State Aims AIDS Ads at High-Risk Individuals : Health: Campaign targets young adults, drug users and men who have sex with men but do not think of themselves as gay.

In what is being billed as the state’s most aggressive effort yet to reduce the spread of AIDS in California, health department officials Thursday unveiled the opening phase of a $6-million prevention campaign aimed at high-risk groups who do not necessarily think of themselves in those terms.

Among the key targets of the three-year media project are young adults, men who have sex with men but don’t identify themselves as gay, their female partners, and injection drug users and their sexual partners.

“We’re looking at some of the new emerging populations in the epidemic,” said Wayne Sauseda, director of the California Office of AIDS.

The campaign, unveiled on the eve of World AIDS Day, will include television, radio and billboard ads as well as community outreach programs.

In one of two TV ads featuring African American women, Felice tells viewers she has AIDS. “It’s not a matter of how many people you’ve been with. He was only the second person in my life. He did have other relationships while we were married. . . . It could happen to anybody.”

Although the majority of California AIDS cases involve men who have sex with men, the state Department of Health Services says that between 1987 and 1993, HIV infections rose dramatically in a number of other groups, including adolescents, women, African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Asians and Pacific Islanders.

A state campaign targeting such segments of the population is long overdue, said Cynthia Davis, head of the Minority AIDS Consortium in Los Angeles.

“I’ve been working in this field since ’83 and in the Latino and African American communities, the levels of denial are still strong,” Davis said. “Women just do not see themselves at risk. Neither do young people. They’re not seeking testing. We’re lagging seven or eight years behind the gay community” in terms of education.

Speaking at a Los Angeles news conference, Health Services Director Kim Belshe said the new campaign is very different from previous state efforts. The last statewide campaign was in 1988, cost $2 million and offered more generic messages that were not targeted at specific groups.

The previous project also relied on public service announcements that appeared erratically, whereas the current one uses paid advertising that can be regularly placed to reach certain audiences. Individuals with AIDS or HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, are also being featured in many of the spots.

That approach, Belshe said, is much more straightforward and personal. “We really do believe it will work.”

Mark Caffee of Rogers and Associates, a public relations company involved in the campaign, said some ads will run in the gay print media, and outreach efforts will also be targeted at the gay community. But the majority of the project will not be geared at men who identify themselves as homosexual.

Although the gay community has complained that the government has not spent nearly enough money getting prevention messages out to gay men, Antonio D. Le Mons, project director of HIV prevention services at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center, did not question the state campaign.

“I think it’s wonderful the state has committed $6 million to an education campaign,” Le Mons said. “I don’t expect the state to come out with an ad campaign that will reach everybody. . . . I do think there is some validity in targeting the campaign to those who have been difficult to reach.”

Moreover, he said, if the state program can reach men who do not think of themselves as gay or bisexual and do not listen to gay-themed messages--even though they have sex with men--that will benefit the gay community.