Dec 09, 2005  |  By: KATHERINE VOLIN  | COMMENTS     

THIS YEAR GOT off to a rocky start for local gay black AIDS organization Us Helping Us. Lydia Watts, then-director of the HIV/AIDS Administration for D.C.’s Department of Health, announced drastic funding cuts for the organization in January.

Until then, Us Helping Us received three grants from HAA totaling nearly $460,000. Its funding was cut to $75,000 in 2005.

Although Watts has since been replaced by Marsha A. Martin, Ron Simmons, gay executive director of Us Helping Us, still decries the impact the funding cuts had on his organization.

“We’re not on the street as much because the funding for that was cut,” Simmons says, explaining that Us Helping Us formerly focused much of its grassroots outreach in barbershops, beauty parlors and other similar establishments.

“In our heyday, we were at bus stops,” Simmons says. “We had a model of a vagina and we were showing women how you use female condoms at bus stops.”

As the year progressed, Simmons found conditions improving for Us Helping Us. HAA recently committed to granting the organization $150,000 for 2006, and Us Helping Us recently received a Red Ribbon Award from the National HIV/AIDS Partnership, an organization of prominent business, religious and entertainment figures fighting to stop the epidemic.

“The point of the awards was really to … award people who have been out there doing the work, especially people who have been doing it for a long time,” NHAP member Sonya Lockett says. “Us Helping Us has been doing the work for a long time. They’re serving a population that people weren’t really looking at and people weren’t really servicing.”

D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams declared Dec. 1, 2005 as Us Helping Us day for the District of Columbia. The proclamation was announced on World AIDS Day at the grand opening of newly renovated Us Helping Us building in northwest D.C.

“Us Helping Us, this is what this is all about,” Martin, who attended the grand opening ceremony, says. “Ron is feeling pretty good and he should. He should be proud. When they say 1 in 7 African-American men in D.C. has HIV, [that means HAA] should help [Us Helping Us] continue to do their outreach. It’s time for us to support each other.”

The organization had grown from meeting in living rooms when Rev. Kwabena “Rainey” Cheeks, founding minister of gay-inclusive Inner Light Ministries, started Us Helping Us in 1985. Later the organization was housed in six buildings across four blocks of L St., SE until it purchased its new building in 2001. Renovations to the current space began in 2004.

The new facility at 3636 Georgia Ave., NW, comprises 6,100 square feet and will hold all of the organizations’ offices as well as counseling, meeting and testing rooms. Simmons says the$700,000 in renovations to the building, which was purchased for $438,000, included expanding the existing basement, connecting the previously separated first floor and gutting the rest of the structure before rebuilding its interior.

“It’s ours. Wow,” Simmons says. “I still find myself smiling when I come to work. This building is our rock.”

The new building will also house Simmons’ new focus for Us Helping Us, which was motivated in part by a recent study from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention of gay men in five cities. The study found that 46 percent of the black gay men in those cities were HIV positive.

“It’s devastating and it’s worse than that,” Simmons says. The 46 percent, he says, is an average. In Baltimore, the figure was 67 percent.

“If Baltimore is 67 percent, given how close D.C. is to Baltimore and how much we interact socially, I think D.C. is probably much higher than 46 percent,” Simmons says.

Research has shown Simmons that the reason black gay men are still contracting HIV has nothing to do with their knowledge of the disease, he says.

“Maybe we need to rethink what it is we need to do,” Simmons says. “We’re going to have to get involved more in changing social norms. We have come to realize that HIV prevention is not a matter of education. They know about HIV, they know it’s caused by a virus, they know about latex condoms. They know all that stuff. The problem is they’re not changing their behavior.”

The cruelty of an intolerant society has obliterated black gay men’s self-esteem, Simmons says.

“When you listen in the support groups [to] what the men are talking about, they’re not talking about HIV or how to prevent it,” Simmons says. “They’re talking about their father calling them a ‘faggot’ since ...