Washington Blade - November 30, 2007
Jennifer Vanasco*

Dr. Kevin De Cock, director of the World Health Organization's AIDS department, told the Associated Press, "For the first time, we are seeing a decline in global AIDS deaths."

This is wonderful, of course.

But 33.2 million cases worldwide is still 33.2 million. How big a number is that? It's more than the population of Canada.

With the approach of World AIDS Day Dec. 1, let's spend a minute and review some sobering facts from the CDC.

• Between 1 and 1.7 million people in the United States are currently living with AIDS.

• More than half a million people have died from it.

• AIDS is the No. 1 killer of African Americans between 25 and 44. Black women become infected from heterosexual sex or drug injection; black men get HIV from sex with other men, even though many don't consider themselves gay.

• Almost 400,000 white people are living with or have been killed by AIDS, compared to 156,000 Latinos.

• There is a new infection every 13 minutes and infection rates in the U.S. - despite this adjustment - haven't fallen in 15 years.

• According to Gay Men's Health Crisis, the U.S. is one of the few countries not to have a national strategy for fighting AIDS. Yet even at the "gay" presidential debate, AIDS was glossed over.

• About 42 percent of new cases in the U.S. are due to same-sex sexual transmission. That's about 17,000 a year.

SEVENTEEN THOUSAND IS a pretty big number, too. It's about the population of my suburban hometown. Numbers are difficult to relate to, I know. But imagine whole suburbs or neighborhoods getting HIV each year - maybe that will help you understand what a big deal this is.

AIDS is more than a gay disease, and once it moved beyond our community, once it was clear that this was a worldwide pandemic, once rock stars started singing about it and first ladies started holding tiny sick babies in developing countries, it stopped feeling central to our community's activism.

Yet AIDS is still a crisis.

When gay men stopped dying in an obvious, community-disrupting way, gays and lesbians started volunteering for other things and donating money to other causes. You no longer see a flock of red ribbons at gay gatherings. You no longer regularly hear AIDS mentioned in urgent conversations in bars.

I wonder how many younger queers have walked around the quilt. Marriage and the military are now our central issues, not AIDS funding and research.

But men (and fewer women) in our community are still getting sick and still dying. There is no working HIV vaccine. And although drugs have gotten better, there are still people who become sick with AIDS and die.

AIDS is still a crisis and this is still our issue.

It might seem like a less obvious issue, because younger people are no longer experiencing the personal devastation of losing dozens of people they love and know from a disease they don't understand.

But AIDS is a disease that strikes at the core of how we understand ourselves. We define our community by who we have romantic relations with, and often these relationships include sex.

If you're a man sleeping with other men, you live with the fear that you must be vigilant, or you might be infected with HIV or pass the virus on to someone else.

Even if they are HIV-negative, AIDS still casts a shadow over most gay men's lives. It still affects them and that means it still affects us, all of us in the GLBT community who believe in working together.

There is a leveling off of infections, but what of it? About 33.2 million people worldwide are living with AIDS. More than 25 million have died from it.

This Dec. 1, recommit to fighting AIDS in our country and around the world. Press our political candidates and legislative leaders to agree to develop a national strategy; give generously to organizations that support PWAs and provide health care and drugs to Americans, Africans, Indians.

There is no miracle here. It is a long fight, with no obvious vaccine, no obvious end.

But AIDS is not someone else's issue. It is our issue. And each of us must bring it back into the national conversation.

***

Jennifer Vanasco is a freelance writer and can be reached at jennifer.vanasco@gmail.com. Copyright 2007 Jennifer Vanasco. Reprinted with permission. www.jennifervanasco.com

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