Charles King - "It's really about human dignity"

viaThe Villager (NY), by John Bayles

AIDS activist says fight’s ‘bigger than marriage’

It’s impossible to pigeonhole Charles King, executive director of Housing Works. He’s a pioneer, a radical, a respected voice in the L.G.B.T. community and a veteran of both the local and national effort to provide housing and resources for people living with H.I.V. and AIDS.

He’s one of the only openly gay men living with H.I.V. who is in charge of an AIDS service organization. He’s also the son of a Southern Baptist preacher from Texas and is a Yale graduate. And when he begins speaking about the gay community and AIDS, you feel as if you’re being preached to, perhaps because King is an ordained minister himself who still teaches a Sunday Bible-study class to his clients and speaks with a slow, committed, thoughtful cadence.

“What I find very frustrating about the organized gay community,” said King, “is all too often it’s about what ‘I’m not getting.’ ”

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Gay and AIDS community condemn Frieden CDC appointment

“The bad news is that [Frieden’s] propensity to ignore the concerns of affected communities may hinder his ultimate success in achieving the goals of aligning public health with the best that science has to offer.”

via Housing Works, by David Thorpe

This week’s appointment of New York City Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provoked dismay among AIDS advocates and the gay press in New York City and beyond (with some exceptions).

As Health Commissioner, Frieden tried to do away with informed consent for HIV tests, made an Orwellian power grab for the medical information of people living with HIV, and infamously mishandled the so-called AIDS “superbug” case in 2005. As head of the CDC, Frieden may try to bully states into adopting routine testing without informed consent and will almost certainly take a step away from the real concerns of real people living with HIV/AIDS.

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Of interest in Gay City News:
Policy Regarding Bathhouses and Other Commercial Sex Venues in New York City

Where are the black gay men?

via Housing Works

Two weeks ago individuals and organizations across the nation marked National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day. Judging by many of the articles, press releases and events commemorating the day, however, you might never guess that the highest percentage of new HIV infections in 2006 was among black gay men.

Why, even on a day dedicated to black AIDS awareness, do black gay men remain a footnote?

“It’s symptomatic of the problem we face of ridding our community of HIV in order to break the back of the epidemic,” said Ernest Hopkins, policy director of the Black Gay Advocacy Coalition. “The most heavily impacted population by percentages is black gay men. If you want to talk about this epidemic you have to start there, and then move very quickly to black women, or you’re not doing your job.”

Two events that got advocates talking were the National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS (NBLCA)’s forums in New York and in Washington, D.C. (the latter included black ministers from the D.C. area).

The New York forum extensively covered women, incarceration and drug use, while gay men and homosexuality were mentioned in passing and only as they related to women being infected by men who have sex with men. The theme of the BLCA event was “HIV/AIDS and Black Women,” but the question remains why, on National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, one of the highest profile African-American groups failed to address the most-affected black demographic.

“A lot of us left the session angry and we weren’t sure why,” said Kristin Goodwin, Housing Works Director of New York Policy and Organzing. “There was nothing wrong on the surface, but it was distressing the way the event made women seem like victims and didn’t even account for gay men who don’t have sex with women.”

NBLCA President C. Virginia Fields told the Update that her speech at the event was intended to be broad-based. “I was focused on the community. I think when you talk about the disease, you talk about all people,” she said, adding that there was particular focus on women and children because “that’s the population I find often does not get mentioned.” Fields also said that “it’s crucial that black gay men be part of the conversation not just around AIDS, but making homophobia unacceptable.”

Celebrity scandalette

Another Black AIDS Day dust-up involved Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), which solicited its board member, ER star Gloria Reuben, to write an op-ed for Huffington post about AIDS in the black community and the need for comprehensive sex education.

People were upset because Reuben didn’t mention gay men, or men period, in her piece.

“HIV/AIDS in this country is a man’s disease – about ¾ of the epidemic – most of which is among gay men of all races, and particularly among gay black men and gay Latino men. Not mentioning this fact in one sentence, or even a phrase, is absolutely unacceptable,” Jim Pickett of the AIDS Foundation of Chicago wrote in a message to the Federal AIDS Policy Partnership (FAPP) listserv.

