Ari Shapiro. The medicines to prevent and treat HIV already exist. In , more than half of the new HIV diagnoses in the U. Our co-host Ari Shapiro is in Jackson, Miss.
PrEP and Beyond: HIV/AIDS & Black, Gay Men • EBONY
I saw the damage Aids did to the gay community, and I live with it myself. I am a gay man who lived through the Aids pandemic, so many people have asked me to compare that crisis with the one we now face. The main difference between the two is that Aids at first appeared to afflict specific populations, while coronavirus is an equal opportunity malady. I remember when I visited Paris in I told Michel Foucault, the French philosopher, about Aids and he laughed at this American invention that seemed to target both gay men and Haitians. In the mids, I wrote an article in which I said American gays, at least younger ones, had worked through their self-hatred in the post-Stonewall 70s but that internalised homophobia had come back with the Aids stigma in the s. Eventually the viral nature of the disease became known and we discovered the only two significant modes of transmission were blood and semen, but in the early days people feared physical contact, mosquitoes, kisses, coughs. Actually, coronavirus is much more easily communicated than Aids ever was.
Download and Share This Infographic image icon. Source: CDC. But trends varied for different groups of gay and bisexual men. It is important for gay and bisexual men to know their HIV status so they can take medicine to treat HIV if they have the virus. Taking HIV medicine every day can make the viral load undetectable.
For as long as HIV has existed in the public consciousness, it has been associated with queerness. Out of the 1. For instance, men reporting sex with another man could include gay men, bisexual men and—unfortunately, due to antiquated and transphobic reporting policies—transgender women. Similarly, tens of thousands of men living with HIV in the U.