What Is It That Young Black Gay Men Don’t Get About HIV?

High rate of new infections points to a disconnect between prevention messages and their targets

White men and women get it. Latinos and Latinas get it. Even black women, who bear a disproportionate share of HIV infections, get it.

But young black gay men, based on the spike in HIV infections among them, apparently do not get it.

What is "it"? The message that HIV transmission isn’t one of Aesop’s fables or something as intangible as Jim Crow-era segregation may seem today. The message that HIV is real. There is risk. And there’s no cure, despite much lauded advances in treatment that have made the disease manageable.

That’s a consciousness that AIDS activists and some political leaders worry is nearly absent from the minds of young black gay men, who make up more than half of all new HIV infections annually, according to the latest figures released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

When the CDC first sounded the alarm about young black gay men and their high risk for the disease half a decade ago, Tony Ray was in his late teens. Today, the 26-year-old New York City-based AIDS activist says not much has changed about the hyper-masculine, anti-gay communities in which he and his peers live.

“Stigma is the biggest factor” contributing to the high burden of new HIV infection rates among young black men, says Ray, who is co-chair of the Campaign to End AIDS in Youth Council and a community activist for Housing Works, an organization fighting homelessness among those infected.

“If you have a society that says you have to be out and open, but doesn’t allow you to come out and get the affection [you] deserve, you are more likely to live in shame,” Ray says.

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Shame fosters a host of unhealthy behaviors among black men, Ray adds. He’s known his peers to seek discreet sexual encounters with men on “hook up” websites and, out of desperation, compromise their safety to attract other men who don’t “play safe” and are more likely to be HIV positive. And even among openly gay young black men, Ray says, conversations about condom use and HIV status don’t take place at the moment they should.

The emphasis on hyper-masculinity in the black community doesn’t help either. Young men understand very early on the status that comes with dominating and bedding women, even if they are having sex with other men, Ray says.

The spike in new HIV infections among this group seems to be a byproduct of shame, stigma and lack of effective sexual health education, most activists and sexual health experts agree.

The CDC estimates that 1.1 million people in the U.S. are HIV positive, with 50,000 newly infected each year and 1 in 4 occurring in people ages 13 through 24. In 2010, 1,000 young people were infected each month. Young black men who have sex with men (MSM) saw a 48 percent jump in new HIV infections from 2006 to 2009, according to CDC data.

With millions of dollars in government funding already going toward helping community groups test, prevent and educate high-risk demographics, some sexual health experts are beyond frustrated by the latest youth HIV statistics.