Taking Advantage of Teaching Moments

According to a report in the American Independent, in late August Georgia Southern University issued a campus-wide alert, warning students of an HIV-positive "African American male" in his "mid-thirties" or "mid-twenties" who might be "a world traveler" or from "smaller towns", who sometimes wears glasses and or facial hair who may be "intentionally infecting his sex partners".

I don't know where to begin....

Not surprisingly the university's actions triggered backlash from AIDS activists challenging the University for stigmatizing people living with HIV/AIDS. But equally outrageous to me is in a world where Trayvon Martin--no I'm not letting it go!--Oscar Grant and Jordan Davis can be killed in cold blood, Georgia Southern has no problem demonizing all young Black men—their description could be any Black man in Georgia between the ages of 20 and 40—and nobody challenges them on their rampant racism!

But this is an HIV/AIDS newsletter, so let me get to that. To add insult to injury, the University may have been duped—no criminal charges have been filed, no suspects have been indentified, and there has been no public substantiation that anything in the alert was true. According to Ryan Deal, communications director for the Georgia Department of Public Health, "DPH has not issued an alert of this nature."

Having said all that, I'm not opposed to the University issuing a thoroughly vetted fact based "alert". But creating some all-powerful, HIV-positive, sexual-predator boogey man is not helpful. We know a lot about HIV transmission. It is time we start using that knowledge to provide accurate and graphic information that young people can actually use to protect themselves.

It takes two people transmit the HIV virus--but only one person to stop a transmission. People living with HIV have huge responsibility to not transmit the virus. But their responsibility is no greater than the responsibility of people who are HIV negative to not get infected. The University needs to tell its students they are not helpless victims. They have the power to protect themselves and that there are potentially dangerous consequences when they don't use that power. So a more helpful message would have been something like this: No matter what the HIV status of your sexual partner, you can protect yourself by always knowing your status and your partner's status. And tools exist that you can use to protect yourself: traditional male condoms, female condoms, pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), and post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP)—then both explain what those are and how and where students can get them.

But then AIDS activists can't just react and attack when individuals or institutions make mistakes, no matter how egregious. We have the tools to end the AIDS epidemic and we need to use every opportunity to reach, teach and educate. When these things happen--and sadly they will--we need to take the time to help the Georgia Southern Universities of the world to respond in an appropriate way. Yes, there were several things that the University could have done better, but I also think that the AIDS community missed the boat with their response. Stigma still exists and it is bad and it undermines our ability to end the epidemic--that's true. But I think we need to call off the stigma police. Instead, I think we need to change our strategy of attacking people who we believe have made a mistake and instead use the opportunity as a teaching moment.

Regardless of how badly it was executed, the University demonstrated that it is interested in protecting its students from becoming infected with the HIV virus. Let's start by acknowledging that as a good thing. Let's also acknowledge that when a person or organization ventures out to talk about HIV/AIDS, an opportunity exists to create a conversation in an environment where we're not having enough conversations.

Now we need to help them figure out: 1) whether there was a better approach that they could have taken; and 2) what additional they could have done to educate and empower their students than just issue an alert.

Please join me at 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday October 16th, at the 22nd annual Illinois HIV/STD conference in Springfield, IL, where I am the keynote speaker and on Thursday October 17th at the LGBT center in San Francisco, where I will participate in a panel discussion "Racial Justice and HIV/AIDS in an 'AIDS-Free Era' ".

In this issue we continue our series profiling the Fellows participating in the African American HIV University's Science and Treatment College. We run a story from Aljazeera America on how the uneven rollout of Medicaid Expansion is leaves many PLWHA without the health-insurance coverage they need. We note that Aljazeera America has published several stories on HIV/AIDS recently; we commend them for their coverage.

Kaiser Health News reports on the communication challenges between the federal online health-insurance marketplace and state Medicaid agencies. AIDS.gov reports on innovative strategies being used nationwide to deliver HIV/AIDS prevention messages to Black MSM, and particularly those by the organizations participating in the CDC's Act Against AIDS Leadership Initiative (AAALI).

Finally, we want to alert you to the publication of a new book, Structural Intimacies: Sexual Stories in the Black AIDS Epidemic, by Dr. Sonja Mackenzie from San Francisco State University's Health Equity Institute. Dr. Mackenzie's book release will take place on Thursday at San Francisco's LGBT Center. (Information about how you can buy the book or register for the event can be found in the article.)

Yours in the struggle,

Phill