Jun 01, 2006  |  By: KATHERINE VOLIN  | COMMENTS     

Is leaders of local and national black gay AIDS organizations examine 25 years of media coverage of the disease, they say news outlets have neglected to properly cover the staggering number of black gay men with HIV/AIDS.

“I think by and large the larger media has done a poor job covering black AIDS in America in general and has done a very poor job in covering it in black gay men,” says Phill Wilson, executive director of the Black AIDS Institute, a Los Angeles-based non-profit he founded in 1999 to mobilize black institutions to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS among blacks.

In 1988, the Washington Blade reported that HIV/AIDS education programs in Washington, D.C. were disregarding the rapidly rising rates of HIV infection among black gay men.

“We were actively looking for anything, any piece of information, that might help in the fight,” Lisa Keen, former executive editor of the Blade, said in an e-mail interview. “We were reporting everything we could get our hands on that might be helpful, so we were scouring whatever statistics we could get, too. In the context of all this, we noticed the statistics on cases among black gay men in D.C. going up twice as fast as among white gay men.”

The same article also revealed local black gay leaders had been calling for greater focus on black gay AIDS education since 1986. By 1987, the number of black gay men with AIDS in D.C. had outpaced that of their white counterparts. Nationwide, the statistics revealed a similar pattern.

As early as October of 1986, the CDC was reporting that the “cumulative incidence of AIDS among blacks and Hispanics was more than three times the rate for whites.” By 1996, more AIDS cases were found in blacks than any other ethnicity.

Despite the constant and steadily rising statistics that indicated minorities were disproportionately affected by AIDS, a 2004 media study by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a non-profit organization that researches and informs the public about major health issues, found that only 3 percent of all the news stories about AIDS from 1981-2002 were about racial minorities in the United States.

“It’s always been disproportionate,” says Ron Simmons, executive director of Us Helping Us, a D.C. based black gay AIDS group, about the number of black gay men with AIDS. “It’s just that it hasn’t been given that much attention.”

Keen says that the Blade did not give thorough coverage to AIDS among black gays.

“We weren’t in a position to give ‘thorough’ coverage,” Keen says. “We didn’t have the resources necessary to deliver what I would consider thorough coverage. But we were always mindful that Washington had a majority black population and that we had a responsibility to cover news that would benefit black gays specifically, as well as gay men in general.”

THE JUNE 1, 2001 Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report — the same CDC publication that first reported in 1981 the “rare pneumonia” in five gay men in Los Angeles that would later be identified as AIDS — declared that “minority [men who have sex with men] have emerged as the population most affected by HIV.” The report called for “behavior interventions” targeting minority MSM.

Four years later, MMWR released a five-city study that found 46 percent of black MSM were HIV-positive. The study sparked some media coverage, but failed to result in any in-depth reporting, according to Simmons.

“A year has passed,” Simmons says. “There’s been no real stories since. There’s been no stories about what the CDC’s been doing about black gay men specifically.”

The trend is a common one for black gay AIDS stories, say Simmons and Francis Broome, a program coordinator for Many Men, Many Voices, a gay and bisexual men’s support group sponsored by the Black Coalition on AIDS in San Francisco.

Part of the reason for the lack of mainstream media coverage is the apathy of the general public to the concerns of black gay men, according to Broome.

“It makes the news, and then nothing else happens afterward,” Broome says. “It doesn’t cause the outrage or community reaction. There’s a lot of quietness around [black gay AIDS], particularly around the institutions: the church, the family, even within the black community, it’s not something that’s talked about.”

Poor media coverage of black gay men in general certainly doesn’t help the cause, Broome says.

“We don’t hear a lot of things that are positive around black gay men besides AIDS, so I definitely think it has shaped how black gay men socialize and how they see themselves,” Broome says. “There’s not a lot ...