Anti-AIDS Workers Struggle to Get Message to Minorities

By CHARISSE JONES

Feb. 18, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

As the face of AIDS changes in Los Angeles County from white to African-American, Latino and Asian-American, dedicated men and women scour street corners, homes, gay bars and businesses within communities of color, determined to deliver a message many do not want to hear.

With each passing year, the message becomes more dangerous to ignore.

But many front-line workers say denial runs deep in minority communities, fueled by religious and cultural taboos against homosexuality, drug abuse and birth control, and made all the more insurmountable by the white, gay, middle-class image of AIDS in educational literature and the media. Money for programs is hard to come by. And the battle against AIDS must compete with the struggle to overcome poverty, inadequate health care and myriad other problems.

“People of color still don’t face that it affects us,” said Phillip Wilson, AIDS coordinator for the city of Los Angeles and an African-American. “You’re talking about helping people to fight a disease that could kill them in 10 years, and they’re dealing with drive-by shootings and hunger, which threatens to kill them every day.”

When the AIDS epidemic was first identified in the early 1980s, many of those affected were gay, white males. But a decade later, blacks and Latinos are about twice as likely to suffer from acquired immune deficiency syndrome as whites nationwide, and they are dying from the disease at a faster rate than any other group, federal health officials say.

As of November, 1990, 44% of all AIDS cases reported that year in Los Angeles County were Latino, African-American or Asian-American, up from 31% five years ago, according to the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services. County health officials say that while the AIDS epidemic among white, gay males seems to be reaching a plateau locally, the impact of the virus on people of color has yet to peak.

So the job is left to a few--the Rev. Carl Bean, on a hunger fast to save his program, the Minority AIDS Project, young men whose gangs once fought each other on the streets of Los Angeles, a woman who carries the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS. They take to the streets and together fight ignorance about AIDS.

“If you get them to listen, you could give them something to make them think,” said Lucy, a former prostitute who now does AIDS outreach among the addicts and prostitutes with whom she used to work. “And if I could stop them and make them think, then I am winning.”

First, you pick out the leader. Every group has one, said Victor McKamin, 23, glancing at the small groups of men playing basketball and soccer at LaFayette Park in the Mid-Wilshire district. “It’s best to go talk to him first because if he respects you, then the others will listen.”

McKamin and two other community health outreach workers with the Minority AIDS Project watched silently at first as a group of men debated issues from the war in the Persian Gulf to unemployment.

Then one man who seemed in charge of the group’s conversation started talking about money. That was McKamin’s cue. “Hey man,” he said quickly, walking toward the speaker while pulling out some AIDS literature. “All the money in the world can’t cure this.”

“You talking about the war over there,” said Trent Grandberry, 20, following his partner’s lead and pulling out a safe sex kit. “We’re fixin’ to die right here if we don’t get some of this stuff.”

“You’re right,” said the group leader, accepting the kit containing a condom, lubricant and a demonstration card. “Ain’t no cure for this.”

One young man kept to himself. “I don’t like using rubbers,” he said, adding that the only one who can protect you from AIDS is God.

Despite some tough sells on the street, those such as Grandberry, a young black man who began educating others about the virus shortly after being released from the California Youth Authority, persevere. He and his partners pass out a pamphlet that says in bold black letters “People of Color. Let’s Talk.” The pictures on the cover depict minorities and the statistics inside are about them.

McKamin, a former Blood gang member, and Grandberry, a former Crip, said they even try to educate their old homeboys, distributing blue condoms to one set and red to the other.

“While incarcerated, we got a consciousness within ourselves, and we found there are a lot of things killing our people,” said Grandberry, who studied issues affecting African-Americans while housed in the same Youth Authority cottage as McKamin. “We are killing each other, economics are killing us.

“And now this disease.”

“Sometimes they laugh at you,” said Oscar Reconco, smiling. “There’s places I’ve been to so many times that as soon as they see me, they run.”

So he talks quickly, before the men get halfway through the parking lot.

He walks up to and greets two Latino men heading into the Circus disco in Hollywood on a cold evening. He asked them if they were interested in attending a meeting about AIDS.

“Maybe another time,” said one, hurrying by. “Tomorrow,” said another.

A gay Latino man, Reconco began to devote his life to AIDS education in his community shortly after several of his friends died of the disease. One died in his arms.

Recently named director of the Cara a Cara (Face to Face) Latino AIDS Project, Reconco has spent the last three years going to bars frequented by gay and bisexual Latino men, and planning meetings for Spanish speakers where discussion centers on safe sex, HIV testing and the impact of AIDS on day-to-day life.

“They just want you to talk to them in simple Spanish,” Reconco said. “A lot of people cannot even read. You must be simple, speak from your heart.”

He sometimes has as many as 15 volunteers to work with, sometimes none. This evening he had two, Arturo and Fernando. “It’s very, very difficult,” Reconco said of his work in the Latino community. “They lie to us a lot.”

Reconco said he often has signed up dozens of people for meetings, only to find out later that they have given false addresses or phone numbers. “They don’t want to give their name because they think we’re going to give it to immigration.” Or they fear a relative may answer and find out about their lifestyle.

