[Health News] CDC: Half of Black Gay Men Will Be Diagnosed With HIV

Yes. It looks like I've already lost you though and you don't quite understand the point.

The battle with HIV is always a battle of information and knowledge. Tell people to practice safe sex and it goes away. Look, I'm telling you how actual health organizations fight the disease and that it hits the poor harder. It just does. The poor are usually not as educated about a great many of things, safe sex is usually one of them.

http://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/factsheet-hiv-aids.aspx

 

I don't know much about testosterone except that most of the huge guys at my gym inject it's derivatives to get gainz. That is more of a jcee15 theory. I was trying to see if a correlation existed in the homophobia scale. Apparently blacks are extremely homophobic and therefore get teh aids.

 

Yeah, I don't believe that theory. It's true though the last polls I checked that many AAs don't agree with homosexuality.

I doubt testosterone has anything to do with being gay. Men testosterone levels decrease with age for instance, it doesn't make anyone more gay...I mean at least I think. Unless there is some 60 year old coming out trend that I'm not aware of.

 

hmmm....ok...so how many times exactly Black men hit on you !!

did you decline POLITELY because you want these guys alone without their girlfriends?

maybe you did think its a unsafe or

you just wanted to play hard to get games

can you provide more details please . thanks

 

This theory ignores the fact that some of these same African American men carry European Y-Chromosomes thanks to the absolute power of slavery.

 

Funny. Spoke with a friend that works in HIV prevention and she informed me that she thinks the stigma of infection and of even being tested is strong and ignorant due to religiosity with respect to homosexuality. I've made my point clear, even though you keep reducing it to an absurdity I have never claimed.

The cultural stigma associated with infection is anecdotally still real in my family and amongst the people with whom I live and work. I have a bi-sexual cousin for whom that stigma was in influence in her not seeking testing for far too long. We might all be wrong in what we are reading and the people with whom we speak who reject the outreach may be a very small sample skewing our view, but I have shared my perspective. Belittle and diminish it. But don't distort it further. it is a cheap way out of the question of if dislike of homosexuality is still a relevant cultural influence. In the black culture I live in, it is. And it affects educational outreach efforts.

Education and information is the best protection. But there are real barriers to disseminating that information. Where I live, the movement is to try to involve churches so people in our community can move past the stigma associated with infection. Is that wrong headed and improperly motivated, maybe. But I am still amazed by the number of people who still have misconceptions about HIV.

 

For the sake of conversation, and to not take the usual anti-black racists bait posters like to drop, here are other theories:

The top 5 ideas at the moment:

Institutionalized Racism
Black people are equal on paper, but the same can't always be said in practice. Changing laws haven't done enough to undo almost 400 years of oppression that have lead to countless disadvantages that black people have to overcome every day. HIV impacts black populations disproportionately because the majority don’t have adequate access to the tools to prevent and treat the disease. Through policies and procedures, institutionalized racism creates a system that implicitly and sometimes explicitly disadvantages people of color.

Poverty
The 2012 US census reported that 28.1 percent of black people are living in poverty compared to the national average of 15.9 percent.The greater numbers of black people living in poverty are, in part, a result of the limited opportunities for upward mobility afforded to them. Often living in poverty means lack of education, lack of access to healthcare, increased risk of substance use and homelessness, and increased likelihood of engaging in sex work as a source of income. All are factors that can increase the risk of acquiring HIV. For those living in poverty who become HIV-positive, priorities do not change. Their concerns on a day-to-day basis are finding and maintaining income, keeping food on the table, and ensuring a place to sleep at night.​

Homophobia in the Church
According to the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey conducted in 2007, 87 percent of black people are affiliated with a religion. In the face of racial discrimination and hatred, the black church has always provided a sense of togetherness and belonging. However, when a black person comes out as LGBT, many don’t have that same support. Unfortunately black people in the church still make up a large portion of anti-gay America.

Traditionally the black church organizes and rallies when the community is faced with a crisis. However, the response to the HIV epidemic has been slow to non-existent. The reality is black, gay and bisexual men and transgender women are in a state of emergency when it comes to HIV/AIDS, yet they don’t have the full support of the black community.

Limited Sexual Networks
While interracial dating continues to be on the rise in the United States, black people remain the minority group that has relationships outside of their race the least at 19 percent. This means that the majority of black people have sexual partners who are also black. And given the smaller population size, once the black community was exposed to HIV it spread quicker and the negative impact was and continues to be greater. This means that black people who choose other black partners are more likely to come in contact with someone who is HIV-positive than other people who date within their race. This is especially true in LGBT communities as the CDC has reported that more than 1 in 4 black gay and bisexual men and 1 in 2 black transgender women are testing positive for HIV, compared to .06 percent of the general population.​

The Exaggeration of the "Down Low" Brother
The "down low" is a concept rooted in homophobia that leads to misguided assumptions about HIV in black communities. Studies have shown that the majority of black men who have sex with men do identify as gay or bisexual, and those who don’t are less likely to be HIV positive, have multiple male sexual partners and have engaged in unprotected anal intercourse in the past 6 months.

The idea of large numbers of black men being on the down low does a disservice to the community as a whole. It implies that being gay or bisexual is something to be ashamed of and it assumes that if you are an HIV-positive man who identifies as heterosexual you must be lying about who your sexual partners are. If you are an HIV-positive woman then you must have had sex with a man who wasn’t honest about his sexual partners, which eliminates the possibility of bisexuality and makes the woman a victim and void of the ability to empower herself and require protection during sex.

