At this moment, one in four gay men in New York City is infected with HIV, an incurable disease that has infected more than 100,000 men in New York City, 20,000 of whom have no idea they have even been infected.
In the last six years, new diagnoses of the disease among gay men in New York City under the age of 30 rose by 33 percent.
Among gay males between the ages of 13 and 19, the rate of infection has doubled.
The disease has spread across the nation—where government estimates put the total currently diagnosed at over one million—but nowhere has it taken hold more than in New York, where its incidence is four times the national average, with more cases than Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami and Washington, D.C., combined. In Manhattan, the incidence of the disease among gay men has more than doubled since 2001.
AIDS continues to impact the gay community in almost the same manner it did when it arrived a quarter-century ago. The only difference between then and now is that in the wake of worldwide attention to its spread among blacks and Latinos and the third world population, the danger to sexually active gay men has been almost forgotten.
But that danger is real, and it is growing.
On May 19, 1981, The New York Native—then an influential gay newspaper published in New York—wrote for the first time of the disease that would eventually ravage the world and spread across continents and kill millions of men and women.
It described an outbreak of 12 to 24 cases of “infection with a protozoa-like organism, pneumocystis carinii” in the New York City area. Less than a month later, The Los Angeles Times picked up the story with the headline, “Outbreaks of Pneumonia Among Gay Males Studied.” On July 3, 1981, The New York Times reported, on page A20, that doctors in New York and California “have diagnosed among homosexual men 41 cases of a rare and often rapidly fatal cancer.” The Times reported that “8 of the victims died less than 24 months after the diagnosis was made.”
In May of 1982, New York magazine published a story by Michael VerMeulen called “The Gay Plague,” and from the notion of a plague was born a safe sex movement designed to combat the deadly virus.
Eventually, researchers found that AIDS had spread to other countries and continents; by the late 1990s, AIDS was found to be killing millions of Africans, more than the number dying in war or genocide. A Pulitzer Prize–winning 1999 series of articles in The Village Voice documented the explosion of AIDS deaths in Africa that threatened to become the worst catastrophe in the history of the continent—with only $150 million in American funds (less than the cost of making the movie “The Wild, Wild West,” then-Voice reporter Mark Schoofs pointed out) being provided to combat the epidemic.
With the 1990s came an increased awareness of the disease’s ongoing threat. Deaths of prominent New Yorkers like Alvin Ailey, Robert Mapplethorpe and Michael Bennett focused attention and concern; plays like Angels in America caused the world outside gay neighborhoods to acknowledge the devastation. The announcement in 1991 by basketball legend Magic Johnson—an avowed hereosexual—that he had been diagnosed with HIV stunned the world into awareness that anyone could be stricken; he acknowledged having contracted it through anonymous, unprotected sex. By the mid-1990s, drug companies were introducing new forms of HIV drugs that helped slow the progression of the virus and forestall the death sentence that had once come with an AIDS diagnosis.
In the late 1990s, stories began to surface of a return to unsafe sex. For the first time in 10 years, in 2000—the same year that a Brooklyn judge ruled that New York City had “chronically and systematically” ignored the special financial needs of AIDS victims in the city—gay sex replaced intravenous drug use as the main cause of AIDS.
Still, the media’s attention flowed towards Africa, and toward studies that showed a large increase in HIV infections in the African-American community. Twenty years after the virus was first discovered, an odd circumstance developed: the American news media began to forget that AIDS existed in the gay population. It was as though a cure had been found—which it had not. Organizations like the Gay Men’s Health Crisis—a vibrant fundraising charity that grew out of widespread attention to AIDS during the 1980s—experienced lack of funds and interest. Stories rarely appeared in print, except in connection with World AIDS Day, or the occasional medical breakthrough. Indeed, the facts that appear in the first three paragraphs of this article—stunning developments worthy of the attention of every breathing New Yorker—were reported in only a single paragraph buried in the metro section of the September 12, 2007, New York Times.
“Yes, people have forgotten,” said Sara Markt, a spokesperson for the city’s Department of Health, which put out the report on September 11. She sounded surprised that the statistics didn’t attract the attention they should have, given the alarming growth of HIV among young, gay New Yorkers—precisely the group that first faced the alarming threat of AIDS in the early 1980s.
