Reaching the Endgame for AIDS in Black Communities
Just hours before the premiere of the Frontline exposé Endgame: AIDS in Black America, about the AIDS crisis in the African American community, the NAACP announced its campaign to encourage Black churches to share information about the issue from its pulpits and help those infected with the disease.
The irony is considerable.
As Endgame focuses on the institutional and attitudinal causes of the AIDS epidemic, which affects African Americans disproportionately, the program takes Black churches and Black civil rights leaders to task for not stepping up to the plate early on.
"I didn't do what I could have done and should have done," said civil rights activist Julian Bond, a former chairman of the NAACP who is featured in the film, which debuted in July 2012 on PBS. "The shift from civil rights to modern times made it difficult to talk about it."
The two-hour program, directed by Renata Simone, provides a thorough examination of how religion, politics, racism and homophobia have played a role in the spread of this disease among African Americans, who now make up more than half of all new HIV infections in the United States.
The film recounts the first recorded cases of AIDS, which in the early 1980s was widely believed to be a disease that affected only White, single gay men, even though some of the earliest cases were among Black gay men. And yet while word of the mysterious disease spread among the White gay community, particularly in San Francisco clubs in the Castro District, across the Bay in nearby Oakland, there was silence among Black gay men because there was no open and "out" population within the African American community.
"We all grow up with 'Don't put your business in the street' and 'Don't hang out your dirty laundry,' all these phrases around keeping secrets . . . and ways to protect yourselves, going all the way back to slavery. But some of that cultural baggage travels with us," said Black AIDS Institute President and CEO Phill Wilson, who, as a Black gay man living with HIV, provides poignant commentary and insight throughout the film. The Institute will be showing Endgame at many of the AIDS 2012 Post-Conference Hubs it's sponsoring around the country.
Silence and stigma, ignorance and fear, resonate loudly throughout the film. There's the personal story of Nell, for example, a woman whose "good catch" husband learned that he was HIV positive one year before he married her but never told her. By the time she discovered his diagnosis, she had been infected, too.
There are the stories of Tom and Keith -- "Bornies," as they call themselves -- who represent the children born with the virus in the early 1990s, having survived after their mothers died from the disease.
Or Jesse, a homosexual man whose friend invited him to church but who discovered that he'd been brought there to have the "homosexual demon" exorcised from him. He later turned to drugs to help take away the hurt and pain of living as a Black gay man and contracted AIDS by sharing needles.
Then there's the story of NBA star Magic Johnson, whose story made headlines -- and history. "I thought I made all the right moves, all the right decisions, and I found out I didn't make the right moves," he said in the film, noting that he must now take the same care as everyone else living with the disease.
"I am not cured," Johnson cautioned.
Beyond the recollections and personal stories, and testimonials of activists and doctors, the film also examines issues such as the abstinence-only programs that have become prevalent nationwide.
"Schools, the community, let me down," says one young African American woman, who described herself as a "normal" American teenager. " 'HIV' and 'normal' didn't go together." But when she met her Prince Charming, it landed her nearly dead in a hospital room with full-blown AIDS, which she contracted from unprotected sex. "Ignorance spreads this disease," she said.
Endgame further spotlights the work that needs to be done to educate Blacks in low-income communities on prevention, while treatment and access to proper medical care for those who have contracted the disease remain frustratingly limited.
Not until 2011 did the United States have a strategy to fight HIV/AIDS. And yet the AIDS rates in many Black communities are higher than those in many nations throughout sub-Saharan Africa. "I pray we will choose to act," said Wilson. "We need to be talking about the endgame."
And perhaps with the increased spotlight on this issue, we can.
Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn is a Los Angeles-based freelance journalist; co-author of the critically acclaimed Swirling: How to Date, Mate, and Relate Mixing Race, Culture, and Creed; and director-producer of the forthcoming documentary . . . But Can She Play? Blowin' the Roof Off Women Horn Players in Jazz.