Social network theory has a lot of explanatory power.

The stigma/gay stigma theory has been a long considered culprit this last decade.

Here is actual research published last summer finding cultural stigma to be a real problem. I'll post part of the findings below:

OBJECTIVES:
To inform church-based stigma interventions by exploring dimensions of HIV stigma among African American and Latino religious congregants and determining how these are related to drug addiction and homosexuality stigmas and knowing someone HIV-positive.
METHOD:
In-person, self-administered surveys of congregants 18+ years old across 2 African American and 3 Latino churches (n = 1,235, response rate 73%) in a western U.S. city with high HIV prevalence. Measures included 12 items that captured dimensions of HIV stigma, a 5-item scale that assessed attitudes toward people who are addicted to drugs, a 7-item scale assessing attitudes toward homosexuality, and questions regarding sociodemographics and previous communication about HIV.
RESULTS:
Of the survey participants, 63.8% were women, mean age was 40.2 years, and 34.4% were African American, 16.8% were U.S.-born Latinos, 16.0% were foreign-born, English-speaking Latinos, and 32.9% were foreign-born, Spanish-speaking Latinos. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses identified 4 dimensions of HIV stigma: discomfort interacting with people with HIV (4 items, α = .86), feelings of shame "if you had HIV" (3 items, α = .78), fears of rejection "if you had HIV" (3 items, α = .71), and feelings of blame toward people with HIV (2 items, α = .65). Across all dimensions, after controlling for sociodemographic characteristics and previous communication about HIV, knowing someone with HIV was associated with lower HIV stigma, and greater stigma concerning drug addiction and homosexuality were associated with higher HIV stigma.
CONCLUSIONS:
Congregation-based HIV stigma reduction interventions should consider incorporating contact with HIV-affected people. It may also be helpful to address attitudes toward drug addiction and sexual orientation. (PsycINFO Database Record

The last piece of research congress with what I have witnessed in my own family. The stigma related to the disease dropped significantly when my cousin tested positive.

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I encourage folks to research and drop some ideas and share some theories. I think we can all be above the Trump level "his theory is teh stupidz" that tends to direct these discussions.

 

Sexuality is fluid. I'm not sexually attracted to men, but there's nothing wrong with homosexuality. As an object of desire for women and men alike, I encourage people being open and honest about their sexual intentions. It's what makes closet cases come out instead of ruining the lives of those around them. High society isn't a Riyadhi marketplace where we stone guys for not acting with a prehistoric sense of masculinity or play grabass with every woman wearing a burkha. It's about understanding. This is why my life is based on healthy personal relationships, women adore me, and I don't end the day frustrated and putting my dick in a goat anus.

I guess I'm everything you're not.

 

You are everything not me is quite a complement so thanks

yup i don’t sleep with prostitutes, aside from religious part, its disgusting .but yes i

understand people comes different and this why we have different class


i do the like the former policy of don’t ask don’t tell, it should be applied equally to what

taking a *****

might be , its natural and healthy etc; but i don’t think its an appropriate to reveal if you have a

diarrhoea or constipation ,let alone describing what colour or shape you had or whatever you may

squirted it this morning , you know these stuffs that you may find it interesting but others struggles not to vomits

BTW . you are the suspect of having anal sex with a goat, oral sex with a male donkey and forplay with

a pig, then when you are done after that you come here & brag of how sexually- healthy you are .

Healthy individual don’t talk much about it , they are secure,set and treats it as confidential

personal subject

 

Poor uneducated white people are problematic

just like poor uneducated asians, blacks, first nations, latinos, etc....

 

This is very interesting. I saw a BBC documentary on this issue once.

 

Did anyone understand this post? Like, at all?

 

Do you pretend to be ignorant as an act or is this really the way you think?

 

You all were doing such a good job of ignoring him. His schtick is old and was never funny. Just keep scrolling.

 

Seriously?

Honey/Ronny is an act, I thought everyone knew this.

Mojoman/glynch/commodore/exiled/giddyup/etc actually believe what they say.

 

I don't really pay a lot of attention to his posts because they aren't very readable or well articulated. But I read that one and wasn't sure if it was an act because it was so ridiculous or if he really thought that way.

I figured he was being intentionally ridiculous.

 

go back to sleep , you got your cookie


[youtube]/6zbsUtQL4nY[/youtube]

 

I'm as outraged as anyone by the disproportionate rate of HIV infection among gay black men. But that sad truth has in this thread been greatly overshadowed by the hilarious titillation demonstrated by an apparently repressed and frustrated wahhabi (is there any other kind?) when confronted with the very idea of a MMF threesome. Whether the fact that in the original reading a black man would comprise one of the M's increases said titillation I cannot say.

But the wahhabi is not feckless, no! He rallies a strong defense by posting a video of a pig consuming a cookie. What? TWO cookies! Two cookies, one pig; yet another happy threesome to delight the sophisticated wahhabi.

 

This. He's back to trying extra hard to get attention.

 

I don't think there's much more to it than not using rubbers, either by lack of availability due to lack discretionary income or local retail development, or a lack of conscientiousness, optimism or sense of isolation that drives all the other (statistical) deviations from socially ideal behavior. I remember there was an episode of Friends where Ross and maybe Rachel or some other chick couldn't have sex because they couldn't find a condom, so they spend the whole episode looking for one. Maybe similar to when the post '60s drug trade spawned massive black and hispanic gangs, hook-up culture reintroduced reckless sexual behavior.