Bay Windows - Local News, November 04, 1999
Beth Berlo, Bay Windows staff

More than a dozen local health organizations and the city and state health departments will receive the funding, won through competitions sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and other federal agencies. The funding will help provide a wide range of new HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment programs and will reach the state over the next three years, with a majority of the services focused on Greater Boston.

"Our hope is that this begins a new day in the African- American community's fight against HIV," said Gary Daffin, director of the Black HIV/AIDS Coalition (BHAC).

The not-yet-year-old Coalition was formed "partly in response to the Congressional Black HIV/AIDS Initiative," Daffin said. "We knew there would be funding targeted to the African-American community, and there was a real desire on the part of the agencies within the community to coordinate a response."

State Sen. Dianne Wilkerson and Pamela Johnson, executive director of MOCAA, were among several that were instrumental in getting the funding, Daffin said. The CDC was for the first time funding community coalition developments. "And this is precisely what we were doing," he added.

Daffin, who was responsible for disseminating information about the funding to applicable agencies, organized several roundtables. "Everyone sat at the table and identified what they thought were gaps in services, the type of training needed, and how the different organizations were going to work together to fight the disease in the community," he said. "Some people were working for HIV for a long time. Some were new. Everyone recognized the numbers à We have a real disproportion in the African-American community."

The CDC estimates that the community, which represents 13 percent the nation's population, accounts for nearly 50 percent of the country's AIDS deaths.

"These new funds are a critical first step," Wilkerson, a founding member of BHAC, commented at a recent press conference. "But we have far to go to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic within the African-American community. à We have a very serious crisis on our hands."

Mayor Thomas Menino commended the new collaborations during the conference, saying, "I am very pleased to see such a strong partnership between the government and the community. These programs are on the ground in the community, where the fight against the spread of HIV and AIDS is most critical."

The funds are earmarked for several at-risk groups within the African-American community, including: a perinatal prevention program; a pilot prevention and care initiative targeting prisoners returning to the community; a youth-led prevention program; a street outreach program for women; an outreach resource center and referral service for active injection drug users; expanded treatment programs for parenting women; technical assistance to agencies working with gay men of color, and a two-year planning grant to BHAC.

BHAC and state programs funded through the Black Caucus Initiative will focus their early efforts in the Roxbury, Mattapan, Cambridge, North Dorchester, and South End neighborhoods.

Daffin said he thinks a community-wide response to the African-American community with HIV was overdue. "Many people who have been working on HIV for many years are particularly excited to see a focus on the black community, and to see leaders in the community take up the issue. There's still a lot of denial about the disease in the community."

The cause for the grossly lopsided HIV incident rates in the black community are several, researchers say. As recently reported in Bay Windows, something Daffin underscores, bisexuality in the community is driving the numbers of HIV-infected African-American women, "wildly out of sync," he said. "And of course there's a high-incidence of IV drug use in the community, but that should not in any way mask the fact that HIV still has a dramatic impact on men who have sex with men (MSM)."

Daffin also attributed the soaring numbers of HIV infection within the African-American community to stigmas associated with being openly gay.

"There's a tendency among some people to portray the epidemic within the black community as a disease that's solely transmitted through heterosexual sex and drug use. And that's simply not true," Daffin said. "As a 35-year-old African-American man, I know that personally. I've seen how hard it has been for African-American men of my generation to grapple with AIDS. It's been very hard for [us] to be out. I don't think the community has embraced being openly gay. There's still a stigma attached with [saying] that you're gay. It's okay to be gay, but you just can't talk about it. It's made it harder for African-American gay men to seek medical care."

Research backing a higher rate of bisexual behavior among African-American men was presented at the recent HIV Prevention Conference at the CDC in Atlanta.

Tracy Mayne and colleagues from the New York City Department of Health and the Gay Men's Health Crisis found that of 7,065 men in gay venues, 20 percent of African-American men reported bisexuality, compared with just 12 percent of Hispanics and 4 percent of Caucasians.

Jean Flatley McGuire, director of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH) AIDS Bureau, said that it "is looking forward to working with all the programs that were successful in this round of funding."

Organizations receiving awards are: Black HIV/AIDS Coalition, c/o Multicultural AIDS Coalition; WEATOC, Inc.; MOCAA; Massachusetts DPH; Boston Public Health Commission; Springfield Southwest Community Health Center; Dimock Community Health Center; Women of Color AIDS Council; John Snow Institute; Boston Medical Corporation, and Latino Health Institute.
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