San Francisco Chronicle - December 12, 2003
Dave Ford, Chronicle Staff Writer

The Bernal Heights house is one of several programs offered by the Black Coalition on AIDS, an 18-year-old city organization tackling HIV in a community where the disease stirs shame, denial and ostracism.

Tonight the organization is hosting "San Francisco's Soulful Celebration, " an event featuring entertainment and music at private homes and city jazz clubs. Perry Lang, who was recently appointed the executive director of the Black Coalition on AIDS, says the event will help "build community."

It will also help the group secure funds for planned outreach programs targeting African American women, the population now hardest hit by AIDS.

"If we're talking about a class of folks, particularly ethnic folks that may be dealing with mental illness and depression because they can't find a job, they're using more alcohol and drugs and then getting into situations where they have unsafe sex," Lang says.

In a local community in which HIV infections among blacks have risen 20 percent in the past five years, -- some churches have begun to acknowledge the disease, Perry says. That's a big change from 20 years ago: "Now you have a handful of churches who are willing to stretch their values and to expand the notion of what a sin is or isn't."

But that's only a beginning. BCOA statistics show that blacks have a 61 percent higher prevalence of HIV cases than the general population, and that black men in San Francisco have an HIV rate six times higher than that of white men in San Francisco. Shame and silence are often the reaction to infection; sometimes family members don't even disclose their condition to other relatives.

Dabs-Kelley says some black men have occasional sex with men -- what's come to be called being on the down low, or DL -- and may not tell female partners they've contracted HIV.

"I don't how much of it is this DL thing," Perry says, "but, quite frankly, you've got a fourth of the young male population in prison, and it makes that kind of situational sex easy without the men identifying as gay."

Dabs-Kelley says she was infected by an HIV-positive man with whom she had unprotected sex. A biracial immigrant who came here from Germany at the age of 3 - her mother was German, her absentee father black - Dabs-Kelley says kids made her feel unwelcome during student days at Everett Middle School. There she started experimenting with "weed and downers." Her mother died when Dabs-Kelley was 21; the grief spiraled her into heroin addiction.

"It was a full time job, and remained my full-time job for, like, 20 years," she says of the process of obtaining and taking the drug. During a 1989 attempt to kick drugs, Dabs-Kelley received methadone -- a prescribed substitute that weans users from heroin -- at a clinic that was paying intravenous drug users to take blood tests for a study. There, Dabs-Kelley learned she was HIV-positive.

"At the time, there was no counseling when you were given your diagnosis -- you were just told you turned up HIV-positive," she says. "I was pretty much in denial. I didn't want to believe it."

Clean for a couple of years in the late 1990s, she relapsed after her husband, Curtis Kelley, died of a heart attack in 1997. She turned to prostitution.

Eventually jailed on a drug-possession charge, she cleaned up a year ago through the Walden House rehabilitation program. From there she moved to Rafiki House, one of the Black Coalition on AIDS transitional housing facilities. She continues regular doctor visits and a successful HIV medication regimen. She believes that African American women should get tested for HIV and, if HIV-positive, seek support and health care.

For her, HIV infection is hardly a death sentence, thanks to a good attitude and support from groups like the BCOA. "My attitude around HIV is a positive attitude," she says. "I think if my mental attitude was, 'Oh, s-, I'm gonna die,' that's what I would do."

Show tonight

The Black Coalition on AIDS' "San Francisco's Soulful Holidays Celebration" will be at 7 tonight, at the San Francisco Ferry Building, Embarcadero and Market streets. $75-$250. (415) 615-9945.

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