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AIDS rising faster among gay Hispanic, black men
Friday, January 14, 2000 By Byron Spice, Science Editor, Post-Gazette
For the first time, more black and Hispanic gay men are being diagnosed with AIDS than white gay men, federal health officials said yesterday.
But if that seems surprising, it's only because many minority gay men feel they must remain in the closet, said one Pittsburgh man.
Howard, a 40-year-old black man who is infected with the human immunodeficiency virus and who asked to remain anonymous, said the prejudices and discrimination faced by gay men are magnified for those in the minority community.
"We work. We have lives. A lot of us have families," he said. Many black gay men put that at risk if they acknowledge they are gay. "You're talking about careers on the line," he said.
For those reasons, many minority men are hesitant to seek AIDS prevention and treatment services, and that plays a role in the spread of the disease.
"Clearly, all the evidence suggests that it's harder to be a gay man of color in this society than it is to be a white gay man," said Dr. Helene Gayle, director of the center for prevention of HIV, sexually transmitted diseases and tuberculosis at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC reported yesterday that 52 percent of the 18,153 gay and bisexual men who were diagnosed with AIDS in 1998 were minorities. By contrast, minorities represented 31 percent of those diagnosed in 1989.
Black men made up one-third of the 1998 cases, while Hispanics represented 18 percent. Asian and Pacific Islanders made up 1 percent of the cases.
Gayle said trends identified several years ago led researchers to project that the number of nonwhite gay men with AIDS would surpass the number of whites, but it happened faster than expected.
"The tendency to equate gay and white has persisted," she said. "People have totally ignored the consistent fact that gay men of color have always been the largest single risk category for men ... and this issue is never talked about."
Gay men in the black community face an odd dilemma, said Howard, a volunteer with the Pittsburgh AIDS Task Force. To be accepted within the black community, gay men "have to be really out there." The much larger number of less-flamboyant gays are more likely to be ostracized if they acknowledge their sexuality.
"Not all black gay men even identify with being gay," Howard added. That was borne out by a CDC survey of 8,780 HIV-infected men who had sex with other men. Nearly a quarter of the black men surveyed and 18 percent of the Hispanics considered themselves heterosexual. By contrast, only 6 percent of the white men who had sex with men identified themselves as heterosexual.
Though many black gay men may delay seeking treatment, Howard said that wasn't the case for him. By the time he needed services, he had already become involved as a caregiver for others.
"It was bad enough being black. It's bad enough being black and gay. But to be black and gay and have AIDS ... I mean, you talk about three strikes and you're out. You can't get much worse than that. We had families turning their backs on people."
The CDC report found that 85 percent of the black and Hispanic gay men with AIDS lived in metropolitan areas with populations of more than 500,000. Like other areas, more than half of all new AIDS diagnoses in Allegheny County are among minorities, said Guillermo Cole, spokesman for the county Health Department, though recent statistics were not available yesterday.
New York City had the highest number of both black and white gay men with AIDS in 1998, while the Los Angeles-Long Beach, Calif., metro area had the most cases of Hispanic gay men with AIDS.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
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