Now, more than a quarter century later, the eyes of a concerned world focus almost exclusively elsewhere when HIV and AIDS are mentioned. The epidemic in Africa has, by some estimates, cost 25 million lives, with millions more likely to die over the next several years.
But in New York City—where aggressive drug treatments have slowed the death rate from AIDS to a trickle, and heightened protections have reduced the number of infections caused by needles, or passed from mother to child—a different sort of crisis has emerged. While few die from a diagnosis of HIV, many thousands of New Yorkers who engage in unprotected gay sex find themselves living with the painful consequences, a catastrophic illness that they mistakenly believed had passed them by. Their lives are still forever transformed by a disease that rarely finds itself in the pages of The New York Times—except in coverage of pharmaceutical developments—or discussed openly by public officials outside the halls of the city’s impassioned health department. “We’re headed in the wrong direction,” declared Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the city’s health commissioner, in his September 11 announcement. “Unless young men reduce the number of partners they have, and protect themselves and their partners by using condoms more consistently, we will face another wave of suffering and death from HIV and AIDS.”
On bus shelters around the city, a striking image of Magic Johnson now appears with a warning to young blacks and Latinos. The ads read, “Staying healthy is about a few basic things: A positive attitude, partnering with my doctor, taking my medicine every day.” Paid for by the drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline, the use of Johnson as a spokesman is meant to attract attention to the statistics showing a growth of HIV in the black community. Even though blacks comprise 15 percent of the U.S. population, they represent half of all Americans currently diagnosed with HIV—and it is now the number one cause of death among blacks between the ages of 25 and 44. No better symbol of recovery exists than the healthy-looking former basketball great.
But while the statistics show a significant and important racial component to the disease, the use of Magic Johnson misrepresents the people that make up those statistics. Most of the young black and Latino people getting HIV and dying from it are gay—or what health experts now dispassionately refer to as MSM, or “men who have sex with men.” This phraseology was designed to deflect attention from men who, for whatever reason, decline to define themselves as gay, even though they engage in homosexual acts that can lead to HIV infection.
“We use the phrase because if we refer to this as a gay issue, it could be ignored by men who consider themselves heterosexual,” Sara Markt, the Health Department spokesperson, explained. The result of this distinction, however, is to confuse the issue of what causes new HIV infections, and what needs to be done to halt its spread.
There’s universal agreement among experts that the best deterrent to getting HIV is safer sex; the city agency brags, rightly, that it’s working to “promote risk reduction” by the distribution of more than three million condoms in New York City every month via clinics, community organizations, bars, restaurants and elsewhere. It’s also offering free HIV testing not only through hospitals but also at community organizations throughout the city.
But even the city’s own news release on the explosive new statistics fails to offer a specific plan of action to combat, or halt, the terrifying growth of HIV infection in the 13-to-19-year-old age group. And it fails to acknowledge that a lack of effective sex education programs in New York City schools, and the use of Abstinence Only programs, which have been proven ineffective and harmful, may be contributing to the problem. In embracing the politically correct phrase of “men having sex with men,” the city conveniently—and perhaps dangerously—ignores the threat implied by its own numbers: A quarter-century after the first AIDS diagnosis sent a chill through the gay community and transformed its culture, the threat of catastrophic illness still exists for gay men having unprotected sex.
As if to underscore the danger, buried in the press release was the news of a “sharp increase” in the number of syphilis cases reported among “men having sex with men” in the first quarter of 2007. Half of those newly diagnosed with syphilis, the department reported, also have HIV. The two form a “dangerous combination,” the city health department declared, because syphilis causes genital sores, making the disease easier to spread—and because HIV lowers the body’s immunity to disease, adding to the risk of syphilis.
But all of this has been couched carefully in the terminology of the 21st century, which perhaps explains why media organizations once racing to cover AIDS and HIV issues have backed off stories in the wake of these latest disclosures. When The New York Times first reported on what would turn out to be the AIDS epidemic—in a story by its medical reporter, Lawrence K. Altman—the headline read, “Rare Cancer Seen In 41 Homosexuals.” No distinctions were drawn between men who called themselves gay and men who didn’t. There was an urgent call to action in the gay community that led to a safe-sex campaign transforming the way gay men lived—indeed, the way all of us lived.
“It’s sad, but it’s almost like we’re back at the beginning,” said Sara Markt, the Health Department spokesperson. “We somehow have to remind people that this is a gay disease, all over again, before it becomes another epidemic.”
