Brothers and Sisters

by Lucile Scott for POZ

Having competed for funding, media attention and support within the African-American community, HIV-positive straight black women and HIV-positive gay black men are finding common ground in a new goal: prevention and survival. Here, leaders from each camp share their united battle plan.

After Kali Lindsey, now 27, was infected with HIV four years ago, he went to his doctor, only to get a dose of bigotry that nearly kept him from returning. “The nurse said to me, ‘Come on, you’re gay, you had to know you would get HIV one day,’ ” he says, adding that the words drowned out all the medical information the doctor doled out that day. Lindsey relays the episode as an example of the pervasive homophobia and HIV stigma black gay men face daily—even in the medical establishment. “There is so much homophobia in the black community that men who have sex with men [MSM] often live below the radar to please their family and friends and avoid violence,” he says. Fortunata Kasege, 33, meanwhile, embodies another AIDS-ravaged group: heterosexual black women. Kasege was diagnosed in 1997 during a routine screening while pregnant. (Her daughter, now 10, is negative.) “I didn’t think I was at risk,” she says. “I waited until I was 19 to even kiss a boy. I couldn’t relate to HIV prevention messages, which focused on people with certain behaviors or multiple partners.” And what of the man she believes infected her? “I trusted him,” she says.

Kasege and Lindsey’s stories are increasingly common. For more than a decade, HIV has disproportionately affected African-American MSM and heterosexual women. Facing an insufficient response from black leaders and the federal government while the media scrounges to pinpoint a culprit, these two groups often find themselves on the defensive.

Instead of joining forces they have sometimes pointed fingers at one another for fueling the epidemic among African Americans by perpetuating homophobia (straight women) or violating trust (MSM who may also have relationships with women). Recently, however, Kasege, Lindsey and other members of both demographics have started pushing to get all involved to move beyond blame and pool their efforts.

This June two dozen black men and women, all leading AIDS advocates, began doing just that. They convened in a hotel in Charlotte, North Carolina, to devise a plan to move forward—together. “We decided we need to combine our resources and [focus] our direction,” says Debra Fraser Howze, chair of the Black Women’s HIV/AIDS Network, which planned the conference along with the National Black Gay Men’s Advocacy Coalition and the National Minority AIDS Council (NMAC). “It was long overdue.”

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