Introduction and Welcome

       I was 12 years old the first time I heard about AIDS. My parents brought home The Cure [1], a 1995 movie about a boy around my age living with AIDS. It was one of two PG-13 movies my parents let me see before turning 13-- the first being Austin Powers. The two films couldn't have been more different; I suppose my parents were trying to accustom me to the two biggest changes between PG-childhood-innocence and PG-13-real-world-issues: sexuality and tragic endings. Perhaps the fact that I was shielded from these taboos are why I hadn't heard AIDS mentioned before seeing the movie, despite living only miles from Washington, D.C., a city that boasts the highest rate of new AIDS cases in the country [2].

 

        When I was 14, Washington for the first time represented more in my mind than a collection of monuments and museums as I began attending Gonzaga College High School, five blocks away from the Capitol dome. For the first time I was aware that people didn't just go to work and make laws in D.C.--they actually lived there. Though my high school is within viewing distance of the Capitol, it is literally across the street from the most notorious slum in D.C.--Sursum Corda [3]

        

High School

        Gonzaga never made any secret of the poverty and crime that existed in D.C.; from freshman orientation lectures about community service to a required Social Justice class that had young men walking through neighborhoods "even the police were afraid to enter" [3] to tutor elementary students, I was deluged with information about poverty in the city the moment I walked in the front door. By the time I was a senior I figured I had a pretty good grasp on the problems my city faced; I had no idea that D.C. was in the grips of an epidemic that had been festering in America for almost twenty years.                                                  

 

        There were, of course, always some hints as to the problem AIDS posed to Washington. When searching for information for an AP Psych presentation on homosexuality, I was surprised by the number of DC web pages that seemed more concerned with AIDS than homophobia or Gay/Straight Alliances. And an inordinate amount of profiles in the personals page of the Washington Post seemed to be concerned with whether someone was "poz" or "clean'.

 

           For three years I would ride the Metro for an hour every day on my way home, and I can recall an occasional poster written in bold, red letters proclaiming

 

recent AIDS statistics for the city. I can't recall what advocacy group produced them or exactly what the statistics were; numbers and percentages always seemed a bit confusing to me, especially since I still had little idea how many people lived in D.C., and thus no idea what numbers could constitute a problem. Besides, I learned more from visually interesting ads; one in particular showing bloodied, bruised faces of people asking "if Hep C attacked your face the way it does your liver, would you see a doctor?" The campaign was an intelligent one: it got people's attention, it provided a visual representation of a largely non-visual problem, and it raised general awareness of the problem.

http://www.hivandhepatitis.com/images2005/081205image.jpg

Lost In The Shuffle

 

        No such campaign existed for HIV/AIDS. No one wants to see images of people dying of AIDS on their trip home, and paragraphs full of numbers and statistics don't hold attention for very long. The posters that were there said "there is a problem," and I believed them, but I had seen poverty in D.C. first hand (when I was a child, my family even brought along extra sandwiches when picnicking in the city for the homeless); I had never seen someone infected with HIV.

    

        Freshman year health class was one of two times I dealt with the topic of HIV/AIDS extensively in my high school career. Health class was little more than a clever extension of our P.E. credit; since it was both mandatory and a part of a grade the jocks were all proud to earn, the class strayed away from any hard science. Every Tuesday the class would meet, mostly to discuss an STD. Every one in the class had to give a report on a different STD that lasted most of the class-- I was randomly assigned to speak on AIDS. Though the entire class had already spoken about genital warts and a variety of other subjects that would make your stomach turn in a class period directly after breakfast, I remember feeling nervous when it came time to make my presentation.  My speech was different from most of my classmates? speeches: I was told to talk less about side effects and more about mode of transmission--which meant talking about drug use and homosexuality (and, even more embarrassingly, some mechanics of homosexual sex). I learned on the day of that presentation first hand how much taboo surrounds HIV, and suddenly saw how the people in The Cure were able to treat a boy so evilly- they had very strong associations between the disease and what they saw as amoral lifestyles.

 

        Two years after that presentation I was able to deliver another on the topic of homosexuality without any ill ease caused by the subject matter (its amazing how much someone can mature in just a few years) but I didn't deal with HIV and AIDS again until senior year AP Biology. We talked about the subject at the cellular level, how it operated in the body, how it spread, why it was so difficult to find a cure--but the subject was never contextualized on a local level.  The problem of HIV was posed as a theoretical one: how easily it could theoretically spread, how it could theoretically continue to spread across America; I didn?t learn what effect it was actually having in my home town.

      
http://www.barbaloot.com/images/aids.ribbon.lg.jpeg

Moving On

 

        There are, of course, some glaringly obvious influences of HIV/AIDS in D.C., most notably the AIDS quilt, a collection of quilts sewn together into a giant collage in memorial for those who have died of AIDS. The event draws a crowd of thousands every year, and while I have never seen the quilt first hand, I was hearing news stories about it yearly.

 

        How could I remain so ignorant on the subject when so many Washingtonians are able to come together for such a cause? The major problem has been the disparity of cases in each ward (click [here] for a map of the eight wards).  

 

        My high school is in Ward 1, which has the highest rate of living AIDS in all of Washington DC (see table one). But our emphasis on poverty, as well as the fact that the majority of my time in that ward was spent inside the walls of a private high school, lead AIDS to be a mostly invisible problem. In my Junior year I moved to Ward 3 with my family, which has the lowest rate of living AIDS of all of D.C. Even the numbers of cumulative AIDS cases for that ward are amazingly low. Thus, while D.C. may have the highest rate of AIDS in the country [2], it is a very small problem for the area I live in. D.C. has a huge population made up of huge risk groups-- the city features a large gay community, a large African American community, and a large drug using community (see table two), each represented largely in certain wards.

 

 

        The problem correlates with the poor communities I was already well aware of, and by counting rates of living AIDS we may be severely underestimating the problem for poor communities. Jose Vargas of The Washington Post notes that "HIV turns into AIDS much earlier without proper treatment -- and proper treatment means good insurance which means dollars. What AIDS workers are seeing in the predominantly black, poor neighborhoods of Wards 7 and 8, east of the Anacostia River, away from Official Washington, shall we say, is that 1) people are not getting the treatment they need as early as they need it; and 2) people are not getting tested early enough" [2]. It's an epidemic that I have largely remained unaware of until this year, and I plan to dedicate further pages of this website to determining both why AIDS is such a definitive problem in D.C.-- and why people in certain parts of the city can easily remain blissfully unaware.

http://www.photomosaic.com/samples/large/AIDSQuilt.jpg