In the last six years, new diagnoses of the disease among gay men in New York City under the age of 30 rose by 33 percent.
Among gay males between the ages of 13 and 19, the rate of infection has doubled.
The disease has spread across the nation—where government estimates put the total currently diagnosed at over one million—but nowhere has it taken hold more than in New York, where its incidence is four times the national average, with more cases than Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami and Washington, D.C., combined. In Manhattan, the incidence of the disease among gay men has more than doubled since 2001.
AIDS continues to impact the gay community in almost the same manner it did when it arrived a quarter-century ago. The only difference between then and now is that in the wake of worldwide attention to its spread among blacks and Latinos and the third world population, the danger to sexually active gay men has been almost forgotten.
But that danger is real, and it is growing.
On May 19, 1981, The New York Native—then an influential gay newspaper published in New York—wrote for the first time of the disease that would eventually ravage the world and spread across continents and kill millions of men and women.
It described an outbreak of 12 to 24 cases of “infection with a protozoa-like organism, pneumocystis carinii” in the New York City area. Less than a month later, The Los Angeles Times picked up the story with the headline, “Outbreaks of Pneumonia Among Gay Males Studied.” On July 3, 1981, The New York Times reported, on page A20, that doctors in New York and California “have diagnosed among homosexual men 41 cases of a rare and often rapidly fatal cancer.” The Times reported that “8 of the victims died less than 24 months after the diagnosis was made.”
In May of 1982, New York magazine published a story by Michael VerMeulen called “The Gay Plague,” and from the notion of a plague was born a safe sex movement designed to combat the deadly virus.
Eventually, researchers found that AIDS had spread to other countries and continents; by the late 1990s, AIDS was found to be killing millions of Africans, more than the number dying in war or genocide. A Pulitzer Prize–winning 1999 series of articles in The Village Voice documented the explosion of AIDS deaths in Africa that threatened to become the worst catastrophe in the history of the continent—with only $150 million in American funds (less than the cost of making the movie “The Wild, Wild West,” then-Voice reporter Mark Schoofs pointed out) being provided to combat the epidemic.
With the 1990s came an increased awareness of the disease’s ongoing threat. Deaths of prominent New Yorkers like Alvin Ailey, Robert Mapplethorpe and Michael Bennett focused attention and concern; plays like Angels in America caused the world outside gay neighborhoods to acknowledge the devastation. The announcement in 1991 by basketball legend Magic Johnson—an avowed hereosexual—that he had been diagnosed with HIV stunned the world into awareness that anyone could be stricken; he acknowledged having contracted it through anonymous, unprotected sex. By the mid-1990s, drug companies were introducing new forms of HIV drugs that helped slow the progression of the virus and forestall the death sentence that had once come with an AIDS diagnosis.
In the late 1990s, stories began to surface of a return to unsafe sex. For the first time in 10 years, in 2000—the same year that a Brooklyn judge ruled that New York City had “chronically and systematically” ignored the special financial needs of AIDS victims in the city—gay sex replaced intravenous drug use as the main cause of AIDS.
Still, the media’s attention flowed towards Africa, and toward studies that showed a large increase in HIV infections in the African-American community. Twenty years after the virus was first discovered, an odd circumstance developed: the American news media began to forget that AIDS existed in the gay population. It was as though a cure had been found—which it had not. Organizations like the Gay Men’s Health Crisis—a vibrant fundraising charity that grew out of widespread attention to AIDS during the 1980s—experienced lack of funds and interest. Stories rarely appeared in print, except in connection with World AIDS Day, or the occasional medical breakthrough. Indeed, the facts that appear in the first three paragraphs of this article—stunning developments worthy of the attention of every breathing New Yorker—were reported in only a single paragraph buried in the metro section of the September 12, 2007, New York Times.
“Yes, people have forgotten,” said Sara Markt, a spokesperson for the city’s Department of Health, which put out the report on September 11. She sounded surprised that the statistics didn’t attract the attention they should have, given the alarming growth of HIV among young, gay New Yorkers—precisely the group that first faced the alarming threat of AIDS in the early 1980s.
Now, more than a quarter century later, the eyes of a concerned world focus almost exclusively elsewhere when HIV and AIDS are mentioned. The epidemic in Africa has, by some estimates, cost 25 million lives, with millions more likely to die over the next several years.
