His is a Sunday sermon the congregation does not want to hear. So when Phill Wilson steps up to the pulpit at Holy Name of Jesus Church in Los Angeles he knows he needs to shake people up. As he stares into the sea of wary black and Latino faces, Wilson tells a story about the time his brother accidentally set the house on fire, and how he and his siblings were afraid to call the Fire Department because they didn’t want people to find out. Just as the congregation starts to feel comfortable with its guest speaker, Wilson–an openly gay black man and one of the country’s most outspoken voices on AIDS–gets serious. “Our house is on fire!” he preaches. “The fire truck arrives, but we won’t come out, because we’re afraid the folks from next door will see that we’re in that burning house. AIDS is a fire raging in our community and it’s out of control!”
Wilson’s mission: getting blacks to face facts about AIDS. At a time when national attention has turned to AIDS in Africa, HIV infection among African-Americans is soaring at staggering rates. In 1985, African-Americans made up roughly a quarter of reported AIDS cases. Today blacks account for more than half of the 40,000 new HIV cases in the United States each year. AIDS has surpassed homicide as a leading killer of African-Americans between the ages of 25 and 44. Roughly one in 50 black men is infected with HIV, three times the rate for white men. An estimated one in 160 black women is HIV-positive; for white women the rate is one in 3,000. And a recent six-city study suggests that the rate among black gay men may be as high as 30 percent–more than three times that for white gays and more than double the rate for Latinos.
But to even begin to stem the epidemic requires talking publicly about topics, like homosexuality, that many blacks refuse to discuss even in private. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study conducted last year showed that a quarter of black men who contracted HIV through sex with other men considered themselves heterosexual (compared with 6 percent of white men). Closeted sexuality is, of course, not unique to blacks, but the level of homophobic rhetoric in black communities, from hip-hop lyrics to Sunday sermons, makes denial about living “on the down-low,” as some call it, especially high. Men with double lives–whether they be former felons who started having sex with men in prison or middle-class professionals with families and social standing–are unlikely to use condoms with their wives and girlfriends for fear of outing themselves. And many women are afraid to raise the subject of their men’s having sex with other men for fear of the answer. The consequences are catastrophic. Black women now make up more than 60 percent of all new cases of HIV among women, and rates for black children are similarly high.
Beneath the secrecy lies a more insidious culprit: self-hate. The weight of AIDS for African-Americans is laden with the historical cargo of racism, poverty and poor access to health care. The result for many is resignation. “We don’t get as angry as we should because we don’t have expectations of surviving,” says Wilson. “Surviving AIDS?” he’s asked. “Surviving, period,” he responds. Prevention messages that work in white communities often fall flat with blacks. Slogans such as “AIDS kills,” for instance, are not as compelling to a young man who believes he is just as likely to die from police brutality or a drive-by shooting. Rampant rumors about AIDS’s being inflicted on blacks by the government compound outreach difficulties. “If it’s a conspiracy, then people can believe there is nothing they can do about it,” says the CDC’s Dr. Helene Gayle. “It allows people to shift the blame from personal responsibility to some amorphous ’they’.”
Wilson’s strategy, as he puts it, is to push blacks to “confront our shadows.” Though there are now many AIDS organizations focused on black communities–such as New York-based Balm in Gilead, which works with black churches–Wilson’s African American AIDS Policy and Training Institute, founded two years ago, is the nation’s first think tank devoted solely to creating a prevention framework tailored to black realities. White activists, for instance, often focus outreach in gay neighborhoods. Because black gays are less likely to live in clusters and to seek gay services, Wilson’s approach is to infiltrate the whole black community. The institute trains fellows to work with churches, community centers, black businesses and the black media to influence policy, funding and research. “It gives us a voice,” says fellow Deneen Robinson-Fountain, 35, an HIV-positive mother of two from Dallas. “The power and permission to control our own fate.”
But Wilson’s take-charge approach is often met with hostility. At a conference of black ministers in the mid-1980s (a time when a decisive message may have prevented the surge in new cases), one clergyman stood and shouted, “AIDS is not our problem. We’re not going to let them blame this on us.” And just last year organizers of a black town-hall meeting, which coincided with the Democratic convention in Los Angeles, denied Wilson’s request to include AIDS as a discussion point, along with topics like violence and racial profiling.
For all his activism, Wilson believes the most effective AIDS work happens on a smaller scale. “Before you can convince people to save their lives,” he says, “you have to convince them their lives are worth saving.” Two summers ago he noticed his two teenage nephews were falling behind in school. Fearful of their slipping into potentially deadly behavior like violence and risky sex, Wilson took them in and redirected their lives with tutoring, curfews and a strict schedule of household responsibilities. Winfred and Corey, now 20 and 18, say their uncle doesn’t talk to them much about AIDS and safe sex. They get the message by sharing in his life. For his senior project Winfred made a documentary on Wilson’s institute. And last year Corey accompanied Wilson to South Africa for the International Conference on AIDS.
In between meetings and caring for his nephews, Wilson wages his personal battle with the disease. Infected with HIV in the early 1980s, he has been living with AIDS since 1990. He looked on helplessly as his partner of nine years died in his arms. Twice doctors have summoned Wilson’s family and told them he had mere hours to live. Recently, the activist’s viral load has crept up, signs that his disease is progressing. But he is not bitter, he says, about his own fate. He had contracted the virus before anyone knew what it was or how to prevent it. What Wilson lives for now is stopping ignorance from taking more black lives.
