Anti-gay pundit pleased at 'admission' that AIDS is a 'gay disease'

PageOneQ | Anti-gay pundit pleased at 'admission' that AIDS is a 'gay disease'

Today, right now, more than 45 percent of African-American gay and bi men in key urban areas are infected with HIV, with a 33 percent increase in new diagnoses among our brothers under age 30 over the past six years. Today, right now, African Americans are nearly 10 times more likely than white people to be diagnosed with AIDS.

The response — internal to our community and external — is appallingly racist. Internally, when these numbers come out, the “established” gay community seems to have a collective shrug as if this isn’t our problem. Folks, with 70 percent of the people in this country living with HIV being gay or bi, we cannot deny that HIV is a gay disease. We have to own that and face up to that.

Even more disgusting is the response of our government. Of the 129 interventions developed and approved by the CDC to address HIV in the African-American community, only one has been designed for gay black men. Twenty-six years into the epidemic and only one out of 129 addresses the group of people most affected by HIV. And, on top of that, funding for meaningful and honest prevention programs has been systematically excised from the federal budget. If these things don’t prove that our government considers the lives of gay black men utterly expendable, I don’t know what does.

--Matt Foreman, outgoing executive director of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force

The above was part of Matt Foreman's State of the Movement address given on February 8, 2008 at the Creating Change conference in Detroit. The second paragraph, in particular, is all but a victory of rhetoric for Concerned Women for America's Matt Barber.

"Because of their war on semantics and being in such denial and not focusing on the reality of the dangers of their behaviors," said Barber to Cybercast News Service, "many people have contracted the disease."

"Who knows," Barber adds, "how many lives could have been saved had homosexual activists been honest about the dangers of the lifestyle they choose to engage in."

While HIV, as an opportunistic infection, does not discriminate on who it infects, gay men who practice unprotected sex are at particular risk of becoming infected and spreading the virus. Early cases of HIV were given names such as "gay cancer" and "gay-related immune deficiency" due to gay men being the first major demographic affected.

"It's extremely encouraging," says Barber in a recent press release, "to see Matt Foreman, a homosexual activist who has for so long been in denial about the dangers of the lifestyle he has promoted, publicly coming to terms with the undeniable perils of that lifestyle."

"I only hope," he continues, "he will now stop promoting homosexual conduct and push for other liberal elites, especially those running our public schools, to do the same. Educators must truthfully address the 'gay' lifestyle's potentially deadly consequences."