Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2009. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Bay Area Reporter - September 17, 2009
Seth Hemmelgarn, s.hemmelgarn@ebar.com
The council's unanimous vote in favor of the recommendations followed a presentation of the plan at its meeting Thursday, September 10.
The recommendations include having a guiding structure, such as a Web site, that orients young Latino gay men who are new to San Francisco.
Several researchers and service providers, and 157 Latino men who have sex with men, were involved in the process that generated the plan.
The people who put the plan together found that young Latino gay men who come to the city looking for sexual freedom and gender self-expression are "treated as sexual objects and land in high-risk contexts that put them at risk for substance abuse and HIV."
In addition to the guiding structure, the plan proposes that "landing pads" be healthy, supportive contexts "rather than situations of risk where Latino gay men are sexually objectified."
Another recommendation is to have programs that provide relevant, tailored education on the connections of sexuality, relationships, substances, and HIV.
There should be community building in a context "that emphasizes a sense of familia ," the plan says.
The plan also includes the finding that Latino English-speaking gay men have "substantially lower rates of participation in Latino-identified HIV programs in the city," so another recommendation is the development of programs targeting Latino English-speaking gay men.
Planners also recommended the creation of a program that targets issues of older English-speaking Latino gay men "of lower socioeconomic status" who are marginally housed in places such as single-room occupancy hotels or shelters.
Another recommendation is that there should be programs tailored to men who have sex with men and identify as heterosexual.
Research participants were selected by sending recruiters to places like bars and community centers, rather than through a random selection process.
The recommendations are meant as guidelines, not necessarily things they'll be requesting money for, people involved in putting the plan together suggested.
According to Jorge Sanchez, the director for the Latino Action Plan, 9 percent of the men studied identified as heterosexual, even though they had had sex with men. Another 10 percent identified as bisexual, he said at the council meeting.
Sanchez said that half of the 157 men surveyed were at high risk of HIV transmission, meaning they had unprotected anal intercourse with either a non-monogamous partner or multiple partners.
In a phone interview with the Bay Area Reporter this week, Sanchez said that approximately one-third of the 157 men were HIV-positive.
Sanchez also said that about 45 percent of the men were primarily Spanish-speaking, "men we would classify as immigrant men who primarily spoke Spanish."
He said that they didn't have data on new arrivals, but he said it could be surmised that 45 percent of the men were educated abroad.
After the plan was presented last week, Erick Arguello, who moved to San Francisco from Nicaragua in 1963, when he was 4, spoke positively of the plan, and talked about programming for Latinos in the city.
Arguello, who's HIV-positive, said, "I found people that looked like me" at Asociacion Gay Unida Impactando Latinos/Latinas A Superarse (AGUILAS), which translates to Association of United Gays Impacting Latinos/Latinas toward Self-Empowerment. He said that he hadn't felt at home at the Stop AIDS Project.
Arguello became a client at AGUILAS in the mid-1990s and is now the group's volunteer/program coordinator.
According to the San Francisco Department of Public Health's 2008 HIV/AIDS Epidemiology Annual Report, as of December 31, 2008, the number of Latino men who have sex with men living with HIV non-AIDS was 712, out of 4,653 men who have sex with men living with HIV non-AIDS overall.
The male AIDS incidence rate among Latinos spiked in 2003 and has steadily declined ever since, the report said.
The soonest the city's next HIV prevention plan will be published is early 2010, according to the health department's Betty Chan Lew.
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