Chicago Tribune (CT) - THURSDAY, December 1, 1994 Edition: NORTH SPORTS FINAL Section: CHICAGOLAND Page: 1 Word Count: 1,094
Trisha Gura, Tribune Staff Writer.

All were gay. All were ages 30 or younger.Though these were not the only people to die of AIDS recently, the young age at which they contracted the disease is troubling medical experts:

Why, at a time when the deadly dangers of AIDS seem to have become common knowledge, would so many young men be afflicted.

The answers are complex and controversial. But the leading theory is that such men were too young to have experienced the first wave of the epidemic, and now they have inadvertently become part of a second wave.

As adolescents, many of these young men had not seen anyone die of AIDS, experts speculate. Many of them missed the safe sex campaigns of the '80s.

And even those who were better informed about the risks were too preoccupied dealing with other issues of sexual identity to pay much heed.

As the United Nations-designated World AIDS Day was to be marked Thursday, medical experts were viewing with alarm two studies emerging from the West Coast that projected as many as one out of three gay men will test HIV-positive by the time he reaches 30.

The discouraging trend-which has yet to be documented nationwide-comes a decade after multimillion-dollar campaigns designed to educate the public about the most deadly plague to strike in the second half of the 20th Century.

Cuban-born Pedro Zamora, 22, who served as a role model for many AIDS victims, said three months before his death that the AIDS awareness campaigns were not effective for him.

"The reason many AIDS prevention programs failed is because they were not grounded in the reality of my life and the reality of my peers," Zamora told the San Francisco Examiner.

"Sure, I could have used a condom and protected myself from HIV," he said. "But I ask you to think about the reality of an adolescent who never learned about condoms . . . and who heard nothing but shameful messages about being attracted to men."

Often it was a matter of timing. "When facts about AIDS started coming out, I was 21 and didn't have a clue," said Joe Wroblewski, 28, a Lake View resident, who fortunately sneaked through unscathed.

"If I had come out two or three years earlier, I might have practiced safer sex," he said.

According to David Coronado, 27, an actor at the Goodman Theatre, even some men who are aware of the risks sometimes choose not to practice safe sex.

"Gay men go through a period where they feel shunned by society and their families," he said. "So they try to set up a home of their own. They begin looking for a partner, and depending on the desperation and need, they are likely to believe someone who tells them he is healthy."

A sexual partner may not know he has been infected by HIV, Coronado pointed out. "Or he may be lying. But because of the intensity of a relationship, many gay men want to believe their partners."

Monogamous relationships are supposed to provide a measure of safety, but fidelity often is an issue, according to Evaristo Saldivar, 29, of the Chicago-based Midwest AIDS Training and Education Center.

"A young gay man gets into a relationship and because he hasn't been in one before, he falls in love right away," Saldivar said. "He thinks that person is the one he will be with for the rest of his life, so he doesn't worry about practicing safe sex."

The danger intensifies when multiple partners get involved.

"One partner may think that the other is monogamous, only to find out too late that he is not," Saldivar said.

In addition, people may relapse in their sexual practices. Many find safe sex boring.

"Some people who do know about safe sex and had it pounded into their heads shift back into their old behaviors," Saldivar said. "And the biggest factor in this is substance abuse.

"They wake up the next morning wondering: 'What did I do?' "

Chicago AIDS experts are eyeing with alarm new trends being reported from San Francisco, the city that was the harbinger of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.

In the Bay Area, nearly 1 in 10 gay or bisexual men between the ages of 17 and 22 tested positive for the virus associated with AIDS, according to a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association conducted by the San Francisco Department of Public Health and the University of California, Berkeley.

Rates for African-American men doubled the overall figures-20 percent were infected with HIV, the study found. The reasons for the high rate are unclear in the study.

Researchers gathered participants randomly from local public places: dance clubs, parks, even street corners. They selected 425 volunteers who resided in the nine-county Bay Area, interviewed each man and gave him a blood test.

A third reported practicing unprotected anal sex, and 1 in 10 admitted to using intravenous drugs. The researchers said they were "shocked" to find that although most of the infected men had been tested earlier, 70 percent were now HIV-positive and hadn't known it.

"Our study is unique in suggesting that most young HIV-infected homosexual and bisexual men do not know that they are infected," said the study's author, Dr. George Lemp of the San Francisco Department of Public Health.

"Because of this, they are not seeking treatment early."

In another study about to be published, the UCSF Center for AIDS Prevention Studies found slightly different numbers of infected men, but noted the same overall trend.

According to those researchers, 5 percent of 18- to 23-year-olds; 11 percent of 24- to 26-year-olds; and 29 percent of those ages 27 to 29 tested positive for HIV.

These researchers and other experts cautioned against projecting the data too far: San Francisco is a particularly high-risk area for AIDS.

But locally, advocates said the high figures also may apply in Chicago.

"I'm scared, but I'm not surprised," said the Goodman's Coronado, who concedes he is no expert. Then again, no one has data to the contrary.

The Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports only diagnosed cases of AIDS, not HIV infections. Officials said that only 4 percent of gay men ages 20 to 24 have AIDS, while 16 percent of those ages 25 to 29 suffer from the illness.

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