New Issues Face
AIDS Community

LESLEY PEARL STAFF WRITER

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ay men in San Fran-
cisco are waking up re-
lieved — happy to find
they have tested HIV-
positive.
According to Eric Rofes, ex-
ecutive director of the Shanti
Project — a volunteer organi-
zation serving 1,700 AIDS pa-
tients and their families in
San Francisco each month, 30
to 40 percent of gay men have
never engaged in anal inter-
course. Yet friends of his who
tested HIV-negative five
years ago are testing positive,
claiming to know when and
from whom they intentional-
ly became infected.
Mr. Rofes spoke Tuesday at
the University of Michigan on
this change in attitude and
the new issues surrounding
the 12-year-old AIDS epi-
demic. Mary Fisher, founder
of the Family AIDS Network,
joined Mr. Rofes in the con-
ference honoring National So-
cial Work Month.
Mr. Rofes is gay, Jewish
and HIV-negative. However,

"There has been an
expanision of
ownership of AIDS."

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Eric Rofes

he, like other HIV-negative
gay men, struggles with the
guilt and knowledge of being
uninfected.
"I'm 38 years old and have
lost an entire network of con-
temporaries I thought I'd
grow old with," Mr. Rofes
said. "Why not me? And do I
still have the ability to feel
grief anymore? Half of the un-
infected gay men in San Fran-
cisco are on antidepressants."
Seminars and programs
are not the answer, he said.
Mr. Rofes does not believe
they worked before — he
doesn't believe prior tactics in
the gay community really
helped halt the spread of
AIDS.
Mr. Rofes believes this new
reaction to AIDS, engaging in
unprotected sex in hope of
contracting the virus, is con-
nected to the reactions of vic-
tims of trauma — war, incest
and physical abuse.
"I hear parallel words from
18-year-old girls whose fa-
thers raped them as I do from
HIV-positive gay men," Mr.
Rofes said. "We have to ad-
dress the real issue of trau-

ma."
Mr. Rofes said the possibil-
ity of dealing with trauma in
traditional, reparative work
must be explored.
"It's like going into a con-
centration camp and doing
reparative work. The people
don't know if they're going to
die tomorrow. Do you need to
wait until the war is over to
do the work?" Mr. Rofes said.
Mr. Rofes believes mental
health and changing demo-
graphics also are among the
new challenges facing gay
men.
Close to 95 percent of Shan-
ti Project's clients suffer from
addiction.
And while educated gay,
white males still account for
the majority of AIDS patients
in San Francisco, numbers of
HIV-positive women, His-
panics and poverty-stricken
individuals are rising.
Shanti Project has dealt
with these changes by imple-
menting different housing
models and living arrange-
ments for people with AIDS
and by hiring staff fluent in
Hispanic languages.
"There has been an expan-
sion of ownership of AIDS.
Who speaks for it? Who rep-
resents it?" Mr. Rofes said.
Ms. Fisher said that while
many groups may stake claim
to the epidemic, those affect-
ed by AIDS continue to be
viewed by the public as sub-
human.
She recalled an article pub-
lished in early February by
the National Academy of Sci-
ence and titled "Social Impact
of AIDS in the United States."
The article claimed that
while AIDS has devastated
communities, it has had little
effect on the society as a
whole and on how Americans
do business.
"The author said he was
not minimizing the impact of
the disease, but rather stat-
ing that the people affected by
AIDS are of largely invisible,
marginal groups," Ms. Fisher
said. "It was a seriously
flawed report."
Between 1 million and 2
million individuals are HIV-
positive in the United States.
Ms. Fisher believes they were
all marginalized by the re-
port.
A doctor friend of Ms. Fish-
er responded to the report by
writing, "You have told every
business and conservative in

K

