Dec. 1 was World AIDS Day. The international theme for 2024 was “Take the Rights Path: My Health, My Right!” The World Health Organization (WHO) wants health professionals to address the social determinants of health to combat AIDS. Specific populations continue to be hard-hit in the ongoing struggle to battle HIV/AIDS.

For African Americans, the disparities within the healthcare system contribute disproportionately to the high number of HIV/AIDS, directly affecting the quality of life and the spread of the virus.

According to an almost two decades old report by the Black AIDS Institute’s August 2008 report, “Left Behind,” the number of people living with HIV in black America exceeds the HIV population in seven of the 15 focus countries in the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) initiative, an initiative helping to save the lives of those who have HIV/AIDS around the world in countries like Haiti, Dominican Republic, India, South Africa, to name a few. In other words, if black America were its own country, standing on its own like Haiti or Nigeria, black Americans would rank 16th in the world.

The epidemic is heavily concentrated in urban enclaves like Detroit, New York, Newark, and Washington, D.C. Sadly, much of this is still present today. Also, with the South’s propensity to avoid speaking about uncomfortable subjects, unfortunately, the South has evolved into one of the HIV/AIDS hot spots in the country. And so, too, are prisons. HIV/AIDS among black male inmates is five times the rate of the general population and is transmitted primarily through male-to-male sex or tattooing.

However, when The New York Native, a now-defunct gay newspaper, in its May 18, 1981, issue first reported on a virus found in gay men then known as GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency), an editorial noted that “even if the disease first became apparent in gay men, it is not just a gay disease.”

Back in the day, famous HIV-positive heterosexual African Americans, like tennis great Arthur Ashe, news anchorman Max Robinson, and rapper Eazy all died of AIDS, and basketball giant Earvin “Magic” Johnson, who is still living with the virus, highlighted the fact that anyone can contract the virus. However, many still see the epidemic as a “white gay disease,” suggesting being gay or having sex with someone of the same gender puts you immediately at high risk.

Over time, we got to see that some “heterosexual” African American men were not honest about their sexuality, and the virus showed up in the women they slept with. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, a sex scare hit the African American heterosexual women’s population due to black men living life “on the down low” (or “on the D.L.”).  As an underground subculture of African American men who have sex with other men (MSM), they don’t identify as gay, bisexual or queer.

The feminization of this disease made many of us AIDS activists and scholars wonder if the same amount of money, concern, communication, and moral outrage that was put into white gay men with the disease would be put into curbing its spread among black women. It wasn’t!

There are still many persistent social and economic factors contributing to the high rates of the epidemic - racism, poverty, healthcare disparity, and violence, to name just a few. While we know that the epidemic moves along the fault lines of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation and that HIV transmission is tied to specific high-risk behaviors that are not exclusive to any one sexual orientation, the significant barriers to ending the AIDS epidemic still today are lack of information, health disparities and access to health care, which overrides homophobia. As a matter of fact, homophobia heightens because of a lack of information, health disparities, and access to health care.

As we enter the season of Advent in the Christian calendar, my prayer is one of health equity. I pray health professionals to heal not only those suffering from the disease but also address the social determinants of health that surround it, causing more lives to be lost.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board

member and Columnist, The Reverend

Irene Monroe is an ordained minister,

motivational speaker and she speaks for

a sector of society that is frequently

invisible. Rev. Monroe does a weekly

Monday segment, “All Revved Up!” on

WGBH (89.7 FM), on Boston Public Radio

and a weekly Friday segment “The Take”

on New England Channel NEWS (NECN).

She’s a Huffington Post blogger and a

syndicated religion columnist. Her

columns appear in cities across the

country and in the U.K, and Canada. Also

she writes a column in the Boston home

LGBTQ newspaper Baywindows and

Cambridge Chronicle. A native of

Brooklyn, NY, Rev. Monroe graduated

from Wellesley College and Union

Theological Seminary at Columbia

University, and served as a pastor at an

African-American church in New Jersey

before coming to Harvard Divinity School

to do her doctorate. She has received the

Harvard University Certificate of

Distinction in Teaching several times

while being the head teaching fellow of

the Rev. Peter Gomes, the Pusey Minister

in the Memorial Church at Harvard who is

the author of the best seller, THE GOOD

BOOK. She appears in the film For the

Bible Tells Me So and was profiled in the

Gay Pride episode of In the Life, an

Emmy-nominated segment. Monroe’s

coming out story is profiled in “CRISIS:

40 Stories Revealing the Personal, Social,

and Religious Pain and Trauma of

Growing up Gay in America" and in

"Youth in Crisis." In 1997 Boston

Magazine cited her as one of Boston's 50

Most Intriguing Women, and was profiled

twice in the Boston Globe, In the Living

Arts and The Spiritual Life sections for

her LGBT activism. Her papers are at the

Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College's

research library on the history of women

in America. Her website is

irenemonroe.com. Contact the Rev.

Monroe and BC.