But in New York City—where aggressive drug treatments have slowed the death rate from AIDS to a trickle, and heightened protections have reduced the number of infections caused by needles, or passed from mother to child—a different sort of crisis has emerged. While few die from a diagnosis of HIV, many thousands of New Yorkers who engage in unprotected gay sex find themselves living with the painful consequences, a catastrophic illness that they mistakenly believed had passed them by. Their lives are still forever transformed by a disease that rarely finds itself in the pages of The New York Times—except in coverage of pharmaceutical developments—or discussed openly by public officials outside the halls of the city’s impassioned health department. “We’re headed in the wrong direction,” declared Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the city’s health commissioner, in his September 11 announcement. “Unless young men reduce the number of partners they have, and protect themselves and their partners by using condoms more consistently, we will face another wave of suffering and death from HIV and AIDS.”
On bus shelters around the city, a striking image of Magic Johnson now appears with a warning to young blacks and Latinos. The ads read, “Staying healthy is about a few basic things: A positive attitude, partnering with my doctor, taking my medicine every day.” Paid for by the drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline, the use of Johnson as a spokesman is meant to attract attention to the statistics showing a growth of HIV in the black community. Even though blacks comprise 15 percent of the U.S. population, they represent half of all Americans currently diagnosed with HIV—and it is now the number one cause of death among blacks between the ages of 25 and 44. No better symbol of recovery exists than the healthy-looking former basketball great.
But while the statistics show a significant and important racial component to the disease, the use of Magic Johnson misrepresents the people that make up those statistics. Most of the young black and Latino people getting HIV and dying from it are gay—or what health experts now dispassionately refer to as MSM, or “men who have sex with men.” This phraseology was designed to deflect attention from men who, for whatever reason, decline to define themselves as gay, even though they engage in homosexual acts that can lead to HIV infection.
“We use the phrase because if we refer to this as a gay issue, it could be ignored by men who consider themselves heterosexual,” Sara Markt, the Health Department spokesperson, explained. The result of this distinction, however, is to confuse the issue of what causes new HIV infections, and what needs to be done to halt its spread.
There’s universal agreement among experts that the best deterrent to getting HIV is safer sex; the city agency brags, rightly, that it’s working to “promote risk reduction” by the distribution of more than three million condoms in New York City every month via clinics, community organizations, bars, restaurants and elsewhere. It’s also offering free HIV testing not only through hospitals but also at community organizations throughout the city.
But even the city’s own news release on the explosive new statistics fails to offer a specific plan of action to combat, or halt, the terrifying growth of HIV infection in the 13-to-19-year-old age group. And it fails to acknowledge that a lack of effective sex education programs in New York City schools, and the use of Abstinence Only programs, which have been proven ineffective and harmful, may be contributing to the problem. In embracing the politically correct phrase of “men having sex with men,” the city conveniently—and perhaps dangerously—ignores the threat implied by its own numbers: A quarter-century after the first AIDS diagnosis sent a chill through the gay community and transformed its culture, the threat of catastrophic illness still exists for gay men having unprotected sex.
As if to underscore the danger, buried in the press release was the news of a “sharp increase” in the number of syphilis cases reported among “men having sex with men” in the first quarter of 2007. Half of those newly diagnosed with syphilis, the department reported, also have HIV. The two form a “dangerous combination,” the city health department declared, because syphilis causes genital sores, making the disease easier to spread—and because HIV lowers the body’s immunity to disease, adding to the risk of syphilis.
But all of this has been couched carefully in the terminology of the 21st century, which perhaps explains why media organizations once racing to cover AIDS and HIV issues have backed off stories in the wake of these latest disclosures. When The New York Times first reported on what would turn out to be the AIDS epidemic—in a story by its medical reporter, Lawrence K. Altman—the headline read, “Rare Cancer Seen In 41 Homosexuals.” No distinctions were drawn between men who called themselves gay and men who didn’t. There was an urgent call to action in the gay community that led to a safe-sex campaign transforming the way gay men lived—indeed, the way all of us lived.
“It’s sad, but it’s almost like we’re back at the beginning,” said Sara Markt, the Health Department spokesperson. “We somehow have to remind people that this is a gay disease, all over again, before it becomes another epidemic.”
