MSM Term Makes Gay and Bisexual Men Invisible, Says GayLatino Network

ASUNCION, Paraguay & MEXICO CITY--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The term “men who have sex with men”, referred to as “MSM”, was developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s as an epidemiological identifier of a sexual practice associated with HIV/AIDS infection; however, it began to generalize to include gay, bisexual, transgender women, and all those assigned male at birth who have sex with other men, whether or not they identify as gay, bisexual, or transgender.

The problem is that the only public or international resources that LGBT organizations could access in those days were those associated with HIV/AIDS. It began to become more frequent throughout Latin America and in developing countries, health sectors, and medical services that they no longer talked about gay and bisexual men but only about MSM. They were identified by their sexual practice and not by their identity or self-identification.

The first to mobilize to move away from that term were trans women – if they identified as women, they could not identify themselves within the term "men who have sex with men" or MSM; therefore, international organizations and several governments accepted that for issues of HIV could not be considered within the category of MSM.

“That protest was successful,” says Simón Cazal, co-founder of the Paraguayan organization SOMOSGAY and Regional Secretary of Red GayLatino, the largest network of gay leaders in Latin America. Simón adds, “Now it is time that gay and bisexual men advocate to eliminate the term MSM. It has cost us a lot of work, effort, suffering, and deaths to achieve that we are humanized as gay and bisexual men and not only as a sexual act. The international term MSM continues to dehumanize us in our territories.”

"In our daily lives, we recognize ourselves as gay or bisexual, we do not self-identify as MSM," says Ronald Céspedes, Bolivian, and president of the Executive Committee of GayLatino and adds, "So it is imposed nonsense to point out only our sexual practice instead of our form of identity and integral development of our personality, thereby reinforcing social, cultural, and legal homophobia and biphobia."

The GayLatino Network has decided to launch a campaign so that in all the documents of the Network and the organizations of its affiliated members, the term MSM will be eliminated and replaced by gay and bisexual men. Likewise, international agencies in Latin America will be demanded to stop using the term MSM and refer to us as gay and bisexual men.

Dr. Jorge Saavedra, Mexican, Executive Director of the AHF Institute of Global Public Health, and member of the GayLatino Network points out that "There is already another term coined by international agencies that work on the issue of HIV/AIDS worldwide, and that is ‘Key Populations’ that incorporates, often without naming them, the groups previously considered MSM. When writing international documents, they only refer to ‘Key Populations’, thus achieving a double invisibility of gay and bisexual men.”

For its part, AHF, the largest HIV/AIDS organization globally, with a presence in more than 45 countries, supports the GayLatino Network for this campaign.

"It is a battle that we will surely win because we are human, gay, bisexual, and we will not cease to exist," added Simón Cazal.

About AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF)

AIDS Healthcare Foundation, the largest global AIDS organization, currently provides medical care and/or services to over 1.7 million people in 45 countries worldwide in the US, Africa, Latin America/Caribbean, the Asia/Pacific Region and Europe. To learn more about AHF, please visit our website: www.aidshealth.org, find us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/aidshealth and follow us on Twitter: @aidshealthcare and Instagram: @aidshealthcare.