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Poor and Gay Aren't Mutually Exclusive Categories

By Diana Scholl

Housing Works

When it comes to addressing HIV and AIDS among gay men, there are a host of policy positions that need to be changed to create equality for gay men and men who have sex with men of all races . For example, we need to have comprehensive sexual health and awareness education which includes HIV prevention and treatment education both for students and those not currently in school HIV prevention education that teaches about safer sex for everyone — gay, straight and everything in-between-- in an open and accurate way. And there’s no way for us to have an effective National AIDS Strategy without acknowledging that all levels of government must do all that they can to end discrimination on the basis of who we have sex with.

But it’s impossible to demand that government address HIV among gay men without also demanding a critical examination of race and poverty.

A few not-so-fun facts:

• A black gay man is much more likely to get infected with HIV than a white gay man even if they’re both engaged in the same amount of “risky behavior”

• Black and Latino gay men are more likely to be diagnosed with AIDS and HIV concurrently and less likely to receive lifesaving antiretrovirals and continuing care than his white counterpart.

• 25 percent of gay teenagers are kicked out of their homes and become homeless, making them more likely to become infected with HIV than their non-homeless counterparts.

As Charles King said in a speech on World AIDS Day last year, “The reality is that AIDS is no longer so much a gay disease in the United States as it is a disease of race and poverty. And that brings to light a dirty secret about the organized and politically engaged gay community - that we are overwhelmingly white and reasonably well-off, and our movement is almost exclusively about rights for ourselves and people like us.”

To address both the needs of gay men and of everyone, we need targeted case management and housing to address as both prevention and health care measures. We need to implement targeted campaigns for prevention and getting people into care. We need the government to sponsor media campaigns that can’t be ignored. And of course, we need universal health care so no one falls through the cracks.

But above all, we must combat stigma and discrimination to get at the root of those problems that the government alone cannot solve.

The CDC’s rise in reported infections shows that 45 percent of new infections were among blacks, and 53 percent were among men who have sex with men (MSM). And too often we talk about AIDS as a disease affecting “black people” and “gay people” as though these are always mutually exclusive categories. But 63 percent of new infections among blacks occurred among men who have sex with men, most of them young men.

It’s impossible to talk about HIV and AIDS without talking about the intersection of race, gender, poverty and a litany of other issues, and it is important that the AIDS community and the gay community address these issues head on.

[Click here to read previous input into the 2009 Gay Men's Health Agenda. Please feel free to comment there - or you could send in a full post of your own here. We will be happy to publish it! The feedback we receive will be featured in the closing plenary of the upcoming National Gay Men's Health Summit and will be a means of moving the community forward in the new year around issues that are important to all of us.]

BUSTED ON BROADWAY

A dozen activists arrested in high-profile street protest demanding U.S. end Puerto Rico's AIDS nightmare

via Housing Works

It was everything you could hope for in a protest.

After staging a spirited press conference in lower Manhattan's Foley Square decrying U.S. neglect of Puerto Rico's worsening AIDS crisis, about 50 AIDS activists marched the short distance to Broadway and Worth streets. A dozen brave souls wearing blue T-shirts bearing a ghostly skull superimposed on a Puerto Rican flag paused for a red light, then lined up across Broadway holding up signs reading "Health and Human Services Must Act Now. People with AIDS in Puerto Rico are Dying." And then they waited for the cops.

It took New York's finest a while to arrive, giving the activists—supported by Housing Works, UDCAS New York, CitiWide Harm Reduction, Harm Reduction Coalition, New York City AIDS Housing Network, Gay Men's Health Crisis, Washington Heights CORNER Project and ACT UP Philly—plenty of time to chant "Puerto Rican AIDS Crisis, Save Lives Now," and make their point about U.S. inaction in the Commonwealth.

The goal of the protest was to pressure the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), the division of HHS that oversees HIV/AIDS in all U.S. states and territories, to take over the dispersal of millions in Ryan White CARE Act funds in Puerto Rico. Mismanagement and fraud of those dollars have led to a crippling of the island's AIDS infrastructure and grievous delays in care for people living with HIV/AIDS, including lack of access to medication.
The protest prompted HRSA to respond to the protestors demands...

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NOT-SO-GREAT EXPECTATIONS

From Housing Work's AIDS Issues Update

May 11, 2007

The Bush administration shocks AIDS advocates by abandoning its U.S. HIV-prevention goals; CDC official admits infections likely already on the rise.

