... having been breathed out

So this excerpt is egregiously long, but I found it both fascinating and almost literally incredible, and wanted to capture it for future reference after I return the book to the library. Putting quite a bit of it under a cut. Warnings for everything you might expect given the subject matter:

Sex workers continued to bear the brunt of the persecution [from government, medical, press, and societal stigma around HIV/AIDS. In addition to hospitals refusing to treat HIV-positive patients, courts refusing to let HIV-positive people marry, and employers firing HIV-positive employees, which were issues faced by all HIV-positive Indians, o]n the orders of the courts or government, sex workers were routinely rounded up in raids and forcibly tested for HIV, with those testing positive incarcerated indefinitely. In 1994, the Maharashtra government attempted to pass legislation that would have allowed it to brand HIV-positive sex workers with indelible ink. In 1996, the Mumbai High Court ordered the arrest and mandatory HIV testing of more than four hundred sex workers; many of the women were incarcerated for over a year, and seven died in that time. The Supreme Court made several rulings that further legitimized the persecution and abuse of sex workers.

My notebooks were soon overflowing. Every one of the interviews was heartbreaking because of the desperation they exuded, so different from the philosophical resignation with which I had seen Indians accept more conventional catastrophes, however awful or unremitting. Their terror leached through as relentless anxiety. Every conversation returned to the looming prospect of death. For those with children, there was the added feverish dread about which relative or friend could be trusted to house them, how to set aside some money to provide for them, how to ensure their well-being.

The one constant I found in my research was that AIDS had devastated the lives of India's sex workers like no force ever before. In the dozen years since Selvi and the five other sex workers in the Madras reformatory had been found to have HIV, countless more sex workers had contracted HIV, had fallen mortally sick, or had died. [But due to the rudimentary state of India's vital registration systems at the time, and the lack of sites providing trend data on HIV infection rates], no one knew exactly how many—or even exactly where.

[...]

But it soon became evident, to my great surprise, that alongside the havoc AIDS was wreaking in the lives of sex workers, the epidemic had also catalyzed positive changes for them, perhaps even transformative changes for those who might survive the epidemic. ( Read more )

—Siddharth Dube, An Indefinite Sentence: A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sex

This actually GOES ON for another 15 pages to talk about SIAAP's growing influence on the development of global policy around AIDS prevention in sex-worker communities not a decade after their founding (!!!), but I have literally been transcribing for an hour and a half. Still. Fucking amazing stuff.