[Billy Twee] AIDS/HIV March, Race and Reality

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To see Billy Twee's original blog post click here

In recognition of National Black AIDS/HIV Awareness Day, the San Francisco AIDS mafia organized a march from City Hall to someplace in the Western Addition, although the local gay media failed to disclose exactly where. I guess this was totally a media event concocted to keep Black AIDS victims in the communal consciousness, so where they marchers ended wasn't important enough to report. A photo published in the Bay Area Reporter (BAR) showed a few dozen marchers, some of them assisted by canes or crutches. The mafia, here in this context, namely the National Minority AIDS Council, says Blacks are at a disadvantage due to "a complex set of social, individual and environmental factors." Fair enough I agree that any program designed to target a specific group has to be real and honest. This whole business of living on the down low, for example, is rife with racial connotations. But my experiences, based on decades of hot anonymous sex with men of all races, ages and cultures, would make the mafia's analysis only more complex. For example, I can generalize about condom use: Black men are more fastidious when it comes to using condoms, second only to Asian men, and by Asian I mean Chinese and Japanese. My experiences with Filipinos and Koreans have been inconsistent. Latinos, and in my case, this means Mexicans, are more problematic...Mexican guys over 40 are likely to use condoms, those younger are among the fiercest barebackers. But who's less likely to use a condom? It's 'white' guys, hands down. And I've had enough sex to conduct my own survey; it's just too bad I haven't written and categorized every single sexual encounter; they're not in the thousands, but hundreds, most certainly.

Then the resident himbo on the SF Board of Supervisors, one Ross Mirkarimi (who is not Black but represents the Western Addition), chimed in with non-sequiturs about AIDS and San Francisco's dwindling Black population (the City now has fewer Black residents than it has in many decades, less than 7% of the total population)...'the African-American exodus couldn't be more shameful,' he opined. 'I see this as an opportunity to make sure the stats go in a different direction.' Well, go ahead, do what you want, but the declining Black population has nothing to do with AIDS/HIV, so if you don't see the results you envision, don't blame Black folks.

I suppose these media events do fulfill some purpose, but I couldn't vouch for their usefulness. Black guys are nowhere the 'problem' in the prevention discussion, that the white guys are, and that's a fact.

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