Over the past few weeks, I participated as an audience member in two town hall style meetings on HIV in the Black community. The first, at Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, and the other at the Gay & Lesbian Center billed as, The State of Gay Black Men. The panel discussion at the first event, was moderated by AIDS Budget Action Coalition Director, Manuel Rivera, and included Dr. Monica Sweeney, Assistant Commissioner of the New York City Health Department's Bureau of HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control. Panelists spoke of how the incidence of new infections is raging among Black and Latino people and how we must secure a greater share of the one-billion-plus dollars which are being allotted to HIV prevention in New York City each year. We must also hold each other to account, they said, for how those dollars are spent.
The most salient perspective issuing forth from that panel came from Dr. Sweeney in response to a woman who proposed that HIV is being put in condoms to destroy Black people. Dr. Sweeney urged the small grassroots audience peopled by HIV fatigued, stigma-phobic, conspiracy theorists, among others, that, “We think of HIV as if it existed in a vacuum. It doesn’t. The discrimination part, including poor education, poor housing, and job discrimination – all those happened before HIV. If we think of HIV in the context of health disparities; obesity, heart disease, stroke, arthritis; we have all of them, and the conspiracy part was not around HIV, it happened way before [HIV] based on the policies in the US around race issues.”
Oddly, when broaching the subject that 50% of the new HIV infections in NY are among men who have sex with men, Dr. Sweeney said, “However we shouldn’t talk about men who have sex with men, because there are a lot of men who have sex with men who are not HIV+. Another panelist, who identified as a heterosexual HIV+ man about to turn fifty, cited stigma as a challenge in fighting the disease but insisted that we oughtn’t waste time talking about whether men are having sex with men because, “If they’re having sex with anyone, they’re at risk,” he insisted.
I proposed to the crowd that that gentleman was right about stigma being a serious challenge in the fight against HIV but that, “we have to talk about the fact that there are many Black men who love men. We are the most stigmatized people on the planet. Those stigmas include the issues of manhood and sexuality. Sexuality exists on a continuum. We have to create spaces in which to talk about those issues. Not talking about it is killing us. There is also a stigma around the identification, ‘gay,’ which is seen by many Blacks as a White thing. Many Black men who love men will not go to venues where gay identification and HIV are the bywords to receive service. In conceiving culturally competent prevention models, this fact must be taken into account.”
At the Gay & Lesbian Center town hall, the audience expressed frustration over People of Color in Crisis’, and NYS Black Gay Network’s being defunded, and Gay Men of African Descent looking as if it is moving in the same direction in the face of administrative and fiscal underperformance.
I suggested that the crisis facing us extends beyond administrative and fiscal mismanagement. “The problem,” I proposed, “is that the prevention and wellness models being employed to assist Black people are invalid. If we are in earnest about more than just keeping our respective organizations afloat, and really seek to help stem the tide of HIV/AIDS among other morbidities plaguing us, we should convene a think tank to explore alternative culturally competent prevention models, and conduct our efforts on behalf Black people in centers in our own community,”
Here’s to hoping we come together along these lines.
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