Evolution
By LeRoy Whitfield
If it’s true that the
first step to recovery is acknowledging that you have a problem,
then the black community’s sobriety about AIDS has begun.
The 1990s began with a reality check: On November 7, 1991,
b-baller Magic Johnson dropped a bombshell about his HIV diagnosis
and inadvertently created the largest AIDS awareness campaign
targeting blacks in the history of the disease. Although African
Americans have accounted for nearly a quarter of HIV infections
since 1985 and have exceeded whites in AIDS deaths since 1993,
Johnson brought AIDS from the fringe of African American concern
and entered it into our dialogues at barbershops and beauty
salons in ‘hoods across the nation.
Listening to all of the talk
that ensued about how to stay negative, however, seemed too
late for me. I’d already beaten Magic to the pos punchbowl
over a year earlier. But if Magic’s disclosure wasn’t enough
to persuade blacks that AIDS was partly our problem, the death
of tennis pro-turned-human rights activist Arthur Ashe five
months later reinforced the message. A year later, as I danced
my worries away at a nightclub, a new for-charity remix by
rap queens Salt-N-Pepa swapped lyrics from their hit song
“Let’s Talk About Sexî to “Let’s Talk About AIDS.î On the
strobe-lit dance floor, folks shook their rumps all the same
as the prevention message penetrated our collective conscious.
By March 1995, gansta rapper
Eazy-E shocked the hip-hop community when he announced that
he had AIDS before dying of the disease later that month.
If a hardcore rapper with a bulletproof public persona fell
to this disease, I wondered, how am I still here? A handful
of Eazy’s fellow hip-hip artists—a genre that had been notorious
for AIDS-phobic lyrics—joined Red Hot Organization to produce
the under-appreciated rap album “America Is Dying Slowlyî
about safer sex. When I heard rapper Method Man spit: “Wu
Tang on that AIDS thang,î I knew nothing would be the same
again. The AIDS landscape was transforming all around me—for
better and worse. My friends who used to chatter about folks
that they knew with HIV were now chatting with me about their
own positive status. I began understanding the magnitude of
the problem when the number of people I knew with HIV grew
from a couple to a full-flanked posse. But a grassroots push
was still lacking.
By 1996, with African American
devastation dominating nearly every major AIDS category, few
could deny the need for organized community-based action.
By May 1998, after many phone calls and much arm-twisting
by a handful of black AIDS advocates, African American leaders
finally mobilized against the disease. The Congressional Black
Caucus led the charge on Capitol Hill, wielding their influence
with President Clinton, and eventually secured over $400 million
to target the problem.
With the cash, longstanding
black AIDS organizations, like the Balm In Gilead in New York
City, are better-positioned to engage black churches seeking
to start AIDS ministries. Black Gay organizations, like New
York’s Gay Men of African Decent, have been empowered to begin
an AIDS off-shoot to carry forth forward-thinking safer sex
messages snuffed by the loss of filmmaker Marlon Riggs in
1994 and poet Essex Hemphill in 1995. As for me, I’ve found
the courage to disclose to my family and community, whose
ideas about AIDS acceptance have improved over the last decade.
And our evolution continues.
LeRoy Whitfield, former Positively
Aware Associate Editor, is now Senior Editor of POZ magazine.
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