Bay Windows - December 8, 2005
Ethan Jacobs, ejacobs@baywindows.com.

"Yet America still sees an estimated 40,000 new infections each year. This is not inevitable - and it's not acceptable," said Bush. "HIV/AIDS remains a special concern in the gay community, which has effectively fought this disease for decades through education and prevention."

Not only were Bush's remarks seemingly out of character for a president who spent his 2004 campaign using same-sex marriage as a wedge issue, but they stood in stark contrast to most of the Bay State's major elected leaders at the state, city and federal level. Sen. Ted Kennedy and Boston Mayor Tom Menino issued official statements to mark World AIDS Day, but neither mentioned the impact of the epidemic on the LGBT community. Neither those officials nor Sen. John Kerry nor Speaker of the Mass. House Sal DiMasi attended any official events to mark the day. Kim Haberlin, a spokesperson for DiMasi, said he celebrated the day by attending an event that evening for the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization celebrating the success of the signature campaign for the MassACT healthcare reform ballot initiative. Spokespeople for Kennedy, Kerry, and Menino touted the officials' long records on advocating for HIV/AIDS when asked why they did not specifically attend World AIDS Day events. Neither Gov. Mitt Romney nor Mass. Senate President Robert Travaglini's spokespeople returned calls to comment for this story, but there are no press reports nor statements suggesting either official marked World AIDS Day.

Rebecca Haag, executive director of AIDS Action Committee (AAC), said that while Bush's statement may have surpassed Bay State officials by acknowledging the efforts of the gay community to combat the epidemic, ultimately his words ring hollow, and his actions pale in comparison to officials like Kerry, Kennedy, DiMasi, Travaglini, and Menino.

"I wasn't surprised by his comments but they don't match his policy," said Haag. "Effectively he called for the reauthorization of Ryan White but his administration didn't submit any outline for Ryan White until August and Ryan White was up for reauthorization Sept. 30th."

Congress has continued appropriating funding for Ryan White, but Haag said the Bush administration's slow response has delayed reauthorization of the legislation.

Haag also blamed Bush for cuts to federal funding, including $1.5 million lost in Massachusetts in the past two years. She also said Bush's praise for the gay community's prevention work does not square with his own promotion of abstinence-based programs that stress abstinence until marriage as the primary prevention tool.

"He doesn't support gay marriage. Does that mean gay people are never supposed to have sex?" asked Haag.

By contrast, Haag said while many of the Bay State's local and federal officials were missing in action on World AIDS Day, their efforts to combat the epidemic have been considerable. In Washington she said Kennedy, ranking member of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, is one of the leading advocates spearheading the effort to introduce a bipartisan, bicameral bill to reauthorize Ryan White, and she expects a bill to be introduced either this or next month. Representatives from Kerry's office have met several times recently with AIDS Action, said Haag, and she considers him a strong legislative ally.

Locally Haag praised DiMasi and Travaglini for the recent unprecedented success of the Pharmacy Access bill, which passed the House with a veto-proof 115-37 margin Nov. 14 and which is expected to find similar success in the Senate next month. The bill allows the sale of clean needles in pharmacies to cut down on HIV transmission via infected needles. She also singled out Menino, a longtime advocate of needle exchange; Menino in fact used his World AIDS Day statement to urge the state Senate to approve the bill.

The only major local official who Haag did not cite for their work on addressing the domestic AIDS crisis was Romney, who has said he opposes the Pharmacy Access bill but has not said whether he would veto it.

Bush touched on the domestic AIDS crisis in his speech, but the bulk of his address was spent discussing the U.S.'s role in combating the AIDS epidemic abroad, and most of the public comments from federal officials focused not on the domestic front but on the need to fight the disease in Africa and Asia. Both Kennedy and Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean devoted their statements on World AIDS Day to lambasting the White House for providing insufficient funding for its own international HIV/AIDS initiatives, but they made absolutely no mention of the epidemic here in the U.S.

Yet while federal officials spar over international AIDS relief, HIV remains an epidemic at home, particularly in the gay and bi male community. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) June prevention conference in Atlanta the CDC released studies showing that nearly half of all new HIV infections in the U.S. are among men who have sex with men (MSM), and half of those living with HIV are MSM. One five-city study found that among African American gay and bi men, 46 percent were HIV-positive.

Haag said the domestic AIDS crisis has gotten comparatively little attention since drug "cocktails" began vastly extending the lives of people with HIV in 1995.

"I don't think there's been an appropriate response to HIV and AIDS in this country since we introduced the drugs. I think there's a sense that this is a manageable disease," said Haag.

She said HIV/AIDS advocates must overcome the apathy around HIV/AIDS in the United States by creating new messages that reach young people who did not live through the early days of the epidemic and see the their friends dying firsthand. She cited designer Kenneth Cole's new promotional campaign, launched on World AIDS Day and featuring celebrities like Will Smith, Alicia Keyes, Rosie O'Donnell, and Sharon Stone with the tagline "We All Have AIDS" as part of a necessary movement to update the message of HIV prevention messages 25 years into the epidemic.

"I also think that we as an HIV and AIDS community need to continue to get the story out there and reach new audiences," said Haag.

051208
BY051204

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