked as a child to hear such stories about the boy's father; who was technically a foster-father, but it didn't matter to me as a child, because it was Joseph who was around on a day to day basis during the boy's childhood and adolescence.
"You're acting like you don't know" Rachel Chapple, PhD (Founder, Real Stories Gallery; Anthropologist; Mother)
"We must speak about the children (under 18s), who are placed in danger every hour, every day, around the world. Placed in danger of being infected with the retrovirus named Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Young people are highly susceptible to the transmission of HIV due to the ease in which their bodies tear during sexual intercourse, particularly intergenerational sexual intercourse. Their vulnerable immune systems and the environments in which they survive and the human rights abuses to which they are subjected, leave them physically and psychologically unable to successfully fight opportunistic infections; even if they are able to access appropriate health-care. These children (under 18s) do not deserve to experience the trauma inflicted as a direct consequence of adult perceptions and behaviours, whether actively or passively endorsed. In a moment when millions of adults have access to technologies and the ability thereby to receive and transmit knowledge, as well as the ability to pass on valuable information to those in their localities, it becomes about choices. The first choice being - an adult who instinctively yearns for such trauma to end, deciding whether he/she would like to assist by raising awareness to shift perceptions and alleviate this huge wrong doing. Is it worth the risk. What risk? That, of course, is something only he/she will know. Real Stories Gallery is enormously thankful for the visual artists and poets and storytellers amongst us, who have stepped up to share their images and ideas to raise awareness and to create a body of witness, a testament to our collective humanity in this moment of clear and present danger for sexually abused and raped male-children at risk for the transmission of HIV and with little access to frameworks created to alleviate their trauma. Our empathetic artists, poets and storytellers are a heterogeneous group of men, women, adolescents and children embedded within distinct localities around the world. Their medium of expertise allows us to glimpse behind cruel stereotypes and roadblocks. Their networks of voices reach across historical, geographical and cultural boundaries, and today through harnessing technologies ability to reach far into the depth and breadth of our communities around the world, they are gifting their time and skills to assist with the process of disseminating KNOWLEDGE.
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The Boys
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