Our class began with a simple question. How many people do you think in your zip code have been diagnosed with AIDS since 1980? When I was asked to guess, I reasoned that there would be 200 or so cases a year. Multiply that by 27 years and you get 5400. The actual number was 419 so I was more than ten times off. A factor that influenced my guess was the lack of knowledge of what physical space constituted 11355 as opposed to 11354. And when I made my guess I unconsciously thought that Flushing, NY 11355 consisted of everything I have been through in my life.

            The first time that I heard anything about AIDS was during a middle school health class. We just glanced over the topic, and I probably learned more about AIDS when I was younger from watching NBA telecasts whenever they discussed the hardships that Magic Johnson had to overcome. Taking a high school health class at one of if not the most prestigious public high school in the United States was a joke compared to the rest of our classes. When you took classes like AP Physics C and Differential Equations, health was nothing more than a pain in the neck. Most students treated health as solely a graduation requirement. The curriculum barely glanced over the topic of AIDS, and I did not take any notes on the topic. We just discussed it along with the rest of the STDs and were given resources about where to go if you wanted to get tested. In an indirect way we had a speaker on AIDS when a woman from the health department came to teach us the importance of protection during sex. The presentation consisted of slides showing what diseases like syphilis and chlamydia could do to our bodies. Afterwards, the woman reminded us that testing was confidential and continued to stress that your parents did not even have to find out. The class did not stress abstinence as a way to prevent HIV as required by the New York State Education Department (2). However, I do remember that abstinence was stressed in my middle school health class. It was no coincidence that when I searched for locations to get tested, both Chelsea and Jackson Heights were results (3). Other classes where I had some exposure to AIDS included my biology and human diseases classes where I learned about some opportunistic infections and what happened at the cellular level to the immune response when HIV invaded. However, regardless of the exposure I received, I had never felt on a personal level that AIDS was a problem.  

            A search for HIV in the past year returned 64 articles. That is a shockingly tiny number because of the in depth coverage the New York Times is known for. The 64 search returns round out to about a story every 6 days. The lack of coverage was a factor in my guess not being so close. Interestingly though, a piece on my school being a cuddle puddle was on the front page of New York Magazine (4), but the newspaper articles varied in location from front page to being hidden in other sections. Most of the articles that I found discussed how AIDS was being dealt with in Africa (5). One focused on how the 16^th International AIDS Conference’s goal was “for the world to provide enough health workers to apply what scientists know can stop the pandemic (6).” Basically people all around the world still do not take AIDS seriously enough. It was astounding to read that “about four out of five people who are infected in low- to middle-income nations do not know that they carry HIV (7).”

            Our high school newspaper never had the need to cover the topic of AIDS, but the cuddle puddle article in New York Magazine covered sexual promiscuity in our school. The story commented on what was probably going on in our school for years. When I was a freshman we were told by our Big Sibs that the Hudson staircase in our building was known as the sex staircase. There was a rumor recently that some people were caught giving oral sex in the staircase. And the girl’s basketball and soccer coach had a reputation of sleeping with his players. It was well known that free condoms were available at the nurse’s office on the third floor. Because of these various incidents I have always had the impression that our school was sexually active.

            Overall, I was pretty ignorant about AIDS because I never considered it to be a problem, and until this class I did not even know that AIDS was mostly spread through MSM. And even though I grew up in an area that was one of the harder hit by AIDS, I knew close to nothing. It is scary to imagine what I would have know had I grew up in some rural part of the country. I also grew up in an age when there was not as much media coverage on the homosexual aspect of AIDS. Because of my upbringing I thought that most people who contracted AIDS were promiscuous women who did not bother using protection. I honestly had no knowledge that being gay was a possibility until I was in middle school. But I did figure correctly that specific minorities had a higher incidence of the disease. Both African American and Hispanic cultures are more accepting of multiple partners. Also newspaper articles that cover AIDS always highlight the higher incidence of the disease among African Americans and Hispanics. Two articles that I think are self-explanatory are “Latinos Need Help in Fight Against AIDS (8)” and “City AIDS Report Highlights Risk to Black Men and Women (9).” Rarely, if at all are there any articles covering both Asians and AIDS. Asian culture tends to lean more toward being faithful and respectful and thus it is not common for Asians to have more than one partner. From a personal standpoint, if I were to seriously come out to my parents, I would surely be disowned.

All of these previously stated factors influenced my guess, and though I was way off I look forward to becoming informed. At least I know what rimming is now.

WORKS CITED