Bay Area Reporter - March 30, 2001
David Fraser

The organization's mission to provide up-to-date information on HIV, AIDS, and sexually transmitted diseases has expanded dramatically with its new project to reach out and inform people.

Many are responding to the online effort, said Marcel Miranda, deputy program director at Stop AIDS. With the help of a $150,000 grant from the San Francisco Department of Public Health's Fund for Innovative Initiatives, Stop AIDS hired Vincent Wright as Web outreach manager and got busy. They're training volunteers now.

"This work is so important," Miranda told the Bay Area Reporter. "It's a counterpart to the other types of outreach we do. And it's a collaborative effort - we solicit input from the volunteers; they're our eyes and ears."

Under the screen name StopAIDSMM, Miranda joins sex chat rooms and waits for men to come to him.

"They read the personal profile, and then they might start to ask questions," Miranda said. "We respond, but only through private messages."

The dialogues are frank and to the point, and are drawing a growing audience. "We get inquiries from all over the country," said Miranda, who is often found aboard AOL and is focusing his efforts on the major LGBT site Gay.com. Both the New York Times and the Advocate have run stories on the program.

Wright said he works to avoid giving canned answers when he's online wearing his Stop AIDS hat. "It's about trust à I talk like I'd talk to a guy on the street." Many conversations last through 15 minutes of fast typing.

"Prevention is so complex," Wright said. "We're starting to see spikes [in STDs] that show prevention is needed more and more."

Top queries

Some questions recur: "We get a lot of queries on how safe oral sex is, on HIV, on rimming, on sex between positive and negative persons. Probably the most frequently asked topic is HIV," Wright said.

"Now there's people asking about PEP (post-exposure prophylaxis)," a treatment that may help prevent HIV seroconversion. The treatment needs to be done within 72 hours of exposure, he added.

The Web-based outreach program grew out of Miranda's years of experience in bringing prevention and other education to high-risk populations, especially those on the street. He worked with Polk Street hustlers and talked to their johns, always in an informational, non-judgmental way. Last year he figured the Internet was a ripe target for prevention information.

Stop AIDS has operated in San Francisco for 14 years, sending trained volunteers to places where gay and bisexual men gather, from Turk and Polk streets to SOMA bars and sex clubs.

"We put on our gaydar, " Miranda said, grinning. "Our volunteers have highly trained senses." He noted that online chat rooms can be "very sexually charged - it's not so different from doing outreach on the street."

The program started in January with a goal of conducting 100 interviews per week. Wright said currently it engages around 60-75 men, with the numbers expected to rise as volunteers complete their training.

Chat and chance

Expansion of the program onto the Internet came amid warnings from city health officials that men were meeting virtually in chat rooms and then physically, often for high-risk sex.

Gay.com, as reported in the B.A.R. last week, recently dropped its dedicated barebacking chat room. Company officials said members were free to create their own rooms.

Research presented by the DPH at the International AIDS Conference in Durban last year revealed how more and more men have turned to the Internet to find sex partners. Among the findings, said James Nguyen, director of communications for Stop AIDs, was that gay and bisexual men who had been treated for STDs were more likely to report finding sexual partners over the Internet. Moreover, gay and bi men reported higher levels of "sexual risk behavior," specifically receptive anal sex, with Internet partners, as compared to non-Internet partners.

As part of their online outreach, and also as a publicity method, Stop AIDS is holding a series of 10 cyber forums lasting three hours each. The goal is to reach a total of 300 gay and bi men. The first was on barebacking; other forums are planned on online cruising, oral sex, and HIV-positive communities.

The first big publicity effort to kick off the online effort was DOT.CUM, one of two in-person social events during the contract year. Nguyen described it as a place where people known only by their screen names could meet in a structured, non-threatening environment where safe sex promotion messages, information, referrals, and free condoms and lubricant were available.
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