The ‘Rev.’ Responds to Calling : Reaching Out to Minority AIDS Victims

The day the Rev. Carl Bean walked into his office, Shanti Foundation’s Jerry Coash remembers saying to himself: “This guy is the person we’ve been looking for.”

After having the chance to talk with Bean awhile, Coash, clinical consultant and volunteer coordinator for Los Angeles’ Shanti, a support organization for AIDS patients, was sure he was right.

Trying to Set Up Liaisons

For three years, since Shanti became an exclusively AIDS-related support group, its officials have been trying to set up liaisons with the area’s black and Latino communities to deal with acquired immune deficiency syndrome issues.

But success has been limited, and the concern is that educational programs to prevent AIDS and help for those who have acquired the disease are not meeting a significant need in the minority communities.

Shanti was started 10 years ago in San Francisco as an outpatient hospice program for people with life-threatening diseases. Shanti in Los Angeles was opened on Santa Monica Boulevard three years ago by hypnotherapist Martin James. Since the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic, the groups in both cities have devoted their efforts strictly to AIDS-related cases.

“It (AIDS) has not been basically dealt with in the minority communities,” Coash said. “We’ve never been able to make an infusion into the minority community. But ‘Rev’--people call him that now--is enough of a zealot to do it. I believe if anyone at all will carve a niche into the black community, and Hispanic, he can do it.

Lack of Liaison

“In this issue, with gays and AIDS, these two communities discriminate against themselves,” he said, explaining that the lack of liaison in the minority community is a matter of growing concern. “We have individuals as clients who represent both communities, but the number is very small compared to the numbers we know are out there.”

There are no organizations in Los Angeles’ large Latino community that specifically offer AIDS education or support for persons with the disease, according to Eunice Diaz, director of health promotion and community affairs at White Memorial Medical Center in East Los Angeles. Diaz directed a forum on AIDS for Latino community leaders at the hospital in April.

“The problem of informing people about AIDS in the Hispanic community is compounded by cultural taboos in our society, and often by language,” Diaz said. “Culturally, the Hispanic community does not wish to deal with the issue of homosexuality. They do not wish to face it. You could die a thousand deaths and never see a Spanish family admit their son was a homosexual.

“And then our culture relates to death and dying in a very different way from Anglos. Anglo families are stoic. The Hispanic family breaks apart at death. They could never relate to the way Jackie Kennedy stood there at the President’s funeral so stoically. At a Hispanic funeral there is hysterical crying--that’s the way you demonstrate your affection for the person. To admit the person dying is a homosexual? Never.”

Enter Carl Bean, 41, who describes himself as a double minority--black and gay.

Bean, an ordained minister, has just started an outreach group for AIDS patients in the black community.

Bean was a gospel singer when he came to Los Angeles in 1972 from the East Coast to enter the entertainment field. He previously had performed with the Alex Bradford Troupe and had appeared in clubs and several Broadway and off-Broadway shows.

In 1977, when the national gay rights movement was well under way, Bean recorded a song for Motown Records called “I Was Born This Way.” It still is popular in many gay discos.

Once in Los Angeles, Bean joined one of the Metropolitan Community Churches for gays founded by the Rev. Troy Perry, began his own gospel group, Universal Love, and recorded for ABC. But he kept thinking about starting his own church.

A former theology student, Bean grew up in Baltimore in a religious family. “As a young boy,” he said, “I used to carry my Bible and read it on the school bus. And after school I’d go over to the church--it was a black Baptist church--and sit in the church secretary’s office and help her with letters and things. I sang in the choir and expressed a desire to go into the Christian ministry. I was a role model in my community. I got good grades and went to church.”

Admitting Homosexuality

When he was 11 or 12, Bean admitted his homosexuality and said he believed he was born a homosexual. “I knew that from early childhood,” Bean said.

Most of his family and neighbors ostracized him, Bean said. “Once the discovery of homosexuality was realized, it was devastating. I went from good kid to disgrace. People said ‘Get out. You’re not welcome anywhere.’ I lived in a middle-class community. Houses with rose bushes out front. The first reaction of my family was to say ‘Get out.’ And the church, too. Suddenly I was divorced from my family and my church, too. Everything just fell apart.”

Only his grandmother seemed to understand his plight, Bean said. “She said, ‘Son, you’re not the first (homosexual) and you’ll not be the last. Just carry on with your life and carry yourself like a man.’

“If I can help other people not to have to face what I did, then that’s what Christianity and God and love are all about. If kids realize they’re gay and they have someplace to go, some acceptance, then they won’t be looking for an escape, hooking into the drugs and the alcohol and the gay bars. But they don’t know how to deal with it, and their families don’t either.”

In recent years, Bean said, his family has become very supportive of him and his activities in the gay rights movement. He said they were especially proud when he decided to give up professional entertaining and go into the ministry. He was ordained Aug. 17, 1982, as a minister by officials of the Universal Tabernacle of Christ on Jefferson Boulevard.

Starts Own Church

In May, Bean started his own church, the Unity Fellowship of Christ Church. He has about 15 members, straight and gay. They don’t have a building yet, so they meet for worship at Bean’s West Hollywood apartment or in members’ homes.

