If one of every two straight white men were projected to become HIV positive, nothing else would be covered in the news. Ever. MSNBC, covering the pandemic 24/7, would rebrand itself MSHIV.
But, as only one in every 2,500 heterosexual white men are projected to become HIV positive – and as many white Americans imagine themselves immune to the kind of virus black gay and bisexual men would bring upon themselves – the black plague of HIV is not considered newsworthy.
Aids was a unifying force in gay politics from the early 1980s until the mid 1990s. Then, effective antiretroviral (ARV) drugs came to market that not only saved the lives of the millions of people who took them but – because ARVs can suppress HIV so effectively that virus levels become “undetectable” and thus “untransmittable” to others – they dramatically slowed rates of HIV transmission within certain communities.
However, these ARVs only helped the individual and communal bodies who got the drugs. And in the US, this largely meant that white gay men got the drugs early and often, while black gay America largely never got them. The inability to end HIV/Aids isn’t a failure of medicine, but a failure of racial capitalism.
Hence, as Aids deaths and rates of new HIV infections declined among white gay activists, many invested their social capital in fighting for causes such as marriage equality or “corporate equality” – positioning gay identity ever closer to middle-class ideals and imagining gay life as white, upwardly mobile, homonormative and HIV negative.
Over the same period, the epidemiology of HIV got worse in black America. But just as how the estimated 35 million people who have died of Aids, the 37 million people currently living with HIV, and the million people who still die from Aids every year globally are guilty of no moral failure, the half of black queer American men who are becoming HIV positive are not doing so due to particularly risky behaviour.
Indeed, black gay men have “fewer partners and lower rates of recreational drug use than other gay men”. It’s just that not enough of us got the drugs, and the things that structurally make people most at risk for HIV – homelessness, incarceration, and a lack of access to good education, employment and medical care – are experienced at high rates by black people.
The US has an HIV epidemic – and its victims are gay black men | Steven W Thrasher
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