Leading an Extraordinary Life: Wise Practices for an HIV ... - 2 Spirits

his isolation”. While members of the focus group felt it was “brave” for the model to
include himself and appreciated the poster’s objective, they widely found the poster to be
flawed due to the model’s posture and appearance. One participant stated, “Greg doesn’t
appear to have gone through a life of hell and abuse”. Another said, “Greg looks like he
is doing just fine without his mom and dad”. Across all focus groups, participants found
a complete “lack of sincerity” in the arrangement of Greg’s portrait.
The same problem emerges in series of five posters produced by The First
Nations and Inuit of Quebec HIV and AIDS Strategy. Each poster features a different
Aboriginal role model (a female elder #59; a young Inuit male #65; a young male
Northern Cree #68; an Aboriginal male medical doctor #67; and a young male doctor
#70) with the identical text about the fact that they are doing their “part to prevent the
spread of HIV in my community”. The focus groups responded negatively to every
model except the female elder. Responses included, “the guy is not real” (#65), “just a
guy who likes to fish” (#65), “too much of a role model – don’t relate to the well-off
Indian” (#67), and “tired of the clean cut people” (#67). In addition, the repetition of the
same message in each poster in the series causes it to loose sincerity. The conclusion is
that these model choices and their posture do not work for Two-Spirit men. In addition,
the prominence of such models contributes to the estrangement of Two-Spirit men from
their communities as they cannot relate to the models or their message. Additionally, the
choice of these models affects the self-worth of front-line Two-Spirit workers as the
posters celebrate a different breed of Aboriginal HIV message bearers and do not include
or recognize the less well-off, marginalized, impoverished front line people working hard
at the centre of the epidemic.
Family abandonment, community ostracism, and isolation are serious issues. The
selection of models’ and their postures in these posters do not address this issue. In fact,
these posters confound the problem of Two-Spirit men’s estrangement from Aboriginal
society and the loss of self-worth. Overall, it is very important to select models with care
and use social marketing campaigns as an opportunity to recognize those who are doing
the hard, day-to-day, frontline work. The wise choice of models are Two-Spirit males
who are not clean cut and middle class, but people who appear to have suffered
discrimination, poverty, and alienation and speak with sincerity from deep experiences.
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