AIDS Without Borders

Plenty of people who have seen me on television think I'm excitable, brash, and occasionally loud. Of course, they're right. When you've got 15 seconds to make an entire argument about the critical issues facing America, there's no other way to do it. For me, it's a natural fit, because it's in my personality to be forceful and stand my ground. Yet, there are times that call for a quieter tone. Though these times often revolve around some hot-button issues, more can be accomplished by settling down, leaning in, and having a serious conversation than by yelling back and forth. Such it is with the issue of AIDS. And though it is somewhat antithetical to my nature, I'm going to try to lean in, and ask you to do the same.

About a month ago, we marked World AIDS Day -- a day filled with red ribbons, demonstrations, and internet greeting cards, all to "prove" that we still care about finding a cure for the deadly syndrome. Just 30 days later, the ribbons are frayed, some sitting on a dresser, some in the garbage. The only demonstrations about AIDS you hear about are by the lunatic "Reverend" Fred Phelps who protests funerals of gays and lesbians, and has taken to protesting the funerals of American service members, spreading his homophobic slurs about AIDS.

Since World AIDS Day, the most attention paid by the mainstream media to AIDS was TIME's declaration that Bono and Bill and Melinda Gates were the persons of the year, in part because of their work fighting AIDS in Africa. Meanwhile, the high-water mark fighting AIDS by President Bush was his verbal commitment to fighting world AIDS a few years ago during his State of the Union.

To be sure, AIDS in Africa is important, and fighting it there is a core part of eradicating the disease. But let us be serious, neither the $15 billion the President committed to spending on the global pandemic nor the work of the persons of the year will do much to take care of the serious problems with AIDS we have here at home. According to the Centers for Disease control, HIV/AIDS is the number five killer of Americans aged 25-44, and the leading cause of death for African American men between 35-44 and African American women 25-34. In 2003, over 85 percent of AIDS cases among women were made up of African American and Hispanic women, while almost 65 percent of AIDS cases among men were African American and Hispanic. Many, if not most, of these cases are in America's inner-cities.

The President has not only been absent from this fight on the home front, he has been hurting the efforts to fight the disease. In America, right now, nearly 20 percent of all working African Americans have no health insurance, almost double that of working white Americans. Meanwhile, the President (as well as many Democrats and Republicans) have been hostile to the notion of universal health care, and has continually attempted to impose drastic cuts to Medicaid -- the number one provider of care to those living with HIV/AIDS in America. The President has also attempted to enact draconian cuts in Housing Opportunities for People With AIDS (HOPWA), that provides housing help to those AIDS victims that might otherwise become homeless, and moderate cuts to the Ryan White CARE Act, the overarching program to fight domestic AIDS.

The President is not the only one with who blame should be placed for the continuing problem of AIDS in America. A subject that tends to be avoided is the behavior of some with AIDS themselves. Bubbling up is a subculture in the gay community that downplays the risks of dying of AIDS, if not overtly encourages contracting the syndrome. The practice by gay males of "barebacking," or engaging in unprotected intercourse, has been on a steady rise, according to multiple studies. Many attribute the rise in unprotected sex to a false sense of security among some that the advances for a cure are proceeding quickly, and that protease inhibitors will at least keep someone with HIV/AIDS alive long enough to see a cure. An even smaller, but growing, group are those who call themselves "gift givers" and "bug chasers" -- those who actively seek to spread the disease to willing people, and those people who wish to contract HIV/AIDS.

The point of all of this is that there are still some serious issues to tackle about the spread of AIDS in America that don't get any attention from politicians and celebrities, and plenty of blame to go around from the President to a small number of those with AIDS to everyone in between. It's time that we as a nation remember that after December 1 -- World AIDS Day -- AIDS does not stop spreading right inside our borders because we had a successful day of rallies and ribbons. So let us commit to spend the other 364 days leaning in and figuring out a solution.