Once a week, the five friends, all members of the Abundant Life Cathedral here, get together to eat sushi, sip wine and talk. But one recent afternoon, the women chose a different activity: They went to see "Not a Day Goes By," a musical about black men on the "down low" who, while not calling themselves gay or bisexual, have sex with other men, often behind the backs of their wives and girlfriends.
To these women, it was a subject of increasing urgency.
"Once I found out how prevalent the down low was in our community, I was very afraid," said one of the women, Tracy Scott, a 37-year-old government relations consultant.
Her friend Misha King, 35, said she needed to get as much information as she could, as quickly as she could.
"I've been on field trips to the gay bars and have seen guys that look like men you would date," Ms. King said. "I treat every man as a bisexual because I don't want to end up as the sister with H.I.V."
Not to put too fine a point on it, but that should pretty much have been her standard operating procedure for the past 20 years. People lie about their sex lives; trusting them before you know them well is foolish. Mind, at some point, you do have to decide to let down your guard, but still, why would you do that early in a relationship?
(Purely a side note: I do love how Miss King talks about "field trips to the gay bars". Makes one feel like a zoo exhibit, or something that the Crocodile Hunter would be declaiming about.)
In government studies of 29 states, a black woman was 23 times more likely to be infected with AIDS than was a white woman, and black women accounted for 71.8 percent of new H.I.V. cases in women from 1999 to 2002. Though new cases of H.I.V. among black women have been stable in the past few years, the number of those who have been infected through heterosexual sex has risen. [...] In February, health officials identified a fast-spreading outbreak of infections among 84 men, primarily black students at 37 colleges in North Carolina. The majority were infected through sex with other men, but a third reported that they had had sex with men and women.
"What we learned from the research we did with college men here is the potential for H.I.V. to enter the mainstream population of the black community," said Dr. Peter Leone, medical director of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services H.I.V. prevention unit and a co-author of a study of the 84 men.
"This is a big change and may be a defining moment," Dr. Leone added. "I don't mean to sound like Chicken Little, but if we don't react to this very quickly and aggressively, it'll be like the 80's all over again. Instead of gay white men, though, we'll be dealing with large numbers of young black men and their female partners." [...] the North Carolina findings made it clear that H.I.V. had the potential to spread to a wider circle of blacks. In particular, the new research has alarmed black women. Now in online chat rooms, at book clubs, on radio call-in shows and in whispered conversations with friends, many are trying to piece together information to figure out if men, whether one-night stands or their husbands, may have secret lives putting them at risk.
"H.I.V./AIDS is a disease of opportunity, not socioeconomics," said Phill Wilson, executive director of the Black AIDS Institute in Los Angeles. "The research out of North Carolina reveals that among black folks, no matter who you are or who you think you are, you are not safe from H.I.V."
And once again, once the initial flurry dies down, the greater society at large will likely just shrug and say, "Oh, well. Just don't have sex with black people." That was the general reaction regarding gay men once more information was available about AIDS, so there's no reason it won't be the reaction when this new outbreak occurs. And because people are who and what they are, it probably will occur. Unfortunately, it's very hard to make people prevent a problem; for some reason, we seem to prefer to react to crises instead.
Posted by iain at April 05, 2004 01:14 AM
