Desert to Get More AIDS Services : Health: An Antelope Valley coalition is taking measures, including confidential testing, to benefit people in an area woefully short of help.

The Antelope Valley lacks sufficient support services for people afflicted with AIDS, according to a coalition of gay advocates and health care providers, who announced several new measures intended to help Antelope Valley AIDS patients and their friends and families.

The most important service being introduced is the area’s only free and confidential testing for the AIDS virus, said Alan L. Robertson of the Sunrise Metropolitan Community Church. Robertson’s church is part of a gay- and lesbian-oriented church active in AIDS-related issues nationwide.

“This is a breakthrough,” Robertson said. “There is a whole broad range of needs that we are trying to meet. We have brought together a coalition of groups and pooled our resources.”

Although the AIDS testing and counseling announced Wednesday has been available for several months through the Western Pacific Medical Corp., a Lancaster drug abuse clinic, few have been aware of it. Even the Los Angeles County Health Department AIDS office was unaware of the program that is administered by the county and funded by a federal drug abuse grant.

That lack of information dramatizes the special hardships and isolation faced by Antelope Valley residents with AIDS, who have to travel as far as West Hollywood for medical and social services scarce in the high desert, health care workers said.

The coalition, which also includes organizers of a gay hot line known as the G&L; Connection, plans to offer counseling, create support groups for victims and their loved ones, and train volunteers to be caretakers for people with acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

The need for services becomes more acute as the disease exhausts physical and financial resources, they said. For example, one Antelope Valley specialist on infectious diseases described the case of a terminally ill man who was in pain because he needed dental care, but was too sick to drive to the San Fernando Valley, where an AIDS program that offers free dental care is located.

“The services that are there are limited, particularly in relation to other parts of the county,” said John Schunhoff, assistant director of the county AIDS program.

County health officials said that of the county’s 9,069 reported cases of AIDS, 26 were reported in the Antelope Valley.

But coalition members said they suspect there have been considerably more than that number in the valley and that their testing programs and other services will give them a more accurate count. They said about one-third of those cases involve people who inject drugs such as heroin and methamphetamine, with most others involving sexual transmission.

Although some people familiar with the issue said there is resentment of AIDS-related efforts and of homosexuals in the traditionally conservative Antelope Valley, Robertson said he rejects the label of a “redneck” community.

“Stereotypes work as destructively against good, solid middle-American people as they do against gay people,” he said. “We would not be doing this if we did not know that there is a network of caring people out there.”