via Duncan Osborne in Gay City NewsPublishing on the website positivelyaware.com, Jim Pickett wrote in August that AIDS groups and the government "continue to miserably fail gay and bisexual men in the area of HIV prevention."
Pickett, the advocacy director at the AIDS Foundation of Chicago, cited data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that was released in June and showed new HIV diagnoses among gay and bisexual men in the US in 33 states had increased 8.6 percent from 2001 through 2006.
"I was not in the least surprised," he wrote. "[We] have been essentially ignoring gay men of all colors in addressing this epidemic. Instead, we have chosen the politically expedient path of pushing the false notion of a generalized epidemic in which 'we are all at risk.'"
Since June, the CDC has released data showing the gay and bisexual men accounted for 57 percent of the new HIV infections in 2006. The agency reported that new infections among all other groups fell, but new HIV infections among gay and bisexual men reached their highest peak ever in the mid-'80s, declined by the early '90s, and then increased through 2006.
Separately, Walt Senterfitt, board co-chair at the Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project, wrote in a September CHAMP newsletter, "There has also been a consistent tendency over at least the last 15 years within much of the AIDS community itself - and certainly by the media and other institutions of civil society enlisted in the struggle against HIV/AIDS - to 'de-gay-ify' HIV/AIDS."
Both Pickett and Senterfitt called for a renewed focus on gay men and HIV and demanded that resources that match HIV's impact among gay men be spent on that population. Just as important, Pickett told Gay City News, "We have to claim this, we as gay men have to own this."
But nearly 30 years after the CDC reported the first cases of AIDS in a small group of American gay men, it may be that the broader community of gay men does not want to own HIV.
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