Washington Blade - November 25, 2005
Katherine Volin

Dr. B.W. Furness, who works with the CDC and the D.C. Department of Health's STD Control Program, says that conservative politicians would have objected to government-funded posters featuring photos of gay men, so he thought of a way around the problem.

"If it was privately funded, they wouldn't have anything to say about it," Burness says.

Burness noted that the Crew Club, a local gay gym and steam club, was on a list of 14 high-risk places where gay men were contracting syphilis. Burness then called D.C. Allen, the Crew Club's owner, who had been involved in other local philanthropic efforts.

Allen, who had donated to Brother Help Thyself - the fund-raising arm of several local leather and motorcycle clubs that donates money to gay and AIDS causes -and the D.C. police department's Gay & Lesbian Liaison Unit, agreed to help.

In addition to allowing the department of health to operate a weekly STD testing site at the Crew Club, Allen funded a yearlong $40,000 ad campaign that included posters, postcards and ads in the Washington Blade and Metro Weekly warning gay men about the resurgence in syphilis. Allen says he helped as a way of giving back to his gay male clientele and because the situation needed to be handled quickly.

"It needed to happen then," he says. "That was the problem and you have to react very quickly to it or it always spreads. Syphilis is especially contagious and condoms will not necessarily protect you from it."

The Greater Washington, D.C. STD Community Coalition, a community advisory board for the Department of Health's STD Control Program, recently honored Allen for his work at a luncheon.

"I have absolutely one belief - absolutely and positively one belief as a gay man," Allen said at the luncheon. "Never put up with a bully. Whether that bully is syphilis, whether that bully is someone who hurts you, physically abuses you à I saw this disease as a bully to our own."

In 2003, after Allen started his campaign, the number of syphilis cases in D.C. dropped for the first time since 1999, according to Furness.

"I attribute [the drop] to the syphilis campaign, of which D.C. Allen was a huge participant," Furness says.

Allen's contributions to the campaign increased more than he originally intended, he says.

"I didn't think that I would help quite this much," Allen says. "But once I was in it and I started to see the numbers go down, I decided it was a necessary thing to do. It wasn't like I was giving money to some large organization and they were using it for pencils. I was making an immediate difference, which you can see on the charts."

Allen's ad campaign is over and syphilis cases are back on the rise. According to the CDC, 69 cases of infectious syphilis were reported in Washington, D.C. in 2004, up from 38 cases in 2000 - an increase of 81 percent.

Furness says he's not certain why syphilis is on the rise again.

"There's a lot of hypotheses," he says, mentioning condom message burnout and crystal methamphetamine use as two possible explanations for the rise of syphilis. "I don't attribute it to anything except that people are having unsafe sex."

The philanthropy eventually took its toll on the Crew Club, however, and Allen stopped placing ads.

"You wanna know the truth, it was a real financial strain à for us to keep doing this," Allen said at the luncheon. "We were sort of out of money and we had to stop. We've had to regroup to continue our construction projects."

The Crew Club, Allen says, just finished building a new wet area and is in the midst of building a new gym. The club has in the past been referred to as a bathhouse, a term Allen rejects.

"[The term bathhouse] brings to mind an old-time thing and I have tried to make it a nice facility and it is," Allen says.

Allen bills his club as a local hangout rather than a bathhouse.

"We are a real alternative to the clubs," Allen says. "Not everybody wants to go out drinking. From the beginning of time, there have been big steam clubs from the Romans on. And it's the same thing as the Romans, to hang out with your friends, relax and enjoy yourselves."

Not everyone agreed with Allen's assessment of his club when it opened in 1995. The Crew Club faced strong opposition from government and health officials who were concerned it was a sex club.

"In the midst of an epidemic, I'm disappointed this is part of the landscape in this city," then Whitman-Walker Clinic director Jim Graham told the Washington Post in 1995. Graham is now a gay Democratic representative for Ward 1 on the D.C. Council.

Graham this week praised Allen's efforts to combat syphilis.

"I very much appreciate his continuing efforts to stop the spread of sexually transmitted diseases," Graham says. "It's certainly coming from an interesting vantage point, that he's doing it. Not to suggest for a moment that his business is condoning sexual activities. He'd be the first to say it's not."

Kim Mills, a spokesperson for Whitman-Walker, said the Crew Club "is not something we're focused on."

For the most part, Allen declines to discuss the club's past problems.

"The times were much different," Allen says.

Furness says the STD Control Program is considering financing its own awareness campaign about syphilis, now that Allen has ended his financial support for the program.

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