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STFree Certificates founder Eli Dancy is one of 15,000 cardholders.
Monaster/News
Dancy displays a card.
Monaster/News
Call it a license to thrill.
Sexually active New Yorkers looking to wise up before turning the lights down can verify their partners’ sexual health status with a simple glance in their wallet.
Manhattan-based company STFree Certifications provides its health-conscious customers a sexual history “license” with a phone number on the back that enables them to prove their testing backgrounds to potential partners.
More than 15,000 people nationwide have signed up for the STFree service, launched in 2004 by Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, native Eli Dancy.
Dancy, a former club promoter, said he saw “a lot of irresponsibility” in his neighborhood and created the STFree card to help raise awareness.
“In places like where I grew up and where I worked, there are incredibly high HIV and STD rates,” said Dancy, 28. “This card opens up the conversation for people to talk about it.”
Nearly one-third of New Yorkers with multiple sex partners regularly have sex without condoms, government statistics show. More than 100,000 New Yorkers have HIV or AIDS.
“People in our community don’t take the time to check each other, and it puts a lot of lives at risk,” said Harlem resident Tawanna Jones, 23.
At registration, which can be completed online or inside an STFree van that travels citywide, program subscribers must provide a detailed sexual profile and be tested.
To access the testing history of an STFree cardholder, partners must have access to the phone number located on the back of the card as well as to a PIN number provided only to the STFree member.
“This card will keep people from lying and get it all out in the open,” said Bronx beautician Lorna Smith, 51, who lives in the borough with the highest AIDS death toll citywide.
“It will let you know who’s safe, and who’s not. It’s definitely a good idea,” said fireproofer Eric Lopez, 28, of Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
STFree members pay a one-time $19.99 fee for the service – which Dancy said will allow more people to join.
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Madonna performs at Roseland on Wednesday in New York City. More Photos >
Halfway through her 32-minute set on Wednesday night at the Roseland Ballroom in Manhattan, Madonna offered a message of sympathy.
“All you people I saw sleeping in the street last night,” she said, “this song is for you.”
It was “Hung Up,” about the agony of waiting. And as she finished the song, she added, just in case the message wasn’t clear: “Anybody who knows me knows how much I hate to wait.”
New York may be a city of the impatient, but for Madonna’s fans, Wednesday’s show proved that seeing her for free in a 2,200-capacity hall — minuscule by her usual touring standards — was something worth waiting for. And waiting for a very long time.
The line outside Roseland, on West 52nd Street, formed 60 hours before show time. By late Tuesday it had stretched around the block as the faithful stood and sat and slept and caffeinated themselves for the chance to score one of the 750 wrist bands that would guarantee free admission.
Erica Gabriel, a 28-year-old makeup artist, waited through the night on line with friends. Once duly wrist-banded some time after 6 a.m., she returned home to prepare the elaborate, swooping hairstyle and “stewardess-Madonna-tricky-tranny look” that she sported early Wednesday evening — as she waited on line again to receive a second wristband.
“Gays don’t camp out,” said one of Ms. Gabriel’s friends, as the group laughed, “but we’ll camp out for this.”
Even those who joined the queue relatively late proved to be professionals of a sort.
“I’m not fanatical,” said Walter Sharpe, 36, an interior designer from Brooklyn. “But I do collect Madonna magazine covers, and I’ve got maybe 170 of them.”
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