Contemporary Sexuality - December 2008 - (Page 5)

As a college student, Collins taught others how to avoid HIV. Today, he’s a member of the Black Gay Men’s Network at the Black AIDS Institute. Ron Simmons is on the front lines of curbing the spread of HIV. As president and chief executive officer at Us Helping Us in Washington, D.C., his focus is on preventing HIV among AfricanAmericans in the nation’s capital, suburban Maryland and northern Virginia. His organization plans to increase HIV testing and begin screening for sexually transmitted infections (STIs). But without more government funding and a coordinated federal strategy, that won’t be enough. “There definitely needs to be a national plan,” Simmons says. “And we need to do more social marketing. When HIV prevention is promoted like McDonald’s promotes Happy Meals, then you are getting serious. But right now, we don’t even have condom commercials on TV, let alone targeted HIV prevention messages.” Syndemics may play a role in the spread of HIV Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh say many factors are combining to make health outcomes worse for gay men, including young African-Americans. Professor Ron Stall, PhD, MPH, argues that several psychosocial factors are working together to create a syndemic. That term was first coined by the medical anthropologist Merrill Singer in his study of Puerto Ricans. Stall describes a syndemic as “a set of mutually reinforcing epidemics that together lower the overall health profile of a population more than each epidemic by itself might be expected to do.” Stall, along with co-authors Mark Friedman, PhD, MSW, MPA, and Joseph A. Catania, PhD, explain the concept in “Interacting Epidemics and Gay Men’s Health: A Theory of Syndemic Production among Urban Gay Men” for the 2008 book Unequal Opportunities: Health Disparities among Gay and Bisexual Men in the United States. “Cultural marginalization alone is sufficient to produce a syndemic among American MSM[s],” Stall writes. “[We] explicitly argue that MSM who are drawn from lower socioeconomic status … and/or culturally marginalized ethnic groups are especially likely to be vulnerable to syndemic situations.” The “mutually reinforcing epidemics” the authors cite as affecting gay men are childhood sexual abuse, partner violence and polydrug use. In an earlier paper, published in the June 2003 edition of American Journal of Public Health, continued on page 6 “I’m hesitant to point a finger at the church, but a lot of times religion is used as a backdrop to prove that homosexuality is wrong or bad and people who engage in it are sub par or subhuman. And religion is a central part of black culture.” — Myisha PattersonGatson Myisha Patterson-Gatson prevention services, underestimation of personal risk, not having personally experienced the severity of the early AIDS epidemic and partnering with older black men (among whom HIV prevalence is high).” Myisha Patterson-Gatson, director of mobilization at the Black AIDS Institute, says the factors cited by the CDC have created a “perfect storm” that allows HIV to spread quickly among young black males. Of particular concern to Patterson-Gatson is how black gays are viewed as “deviant” in the black community. That attitude helps fuel ignorance because teens and young men are reluctant to seek answers to questions about their sexuality. “I’m hesitant to point a finger at the church,” Patterson-Gatson says. “But a lot of times religion is used as a backdrop to prove that homosexuality is wrong or bad and people who engage in it are sub par or subhuman. And religion is a central part of black culture.” Hiding his sexuality was never an option for Michael Collins, 22, an openly gay man who recently graduated from Morehouse College, a historically black male institution in Atlanta. “I’m effeminate,” Collins says. “I’ve never had the luxury of being in the closet.” Collins’ mother urged him to seek answers to everything in life. “She drummed into my head, ‘Don’t do anything in the dark.’ So I didn’t hide anything from my parents. Being open and honest kills feelings of depression, isolation and guilt,” he says. December 2008 Vol. 42, No. 12 | www.aasect.org Contemporary Sexuality 5 http://www.aasect.org

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Contemporary Sexuality - December 2008 Contents Member Profile Book Reviews News of Members Quck Hits: Sex in the News Educational Opportunities

Contemporary Sexuality - December 2008

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