LISTEN TO LARRY BRYANT
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December 1st is World AIDS Day. There are few places in the world that have been harder hit by this disease than the nation’s capital, where at least three percent of District residents are infected with HIV or AIDS. Anything above one percent is considered a “generalized and severe” epidemic. Upon the release of these staggering numbers in March of 2009, Shannon Hader, the former Director of the District’s HIV/AIDS Administration, said, “Our rates are higher than West Africa… They’re on path with Uganda and some parts of Kenya.”
Larry Bryant is National Field Organizer for Housing Works and co-chair of DC Fights Back. Bryant questions why the District of Columbia, despite experiencing an HIV/AIDS epidemic, does not have a comprehensive plan in place like the federal government’s National AIDS Strategy.
Bryant said, “I think the National AIDS Strategy, for the record, can be a little bit more ambitious than it currently is, but at least it is a starting point. So whether we’re talking about lowering new infections by 25 percent in the next five years – hell, I’d love to hear that from the mayor’s office, and how we’re going to do that. I would love to hear that we’re going to put some very specific and targeted goals in black gay male populations. Some of the highest numbers in the city around new infections are among black gay men. What we can do to provide adequate and effective services to women and girls and children and benchmarks to be able to tease out its effectiveness and then tweak it to know that we are going in the right direction. Those are all, I think, reasonable goals that can be applied to an urgent and surely deteriorating problem that we’re having here with the epidemic, but we’ve heard nothing about that.”
Bryant, a native Washingtonian, said, “If you look at the city historically, I mean take HIV and AIDS out of it, the city historically is built on divisions, on race, on economic status, on education. Historically, generation after generation, poverty lives in southest [D.C.] and parts of northeast [D.C.]. And whether it’s been economic development, whether it’s been improving resources for education or just improving schools, the same communities are the ones that suffer for that. The same community based organizations, the same local businesses, the same communities and families have not received the support over – again, over generations. Whereas other parts of the city have [had] more direct and connected ties to where the funds and where the money is. Now, this is not about pitting one side of the city against the other, or one quadrant against the other. This is about applying the resources and applying the support where it’s most needed. And building from within those communities, not shipping developers from Chicago into southeast [D.C.] to build high-priced condos [that] people that currently live there can’t afford… It’s about looking at the entire city, looking [at] where the needs are, where the communities and populations that are most marginalized, that suffer with the most health disparities… We have seen a historic disrespect and disregard to those parts of the city that have suffered the most.”
Bryant continued, “A lot of the same factors that fueled the crack/cocaine epidemic in the mid-80s exist now and are significantly present in the HIV and AIDS epidemic: poverty, domestic violence, social violence, people under-educated, under-employed, so forth and so on. [With these conditions present] crack becomes a quick fix and it’s quickly spread throughout those communities. But again, addressing the epidemic is not just getting rid of the crack because other things fill its spot, whether it’s alcohol, whether it’s crime, whether it’s AIDS, whether it’s whatever it is. We have to see this – whether it’s in D.C., whether it’s Chicago, wherever, Mississippi, Oakland – [we have to] understand it much more as a social justice issue, than just a health issue.”
Bryant, who is HIV positive, said, “We could find a vaccine tomorrow that will eliminate all new infections by this weekend. We could use that vaccine to inject people who are currently HIV positive, the million and half plus that we know of in the States. And by this time next week there are no more people living with HIV in the city and no more coming, but if we don’t address those fundamental issues within the social structure that allow people to sleep in front of the White House 365 days in a year; [if] we don’t put in place the services that protect women, that protect girls from being beaten and raped and basically dying in silence; [if] we don’t put in place policies that allow homophobia and racism and sexism to just run rampant; if we don’t put these fixes in place in the entirety of the social system, we’re just waiting for the next epidemic. HIV will be gone. Something else will take its place… We need to start addressing those foundation flaws if we hope to end this epidemic and get a leg up on anything that’s coming down the pipe.”