For that reason, Reconco uses the code name “Ricardo”--the anti-AIDS organization is never mentioned when he makes his phone calls.

Sex and death, said J. Craig Fong, an immigration attorney who has been the only lawyer in Southern California to focus on the problems of HIV-infected immigrants, “are two of the most sensitive issues in any community.” AIDS touches on both.

“There’s a shame attached to it,” said Fong, who has worked with hundreds of immigrants from Asia, the Caribbean, Africa and Latin America. “And it is enormous.”

Shame is compounded in the Latino culture, said Reconco, by values drawn from the Roman Catholic Church that compel some to mask their lifestyle by marrying and having children and to avoid using condoms.

Reconco knows a man who embodies many of those dilemmas. He is a friend whose former lover was found to have AIDS. He never got tested. Instead, he left his sick companion, married a woman as a “business arrangement” and acquired a new lover.

He refuses to attend Reconco’s meetings.

The myth of the model minority haunts many Asian-Americans--”that we’re all successful and educated,” said Dean M. Goishi, project director of the county-funded Asian Pacific AIDS Education Project. “That’s a fallacy. We have the same problems as any other community. They’ve just been hidden.”

Although the number of Asian-Americans suffering from AIDS is smaller than other groups (25 cases reported for the year in Los Angeles County as of November, 1990), the countywide AIDS rate for that community is doubling every two years--the fastest rate of increase in the state, said immigration attorney Fong.

To get that message across is difficult in most Asian-American communities.

“You are bringing shame to the family and to yourself if you’re not in the mold the community expects of you,” Goishi said. Many Asian-Americans will not pick up an AIDS pamphlet in public, or go for HIV testing in their hometown, he said.

Sometimes the only way to get an audience for a talk on AIDS is to pull a “bait and switch,” tying it into a general seminar on health issues or immigration. Health and community workers from the Filipino, Chinese, Japanese and Thai communities met recently at the Asian Pacific American Legal Center to discuss a new project that would provide mass education about AIDS by showing its relationship to immigration issues.

Among the suggestions: condoms and messages about HIV infection stuffed in fortune cookies, mass mailings printed in native dialects, and pamphlets with pictures for those unable to read.

While the Rev. Bean sets out to comfort the sick, their addresses scribbled on pieces of paper tucked in his Bible, one of his helpers is heading to the streets, trying to prevent the illness.

“We go talk to people who are forgotten, the prostitutes, the drug users, the homeless,” said Lucy, who asked that her real name not be used.

Lucy had given up prostitution and been free of drugs eight years when she tested positive for HIV after receiving a blood transfusion. She became a worker in Bean’s Minority AIDS Project, bringing with her the ability to use the language of the streets.

“If you come at them with, ‘Do you use a condom with each sexual act?’ it’s like ‘get out of here,’ ” said Lucy, 43. “Say, girlfriend, do you use a rubber when you turn your date?” is more like it.

At beauty parlors and homes in her old neighborhood, Lucy modifies her pitch, speaking of husbands instead of “johns,” blood transfusions instead of illicit drug use and casual sex. The working women, schoolgirls and elderly matrons listen attentively.

But when Lucy hands them cups with the Minority AIDS Project’s name, their behavior does not differ much from those she hands safe sex kits up and down Broadway and Western Boulevard. “It was like they were ashamed to have the cup on their desk because people would think they had AIDS.”

Although many entertainers and other members of the black community have responded to the AIDS crisis, Bean said the stigma prevents some people from giving to the battle against the disease. Funding is a key problem because grass-roots groups must compete with larger AIDS organizations for government grants and often do not have the staff or technical expertise to compete for limited funds. State and county health officials say they are adjusting funding in light of the growth of the epidemic in minority communities, but those fighting the disease have found government money slow to trickle down.

Bean started a fast last month that he hoped would help raise $300,000 to $400,000 to keep the Minority AIDS Project alive. Five weeks and 35 pounds later, Bean said his project hs raised about $110,000. Between 500 and 700 people, most of them African-American or Latino, homeless or on the verge of being so, depend on the Minority AIDS Project for basic necessities.

They are people such as Rodney DeShields, young, sick and far from home.

Bean went to Deshields’ small apartment in the Mid-Wilshire district one recent afternoon. He held DeShields’ hand, caressing it, as though he could rub the disease away.

“I want to get out on the beach, just sit and feel the sun on my face,” DeShields, 29, said as he sat, weak from the disease, on a couch in his living room. “I want a snow cone.”

DeShields once worked with Bean. For an hour, the chatter of old friends lifted the veil of illness.

They held hands and prayed. And Bean left him, with prayer and dignity.

AIDS IN L.A. COUNTY BY ETHNIC GROUP

AIDS cases among minority groups in Los Angeles County generally have been on the rise since 1986. The figure below compare the percentage of cases among three groups--blacks, Latinos and Asians--to the percentage of cases among Anglos and others.

1986

Anglo: 68%

Latino: 16%

Black: 14%

Asian/Pacific Islander: 1%

Other/Unknown: 1%

Minority group cases made up 31% of total

1987

Anglo: 67%

Latino: 16%

Black: 15%

Asian/Pacific Islander: 1%