“I hope to get a building somewhere,” Bean said, “so we can offer different programs during the week, things like Alcoholics Anonymous, counseling, things people need. Gay people feel less than human because of their life style and the traditional churches just don’t deal with it. In everyday society we get along fine (as gays). In religious life you don’t talk about it.”

Bean said he decided to start his outreach program for AIDS patients in the black community “because there was no form of one in the black community. Or Latino, either. I hope to meet with some Latino groups and coordinate.”

One member of Bean’s church recently was diagnosed as having AIDS and couldn’t attend the Monday prayer meeting because he is in the hospital.

“If you could see some of the poor people who have had this happen to them, you wouldn’t believe it,” Bean said. “They don’t know where to go or what to do. One guy didn’t even have any food left and his electricity was cut off. He just hid out. That’s the trouble. There’s no support system in the minority community.”

Bean said he hopes to work with black organizations to help him coordinate his outreach program and to call on some of his friends in the entertainment industry to assist him.

“We need to help the families, the ‘significant others’ whose loved ones have AIDS,” Bean said. “There is a young black in Compton with AIDS. He lives with his mom and dad and they all feel so abandoned. No one has been to visit the home, not even people from their church.”

Bean will serve on Shanti’s spiritual advisory committee. He will spend one evening each week at an update session for Shanti volunteers and also plans to take the instruction for volunteers at the AIDS Project Los Angeles. Both organizations have a few minority clients.

“One of the things the Shanti training has helped people with is to get in touch with reality,” he said. “AIDS has a one- to five-year incubation period. That’s reality. But people have become so unresponsive in all society. I think we are taught in our society not to face things head on. And we need to change that, not hide from it.

Support Is Needed

“We need to offer these people (AIDS patients) every support in the community. To buy groceries . . . take them to doctors. Things they do at Shanti and AIDS Project. We need that kind of organization in the black community. Many blacks just don’t know where to go. It’s such a macho-oriented society. We need people to help us set up a complete service--emotional support, financial, food, clothing. All kinds of things.”

According to statistics from the Computerized AIDS Information Network, a Los Angeles data base center run by the Gay and Lesbian Community Center, 139 of the 1,060 persons diagnosed as having AIDS in Los Angeles County are black; 118 Latino.

As of this week, 3,121 of the 12,408 persons diagnosed as having AIDS in the United States are black, 1,762 Latino.

“One of the things I’ve found is that the black community is generally 20 years behind the majority community,” said Christine Adams Tripp, whose home was the site of Bean’s prayer group meeting on Monday. “As a black professional, it’s embarrassing. Why can’t we keep up?”

Help of Grandmother

Tripp, a 40-year-old grandmother, is a church member and is assisting Bean in setting up his outreach program.

“We are 17% of the total population of the U.S.,” said Tripp, a business and tax consultant. “And so far, 10% of the people who have AIDS are black. You translate that, and that’s a lot of people.”

Volunteer Work

Tripp does volunteer work with several organizations in the black community and has helped set up 15 nonprofit groups that support the community.

“I don’t have money, so I give them my skills,” Tripp said. “That’s a problem in the black community. People get an education, learn skills but they don’t take that back to the black community. They go work in the majority community.

“And people who could probably provide services to the black community? They don’t let them in.”

There are a few religions, said Tripp, that have “changed and thought about homosexuality, but most don’t. If you are a Christian and have love in your heart, who are you to throw the first stone? What has happened to Christ and love and fellowship?”

“The point is to raise those questions,” she said. “There are people out there with AIDS who are sick and alone because no one talked to them when they were young. The issue of homosexuality needs to be brought to the right place. The young children need role models. They need to know they can’t be into drugs and also do a job.”

On Sunday, Bean appeared on a talk show on KACE radio to answer questions concerning AIDS in the black community and hopes to be able to take his message to television.

Similarly, Eunice Diaz and her husband, Dr. Julio Diaz, a pathologist in private practice, have done talk shows concerning AIDS on the Spanish radio station KALI-AM and on TV.

Another AIDS Forum

Buoyed by the success of the forum on AIDS for the Latino community at White Memorial in April, Eunice Diaz is planning another in the next few months. But she said she believes that the best approach to dealing with AIDS in the minority communities is to form a national foundation to educate blacks and Latinos.

“What I would love to see is a national foundation put some money into educating Hispanics and blacks about AIDS,” Diaz said. “Set up a national campaign and then local campaigns specifically targeted to the cities with large Hispanic populations. And black populations as well. Posters and pamphlets and TV are all so costly that for one locality to do it it is prohibitive.”

“In a sense,” Bean said, “each community does have to take care of its own. If you have qualms about who you are, the work can’t be done. You have to be about what you say you’re about.”

Shanti’s Coash said: “Rev enables us to hope for every bit of success. We’ll give him a support system and he can evolve and create his own. There are a lot of tasks, a lot of healing to be done in the black and brown communities. And the AIDS issue--that one issue alone is going to be a sizable task.”

Persons interested in assisting Bean with his AIDS outreach program may call him at ( 213 ) 931-0668 or write to Unity Fellowship of Christ Church, 8306 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 653, Beverly Hills, Ca. 90211.