Raising Community Awareness of AIDS

In an office piled high with pamphlets, an earnest young man in baggy blue pants talks about AIDS.

Though more than 250 Latinos in Orange County have contracted AIDS in the past 10 years, “there’s such a silence about this disease,” Loren Lewis complains. “I’ve been to wakes for people who died of AIDS, where no one will admit the person died of it.”

But in the past year, Lewis has committed himself to breaking that silence. He has led support groups for Latino men infected with the virus. He has visited gay bars to warn of the disease and to recruit Spanish-speaking men to conduct seminars on preventing it. And last May, he sat beside a hospital bed as a friend named Arturo, a Mexico City immigrant without relatives here, fell unconscious and quietly died of AIDS.

“Going to the hospital--that’s not part of the job description. But you do it,” Lewis said somberly.

At 29, Lewis is community educator for Hogar Latino Proyecto SIDA (Latino House AIDS Project), a 2-year-old Garden Grove agency funded by the national Centers for Disease Control to offer AIDS education to Latinos.

In some ways, he admits, he is an unusual choice for the job. Lewis, who is of Peruvian descent, spent the last six years abroad, virtually isolated from concern about AIDS.

As a private English teacher living in Spain and Morocco, he didn’t think much about the disease, he said. Though he was gay, none of his friends in those days had AIDS. “I read about it in the newspapers, but in my personal life it had never touched me,” Lewis said. But when he returned from Europe, Lewis was shocked to learn that some friends were sick and others dead from AIDS. After a brief stint as a teacher’s assistant, he heard of an opening at Proyecto SIDA and got the job.

Though he’s now a full-time educator, Lewis’ experience with education has been mixed. Born in Los Angeles, he was sent as an infant to live with his grandparents in Peru when his father died. At 7, he returned to California to attend grade school in Monterey Park though he did not speak English.

He learned quickly, however, and remained in school through his junior year in high school. After passing a high school equivalency test, he entered UC Santa Cruz.

There, on a campus of 6,000 students, he was one of 300 minority students. And there, Lewis recalled, “I experienced racism firsthand.” While walking around town, police would stop him. “They would ask, ‘Well, what’s your nationality? Your background?’ ” Lewis also remembers people in a passing car calling him a “wetback” as he walked on a street.

Lewis dropped out of UC Santa Cruz to live abroad. But now he’s back in school, this time at Rancho Santiago College. He plans to transfer to Cal State Fullerton to major in Latin American studies.

“I think I’ll be in education and working with the Latino community for a long time to come. It’s important that I be,” Lewis said. “And I think it’s important for a gay man to be working within the Latino community.

“I hope through this program we can stem the flow of AIDS in Orange County.”