Washington Blade - April 10, 2009
Lou Chibbaro Jr.

Jeff Crowley, the White House AIDS office director, and Dr. Kevin Fenton, director of AIDS programs at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, joined others in warning that too many Americans have become complacent over the risk of contracting HIV.

Fenton pointed to recent studies showing that 56,000 people become newly infected each year in the U.S., a development that translates into someone in the country becoming infected with HIV every "nine and a half minutes," a phrase that the campaign adopted as its theme.

The White House says the campaign will include radio and television public service announcements; posters and signs in public transit systems; text messages; and a new web site, www.nineandahalfminutes.org.

Representatives of AIDS and LGBT advocacy groups who attended the kickoff announcement of the campaign, held at the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House, were generally supportive of the effort.

But some representatives, including Alexander Robinson, executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition, expressed concern that none of the 14 mainline African-American organizations selected as partners in the campaign have sufficient understanding of black gay and bisexual men.

Studies on populations at risk for HIV have long shown that black and white gay and bisexual men fall into the population groups most at risk for contracting HIV.

Fenton said the first phase of the campaign, set to begin this month, would target African Americans, a population group also shown to have the overall highest infection rate for HIV. He said the second phase of the campaign, set to begin in early 2010, would target black gay and bisexual men.

Melody Barnes, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, said a "special outreach" effort would be made to all populations at greatest risk for HIV, "including the gay community."

Robinson said he agreed with the decision by organizers of the campaign, called Act Against AIDS, to target African Americans in its first phase this year. But he said he sees little indication so far that black gay and bisexual men would be included in the initial effort.

He said the 14 African-American groups selected as partners in the campaign - including the NAACP, 100 Black Men of America, and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation - have distinguished records in representing the black community as a whole, but have no record of involvement with black gays.

"I question whether or not they even understand what it would mean to do outreach to African-American gay men," Robinson said.

"As an African American, I certainly see them as having provided historically a tremendous amount of leadership. But none of them have any active engagement of gay men on their board or as a part of their leadership, and none of them have any programs that focus on our community at all."

Crowley said the 14 groups selected as partners for the campaign were picked through an application process that sought out traditional African-American civic organizations. He said more organizations would be brought into the process to represent other constituency groups.

"We should look at this as just one piece of a multi-piece initiative," he said. "There will be other groups brought in."

Jesse Milan, chair of the board of the Black AIDS Institute, which is one of the 14 African-American groups selected as a partner in the Act Against AIDS campaign, went further than government officials in describing some of the issues the campaign plans to address.

"This campaign will not be afraid to address black youth and black gay and bisexual men," and, according to Milan, it will unabashedly use the "C" word for condoms.

"Now, the federal government will say that word in a public campaign," he said. "Halleluiah."

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