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  "path": "/health/hiv/black-communiites-hiv-aids-crisis",
  "publishedAt": "2026-02-14T15:15:59.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.advocate.com",
  "tags": [
    "Hiv",
    "Aids",
    "Black history",
    "History is queer",
    "pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP)",
    "_American University Radio_",
    "The Whitewashed History of HIV: A Black Teen Died of AIDS in 1969",
    "_largest group_",
    "_Whitman-Walker Medical Clinic_",
    "_Black Pride_",
    "_Black AIDS Institute_",
    "_To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle against HIV/AIDS_",
    "_Bebashi_",
    "_In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology_",
    "13 Black community organizations fighting HIV in the U.S. you should know",
    "_Los Angeles Times_",
    "_Black Brothers Esteem_",
    "_National Institutes of Health_"
  ],
  "textContent": "\n\n\n\nIn the early days of the AIDS crisis, there were no treatments for people with HIV and no pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), a prescription-based daily pill or an injection that people not living with HIV can take to prevent HIV infection, to prevent its spread. On top of it all, institutional racism in the realm of public health often left Black patients out.\n\n“Back in those days, it really exposed the vulnerability of our community and the lack of a safety net that we were missing to deal with any kind of crisis,” Vincent Slatt, director of archiving for the Rainbow History Project, told _American University Radio_ about the early days of the crisis.\n\n“This is the first thing that came across. We didn't have access to medical care. We didn't have access to what few drugs were available. We didn't have access to appropriate housing and support, and not a handout but a hand up. HIV AIDS exposed the worst things that could happen to our community, and that's what happened. It was a disaster in the making.”\n\n**Related:The Whitewashed History of HIV: A Black Teen Died of AIDS in 1969 **\n\nThe result? Within a decade of HIV emerging first as a threat to gay white men, Black patients made up the _largest group_ of new infections in the late 1980s, a trend that could continue through the 1990s and beyond. But federal systems offered little help. It fell on the Black community itself to set up systems of relief.\n\nIn the first decade of the spread of AIDS, queer people of color suffered a dearth of any treatment at all. In 1986, Dr. Arthur Brewer, chair of the National Minority AIDS Council, spoke at a panel in St. Louis about fighting perceptions that AIDS was a “white homosexual disease.”\n\n“AIDS has been an epidemic in the Black community from the very beginning, but because we refuse to talk about it and refuse to educate ourselves about the disease, we will continue to die in large numbers,” he said, according to archives from Washington University in St. Louis.\n\nThe National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays similarly noted around the same time that many organizations serving Black communities showed disinterest in serving a queer constituency.\n\n“Because Blacks deny homosexuality as a problem in their community, they deny AIDS, but what they don’t realize is that the disease is affecting heterosexuals increasingly and on a national level it is caused primarily by IV drug users,” said NCBLG co-founder Gil Gerald in 1986.\n\nIn Washington, D.C., which has a large Black population, the _Whitman-Walker Medical Clinic_ began outreach efforts specifically to the LGBTQ+ community, ensuring residents knew of breakthroughs in HIV treatment and prevention. City government produced blunt videos about the threat of AIDS, but also how queer men could practice safe sex and limit the spread of the disease. As AIDS became more prevalent in the community, so did condom dispensers in local bars.\n\nWhen _Black Pride_ was founded in D.C. in 1991, organizers Welmore Cook, Theodore Kirkland, and Ernest Hopkins stressed an urgency in organizing the queer Black community. The city also opened one of the first government-run offices of LGBTQ+ Affairs.\n\nAs the AIDS crisis morphed to disproportionately impact Black communities, other organizations arose. The _Black AIDS Institute_ in Atlanta formed in 1999, launched by HIV-positive Black activist Phill Wilson. The Institute served as a massive outreach effort to educate Black Americans about the spread of AIDS in the community and about the growing treatment options.\n\n“At agencies like AID Atlanta, the city’s primary AIDS service organization, white gay men dominated leadership positions and volunteer structures,” Dan Royles, an LGBTQ+ history professor, wrote in 2021 for _The Baffler_.\n\n“Not seeing themselves reflected in efforts to address the new disease, Black gay men believed themselves to be insulated from it. However, by 1983, over a quarter of people diagnosed with AIDS in the United States were Black, roughly double their share of the national population.”\n\nRoyles detailed the emergence of the first Black LGBTQ+ groups and their focus on HIV in his book, _To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle against HIV/AIDS_.\n\nFor example, _Bebashi_ in 1985 Philadelphia became the first organization in the United States to address the AIDS epidemic in the African American community. It remains in operation today, offering free testing for sexually transmitted infections including HIV.\n\nNational efforts to educate about the crisis were also underway. When Joseph Beam compiled _In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology_, a story of 29 gay Black men, it prominently included tales about the impact of AIDS in the subculture.\n\n**Related:****13 Black community organizations fighting HIV in the U.S. you should know**\n\nEfforts occurred on both coasts. In 1989, AIDS Project Los Angeles redirected $100,000 in education funding toward reaching Black and Latino gay and bisexual men. “That’s the top priority in terms of primary prevention,” foundation CEO Stephen Bennett told the _Los Angeles Times_ at the time. That effort set up the organization to address gaps in public health offerings over the course of the 1990s.\n\nAround 1996, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation had launched _Black Brothers Esteem_, a psychosocial support program for the Black LGBTQ+ community. In its early days, the program made sure to connect Black men dealing with the disease with medical care while issuing appeals to the Black community at large to also support the at-risk gay population.\n\nThe inequity in support for queer Black men compared to white peers still manifests itself in unequal care. Adoption of PrEP among minority communities remains lower than among whites at risk of contracting the virus, according to the _National Institutes of Health_. But more organizations than ever before aim to expand both public education and treatment availability of modern treatments.",
  "title": "How Black communities protected each other during the early days of the AIDS crisis"
}