Ryan Lee, Associate Writer: News & Current Events
With its panels of scientists and community health workers, its discontent with the vigor and focus of the fight against a deadly disease, and even with its boxed lunches, Thursday’s White House LGBT Conference on HIV/AIDS couldn’t help but feel like most other such conferences that have taken place in the 31-year history of the disease.
However, yesterday’s conference at the Morehouse School of Medicine signaled that the discussion about gay America’s HIV/AIDS epidemic is taking place at a presidential level.
“Certainly, I think one of the very significant things about it is that this is sponsored by the White House,” said Jeff Graham, executive director of Georgia Equality. “The fact that the White House is the sponsoring organization and that the White House has pulled this together really allows us to elevate these issues, many of which we’ve been talking about for years if not decades, to the highest level of leadership here in the country.”
On hand at the conference was the White House’s newly installed AIDS czar, Grant Colfax, as well as Kevin Fenton, head of the CDC’s anti-AIDS efforts.
While Thursday’s event didn’t reveal new data or strategy, Emory University researcher David Malebranche warned attendees of expecting to get solutions to the AIDS crisis at a conference.
“I don’t come to conferences like these for answers, and I hope you’re not looking to me for the answers, because I may not have them for you,” Malebranche said during his lunchtime presentation. “People have come from all over the country to this session today, and a lot of people I hear complaining at conferences, saying, ‘We talk about a lot of stuff and then there’s no solutions. Where’s the solution?’ And I’m like, ‘Why don’t you look at yourself, and why don’t you go back home and figure out what the solution is. And take what the sharing was, that happened at this conference, and bring that energy with you back. The conference isn’t always supposed to give you the answers.
“It’s in you, it’s within ourselves,” he added. “We’ve been so traumatized to think that we don’t know the answers, that we have to wait on the CDC to give us money, that we have to wait on the [National Institutes of Health], that we’re waiting for someone to hand us something, or give us an idea, or tell us what the [silence] to do, and they’re not going to. So we have to look at it within ourselves.”
AIDS conferences like the one on Thursday often highlight how forces such homophobia, racism, classism and sexism contribute to higher infection rates among gays and people of color. Malebranche urged AIDS activists to think beyond how various minority statuses burden a person, and form prevention and care strategies that use minority status to affirm positive decisions.
“What a powerful group we are, LGBT folks in America,” Malebranche said. “But until we actually embrace our intersectionality, we can’t embrace that power. Intersectionality should be about what’s good: What’s good about being a black, lesbian Christian who lives in [Southwest Atlanta]; What’s good about being a white, transgender female-to-male who is of Irish descent and lives on the Upper East Side of New York? What’s good about the Korean same-gender-loving man who works for the government and has tremendous family support after he came out? What’s good about all of our identities being together, instead of saying, ‘Oh these are all social identities that oppress us all the time.’ And how can we package that into an intervention? How can we package that into meaningful dialogue? How can we package that into social marketing and media that will make a sustained impact on people?”
