Archives: Organisaties

Part of the exhibition was a display of several photos from the exhibition on billboards that served as promotion for House of Hiv.

On the Stoperaplein in front of the city hall, stood six panels with twelve photos that tell us a lot about the history of the Dutch HIV community

Caught in the four themes (fighting, caring, remembering and healing), we have selected twelve photos that serve as a moment of contemplation and as a business card for the rest of the exhibition.

Images of drag queen Nicky Nicole, who was photographed by Erwin Olaf for the Speelset, one of the HIV prevention projects from the nineties of the then Schorerstichting.

There was also a quilt (aggregate flag) that was made with the help of the artist Lalo Fernandez for the clients and buddies of Schorer Buddy Zorg.

One of the rooms was exhibited in the city hall of Amsterdam. It was accessible for anyone who happened to be in the area.

House of Hiv – Fluid Dialogues

This work is an open dialogue in which people living with HIV tell their stories. It puts the emphasis on lived experience and personal stories rather than numbers and statistics that often dominate the discourse around HIV.  

It combines microscopic images of blood from donors living with HIV and mixes them with their personal stories, constantly recombining stories and images and through that creating an ever changing, intertwining tapestries of lives affected by HIV. 

It’s easy to slip into a behavior that is discriminating if actions are guided by fear. But it is important to remain empathetic towards people who must battle prejudices and judgments that come with a virus others try to protect themselves from. Caution towards HIV can easily turn into an aversive fear towards a person living with it. What we need though is empathy and not fear. 

Stigma is a protective mechanism against the fear of contracting HIV, it creates an ‘us and them’ narrative, people at risk and those who are not, creating distance intended to act as a safeguard. This work promotes a recognition that there is no ‘us & them’ – we are all ‘us’.

Fluid Dialogues is made by Basse Stittgen, microENVISION, Juan Arturo Garcia and Andrés García Vidal in cooperation with Leo Schenk and hello gorgeous magazine. 

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Trans United is a platform for trans people with a bi-cultural background. Various workshops are offered with various themes, aimed at informing, stimulating and making the community resilient.

Part of Trans United is the Trans United Clinic, a collaboration with the GGD Amsterdam, aimed at sexual health care and medical supervision of hormone use.

House of Hiv – House of Trans United

Historically speaking, trans people of colour have fared poorly. Being marginalised on multiple fronts over the past forty years, this group has received little structural attention and care in both mainstream healthcare and prevention campaigns. Trans United Nederland was co-founded in 2018 by Dinah de Riquet-Bons, Ana Paula Lima and Samira Hak, and has been filling a gap by giving this still relatively invisible group both space and a voice. 

Under the motto “It’s never too late to be you,” Trans United in Amsterdam develops initiatives aimed at providing mental and physical care for trans people of colour, including its award-winning Trans United Clinic. They also created an informal meeting place: the “safer space” where you are right now. In this space, members of the target group can catch their breath, get advice, exchange experiences and hang out together in a relaxed atmosphere. 

The social structure of Trans United is more or less comparable to that of the various Houses that developed in the US in connection with Balls in the 1980s. Balls are competitive events revolving around looks, attitude, dance, fashion and realness. The legendary documentary Paris is Burning and the Netflix series Pose give insight into what things are like in such a House. Within this Black form of community building, everyone is welcome: queens, queers, trans people and everything in between. In fact, we like to see ourselves as the House of Trans United.

We invite you to become further acquainted with Dinah, the trans community of colour and the Trans United Clinic.

These archives discuss black queer history in the Netherlands and are set up with activists and community members from different generations.

House of Hiv – House of The Black Queer Archives

It’s almost impossible to summarise in a single room the forty-year struggle against HIV and Aids by the LGBTQ+ community of colour. It’s not just a matter of the limited physical space available here. The fact is, the Black scene was and is still much less visible and more sheltered. By Black we mean not only Afro-Dutch, but in fact all non-white communities. 

In many cultural groups of colour, the LGBTQ+ communities still face considerable stigma – not to mention the stigma of HIV. The risk of being rejected by your family was – and unfortunately still is – very real. On top of that, your entire family runs a risk of being turned away by the cultural group to which they belong. Secrecy and discretion are commonly the only survival tactics. 

In this room, we decided to let a number of activists tell Black history in words and/or pictures. We asked the following prominent activists who were/are open about their sexual preferences and sometimes also about their HIV status: Jerry Haime, Anne Krul, Reggie Williams, Marlon Reina, Mikel Haman and Andre Reeder.

Since the 1980s, they have all been creating safe spaces and community initiatives for people of colour, whether or not they were openly queer and/or living with HIV.

We hope you feel at home and get to know these Black community leaders and initiatives. 

IHLIA LGBTI Heritage is the place where the LGBTQ history of The Netherlands is archived and preserved.

House of Hiv – House of IHLIA

There were two rooms on display at IHLIA: in one room you could learn more about Janherman Veenker, who died in 2005, whose archive has been bequeathed to IHLIA; the second room was a treasure trove of special pieces that IHLIA has in its possession. 

Janherman Veenker has meant a lot to the LGBTQ+ community and later also to the HIV community. When Aids emerged, he was one of the first in our country to realize the impact it could have on the position of gays, sex workers and drug users. He was already active in Groningen in 1967 at the age of 17 and moved to Amsterdam for work where he became active for the COC Amsterdam. He was a secretary at the COC’s first European Aids Conference in 1984 and later secretary of the government’s advisory body, the National Aids Combating Commission (NCAB). He was also involved in the establishment of the Aidsfonds and a board member at the drug organization Mainline.

This room also considered the role of the LGBTQ+ community in tackling HIV and Aids, something Veenker encouraged. How the community shaped the information for its own group and the joint mourning for the loss of loved ones.

The second room was a treasure trove of special pieces that have been bequeathed over the years and housed at IHLIA. Including archival pieces of Yehuda Sofer and Dolly (Terence) Cook, who were volunteers at IHLIA and died of Aids.

There were also two quilts on display, including those for Schorer Buddycare clients and buddies.

The Prostitution Information Center (PIC) provides information about sex work from the perspective of sex workers for anyone who is interested.

House of Hiv – House of PIC

In the history of HIV, the stories of sex workers have remained largely underexposed. The Prostitution Information Center (PIC) is participating in this exhibition to help make this group more visible.

It is important to record the stories of those who experienced the Aids epidemic while at least some of that generation are still alive. Many stories have yet to be told, while others have already been forgotten. Those need to be recorded now while there is still time. Another problem is that much of the material is scattered around. This exhibition brings it all together. 

Over the years, various organisations have been working to promote the interests of sex workers. When HIV/Aids reared its head in the Netherlands in the 1980s, advocacy was fragmented. Amsterdam’s Public Health Service (GGD) was promoting prevention during consultations with clients at its outpatient STI clinic, while the Mr. A. de Graaf Foundation had been working on promoting the acceptance of sex work as legitimate work since the 1960s. In its wake, The Red Thread, an advocacy-support organisation for sex workers, was founded in 1985. PIC began combating the stigma surrounding sex work in 1994.

At the PIC there was more to see about the early years of the PIC, the impact of HIV and AIDS on sex workers, and how sex workers still face stigma today.

Photos of the exhibition: