People from every walk of life turned out to march across the Brooklyn Bridge
in support of marriage rights in New York. (Photos: Carlos Monroy)
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Majority Leader Dean Skelos attended Log Cabin’s fall fundraiser, where he backed the first openly gay Senate hopeful, John Chromczak.
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By JAMES WITHERS
Friday, May 27, 2005
Apparently, 1980s nostalgia has hit the New York Commission on HIV/AIDS. If
the committee has its way, it will return to the days when condoms were as ubiquitous
as a corner Starbucks is today.
The commission released its preliminary report on May 23, and while it acknowledged
the progress and advances the city has made fighting HIV over the past 20 years,
“significant challenges remain. NYC continues to be the epicenter of the
HIV/AIDS epidemic in the U.S.,” the report stated. More than 100,000 New
Yorkers are currently living with HIV and AIDS — approximately one in
six people living with the disease in the entire country. Each year, approximately
4,000 people in the city are newly diagnosed with AIDS, with 1,700 people dying
from AIDS. “We still have a huge problem in New York and we need to advance
our response,” said Gay Men’s Health Crisis Executive Director Ana
Oliveira, herself a member of the commission.
One of the recommendations is to make condoms available everywhere, from beauty
parlors to jails and prisons. “This tells us that the epidemic is at a
point where we need to go back to basics, which is condom use,” said Heriberto
Sanchez Soto, executive director of the Hispanic AIDS Forum.
“What we are saying is that 24 years later, condoms remain important,”
said Oliveira. “They are one of among many strategies for everyone in
terms of negotiating safer choices. It is not so much as a return to the past.
But looking at condoms as one strategy among many.”
Some community organizers voiced concern that condom availability as a first
idea shows how HIV prevention in the city has stalled.
“Wider distribution of condoms as the first thing tells us how far we
have to go,” said Dan Carlson, a co-founder of HIV Forum of New York City.
“That should be the base. That should be the standard. Nevertheless, we
need it.”
Some on the commission acknowledged that prevention efforts have dipped and
needed to be renewed.
“We have become complacent about HIV. We normalize homelessness and
we normalize violent crime,” said Frank Oldham, executive director of
the Harlem Directors Group. “We normalize HIV although over 55,000 have
died since the epidemic. It cannot be normalized. HIV is always changing and
prevention efforts need to be energized.”
Carlson agrees that there has been a general apathy about HIV in the recent
past.
“There has been a general complacency in terms of prevention because
of the optimism of treatment, condom fatigue, and crystal meth and its glamorous
reputation,” he said. “People are looking for ways to connect through
drugs and sex parties.”
Making HIV testing a regular part of health care encounters is another important
suggestion discussed in the report. “Last year, more than 1,000 New Yorkers
— three every day — found out that they were already sick with AIDS,”
the report said. “NYC must remove barriers to HIV testing and expand testing
availability.”
Tokes Osubu, commission member and executive director of the Gay Men of African
Descent, agreed: “In order to be effective in HIV prevention if you do
not consider testing and getting people to embrace testing as a strategy, then
you cannot control the spread of HIV.”
Oldham added that, for many of his organization’s clients, they only
learn of their HIV status when they find out they have AIDS. “One of the
tragedies we find up here in Harlem is that people are ending up in emergency
rooms with full-blown AIDS,” Oldham said. “By making testing more
readily available and routine, it will remove some of the stigma so people will
feel more comfortable getting an HIV test.”
Sanchez Soto emphasized that any push for testing should be coupled with consent
and counseling, which the report suggested.
“HIV testing in emergency room should be undertaken; however should
not without consent,” Sanchez Soto said. “By making testing routine
that does not forgo informed consent and pre and post counseling.”
The commission’s report jumped into the thorny issue of needle exchange
and noted that despite studies showing that such programs help reduce infectious
disease, there is no political will, from either the local, state, or federal
levels.
“The federal government does not fund needle exchange programs although
such exchange programs decrease the spread of HIV,” said Oldham. “That
is a scientific fact
Thinking outside the box so to speak is what the commission intended to with
its report, or at least a willingness to be, as Oldham said, “”blunt”
in its language. This is why the report says it is time for needle exchange
programs and for city’s schools to have a comprehensive AIDS-HIV program.
“It [the report] says HIV prevention in this country is very provincial
and backward,” said Osubu. “The epidemic has moved on and raged
on but there hasn’t been a corresponding response in term of prevention.”
The public will be able to make comments on the commission between now and
June 13.
In other AIDS related news, Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed legislation that
will effect the HIV/AIDS Services Administration (HASA). According to the New
York City AIDS Housing Network, the two bills are part of a package that will
require the City to move homeless people living with AIDS into permanent, medically
appropriate housing. The bills also require the City Council to be given regular
reports on how well the housing program is run.
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