Gerberding throws her hands up.

The same week that President Clinton brokered a groundbreaking deal on generic AIDS meds for developing countries, the Bush administration threw up its hands when it comes to stopping HIV in the U.S.

The Centers for Disease Control stunned attendees at its CDC/HRSA Advisory Council (CHAC) meeting with the last-minute announcement of its plan to dramatically reduce prevention goals for the next five years. Whereas in 2000 the CDC set the goal of reducing new infections by 50 percent by 2005, the "Addendum to the CDC Prevention Strategic Plan Through 2005" released this week only seeks to reduce new infections by 10 percent by the year 2010.

"We're disappointed," says Sean Barry, director of prevention policy for Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project (CHAMP), who attended the meeting. "The CDC is giving up on presenting a professional, needs-based vision of what resources they need and then mapping out targets. Even Bush's global AIDS initiative PEPFAR is aiming to prevent millions of infections. In the U.S. we're not setting those ambitious targets."

It's not clear why the CDC made such a dispiriting change in its prevention goals especially since only two months ago it released its (highly criticized) plan for a "heightened response" to halting the epidemic in the African American community. The addendum claimed that the new scaled-back prevention objectives still focused "on eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in new HIV infections."

"Half of new infections are among African Americans. Even if you reduced only those infections by 10 percent, you'd still have big disparities," says David Munar, associate director of the AIDS Foundation of Chicago, adding, "This is a disappointing retreat from an achievable goal. All we have to do is appropriate and direct resources to effective programs, and we're doing neither."

More infections, fewer dollars

As troubling as the eviscerated prevention target is the likelihood of a rise in HIV infections in the U.S. According to Barry, Rob Jansen, the CDC's deputy director of HIV/AIDS Prevention, said that the U.S. will be "lucky" if there's not an increase in HIV infections in the coming years. Munar backs up that assessment. "The CDC has been doing extensive research to update its incidence estimates. It was supposed to be released last year and may be this year. But anecdotal evidence already suggests infections could be substantially higher," he says.

Under fire from meeting attendees, Jansen and Kevin Fenton, director of the CDC's National Center for HIV Prevention, explained that the CDC hadn't achieved its goal of reducing new HIV infections by 50 percent because the agency assumed it would get more prevention dollars over the years — but that never happened. The CDC's prevention budget has declined 17 percent since 2001, when the first strategic HIV-prevention plan was approved. However, the agency recently found $45 million in additional 2007 prevention funds and will be issuing grant request guidelines soon. It is expected that new dollars will be aimed at routine testing.

Fenton also said that Bush's Office of Management and Budget criticized the CDC for its goals. Barry thinks the CDC needs to see the writing on the wall: "They're still acting as if the Republicans control the Senate and Bush can interrogate any agency he wants to. It's the CDC's job to say, 'We can do more.' They've backed away from that."

Fenton, Jansen and others at the CDC did not return the Update's calls.

The CDC's budget woes are not likely to end any time soon. It's facing budget reductions for fiscal year 2008 despite the fact that director Julie Gerberding says she needs $1 billion increase in funding for the agency to do its job.
More bad timing

The CDC heightened the ire of CHAC committee members by releasing its new prevention targets on Friday afternoon, May 4, giving those on the committee little time to evaluate it before the advisory council meeting began on Monday, May 7. "I think the CDC was trying to rush a decision on this," says Barry. They're a couple years overdue in amending the plan—so it's not like they haven't had time to work on it. They knew this would stir up resentment and opposition."

Conference attendees proposed numerous revisions to the CDC plan, which also set goals for the numbers of people getting tested, the scope of prevention, care and treatment services, and the monitoring of the epidemic and success of programs aimed at stopping it.

Committee-member resistance led CDC officials to say they would "stay up late" Monday night and come back with a revised proposal. The revision compromise says the goal is to "reduce new HIV infections by a minimum of 5 percent a year" while keeping the 10 percent by 2010 objective, and "incorporate... resource strategies and constraints to further explain the achievement of past and new goals."

Barry was unimpressed by the changes and could only grasp at a future silver lining. "We're on the verge of a presidential election. I can only hope that this setback in the federal government's commitment to prevention can be used to draw a distinction between the path we're on now and the path the next president needs to take us on."