America Living With AIDS

AM E R I C A Living With AIDS

I am twenty-one
years old. I have hemophilia
and am HIV positive.
I found out my HIV status
when I was fourteen-when
they thought it could mean
I was immune. It didn't really
matter what they thought
then anyway. Death means
absolutely nothing to a
fourteen-year-old. I thought
I was immortal until just about
a year ago when my girlfriend
at the time and I were
going to find out the results of
her first AIDS test.
Meanwhile, most of my friends
still think they are immortal.
This is one of the basic tricky
aspects of AIDS for the
adolescent and the young
adult. It is extremely hard to
have a mid-life crisis and
acknowledge the fact that you
are going to die when life has
just begun. The other is the
fact that this acknowledgement
of death comes through
something that is the
reaffirmation of life and
love-sex.

women with AIDS as
opposed to 2 percent of
all men with AIDS report
exposure through heterosexual contact. It is
important to note that a
majority of female heterosexual cases are related
to unprotected sex with
an HIV-positive intravenous drug user.
Women of color have
been particularly heavily
affected.
These statistics are
particularly troubling
because many women
believe they are not at
risk and do not need to
practice safer sex or
change potentially dangerous behaviors. Prevention messages are not
effectively reaching large
populations of women.
Much of the attention
women have received in
the HIV epidemic has
been related to the potential for the spread of HIV
to their sexual partners or
offspring; women are frequently characterized,
explicitly or implicitly, as
"vessels of infection" or
as "vectors of perinatal
transmission." Women
need attention in their
own right, not only in the

Many prevention messages have
not been grounded in the realities of
women's lives. Not surprisingly, such
messages have not been very effective.
Perhaps the most unrealistic prevention message for women is the nearly
exclusive focus on the use of condoms,
advice that is naive regarding anatomy,
gender roles, and power relationships.
The emphasis on condoms grew out
of the early years of the HIV epidemic
when sex between men was a predominate concern. As more knowledge
has been gained about the epidemic,
the need for alternative prevention
methods has been clearly indicated.
Condom use requires the active
involvement of the male partner, and
the woman must secure his cooperation or convince him to terminate the
sexual interaction if he refuses. The
use of condoms may be complicated
by the perception that their use is an
admission of infidelity, hence threatening relationships of long standing.
In fact, many men report using condoms "on the side," but not in their
primary relationships.
That condom use is inherently limited as a method for preventing the
heterosexual spread of AIDS does not
imply that attempts to encourage their
use should be abandoned, but rather
that such efforts should be redoubled.
The United States has yet to embark
on campaigns such as have been
undertaken in other countries to foster fundamental changes in social attitudes about condoms, through advertising, social marketing, and intensive
outreach and reinforcement strategies.. H.
il 1991

development and evaluation of HIV
prevention strategies, but in all aspects
of HIV policy development.

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