Miami Herald - Sunday, May 9, 1999

I used to have an uncle who was gay. Died years ago when I was a kid. To this day, I don't know much about him. His name was seldom mentioned when the family gathered -- much less the fact that he was, you know . . . ''like that.'' To some of my elders, my uncle seemed a source of shame.

And this was long before anyone had ever heard of AIDS.

So while the report in today's Herald describing the black community's silence in the face of AIDS leaves me pained, disappointed and saddened, it does not leave me surprised.

Fact is, black folks have long tended toward social conservatism, tending to pitch toward the right on such issues as gun control, school prayer and capital punishment. So who can be amazed that there's little appetite for open talk about the disease that was once called ''the gay cancer?''

The problem, of course, is that our silence comes at a ruinous cost.

In 1997, the most recent year for which numbers are available, 9,526 African Americans died of AIDS. Indeed, blacks, who represent about 13 percent of the nation's population, account for 36 percent of its AIDS cases. And while the proportion of white non-Hispanics infected with AIDS declined sharply between 1985 and 1997, the proportion of blacks with AIDS is rising on a jet plane's trajectory.

Clearly, the price of silence is high.

Yet the silence persists. And the fact that AIDS is seen as a gay disease is probably the biggest stumbling block to open dialogue. I know a young black woman who came out of the closet last year. Her grandmother refuses to hear it. She insists her granddaughter is . . . ''confused.''

Surely you recognize the strategy. Pretend it doesn't exist and it doesn't. Deny it and it goes away.

Except that AIDS refuses to stick to the script. In the face of pretense and denial, it stalks communities of color with brazen impunity, stealing away husbands and mothers, sisters and sons. And the silence, the absence of voices raised in fear, raised in warning, raised in alarm -- raised -- is deafening.

And in the end, it doesn't much matter if the reason is homophobia, conservatism, lack of knowledge, or plain old fear. In the end, you're left with the same reality -- people needlessly dying while the rest of us -- African Americans, I mean -- watch. In silence.

The irony is that we talk like mad every day on matters of no particular import. We embrace a freewheeling ethos which says no topic is taboo, no subject sacred. From the late-night comics who paint the air blue with four-, seven- and 12-letter irreverence to the rap records which detail the sex act in graphic follow-along steps, we have banished reticence to the boneyard of prehistoric ideals and sacrificed mortification on the altar of tell it like it is. Ain't nothing we can't talk about.

Except AIDS. When it comes to that, we turn up mumbling and mute. It is no coincidence that the communities where the disease is openly discussed are the ones that have registered a decline in the proportion of people infected by the disease. So the challenge facing African Americans could hardly be more apparent. In a word: talk.

Spread the news.

Tell a brother that the virus that causes AIDS is spread by body fluids in the act of sex -- straight or gay -- or the sharing of infected intravenous needles. Tell a sister that you don't get it through a toilet seat, a plate, a handshake or a kiss. Tell them that almost 10,000 African Americans died of AIDS in 1997 alone. Tell them that last year, black people accounted for 63 percent of AIDS deaths in Florida.

Tell them that knowledge casts out fear. Tell them that people are living now with HIV. Tell them that this is a disease, not a judgment. And tell them to wake up.

Because for nearly 20 years, a killer has stalked our neighborhoods, taken away our lives and loves, while we have done little and said even less.

The cost of silence is high. And getting higher all the time.

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