According to an almost two decades old report by the Black AIDS Institute's August 2008 report, "Left Behind," the number of people living with HIV in black America exceeds the HIV population in seven of the 15 focus countries in the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) initiative, an initiative helping to save the lives of those who have HIV/AIDS around the world in countries like Haiti, Dominican Republic, India, South Africa, to name a few. In other words, if black America were its own country, standing on its own like Haiti or Nigeria, black Americans would rank 16th in the world. The epidemic is heavily concentrated in urban enclaves like Detroit, New York, Newark, Washington D.C., and the Deep South. Sadly, much of this holds today.

With African Americans at younger and younger ages being infected with the AIDS virus, the life expectancy rate of African Americans will decline.  With the South's propensity to avoid speaking about uncomfortable subjects, unfortunately, the South has also evolved into one of the HIV/AIDS hot spots in the country. And so, too, are prisons. HIV/AIDS among black male inmates is five times the rate of the general population and is transmitted primarily through male-to-male sex or tattooing.

Also, data doesn't reflect the recent African diasporic immigrants of the last decades coming from the Caribbean Islands and the Motherland. This demographic group is overwhelmingly underreported and underserved—for fear of not only deportation but also of homophobic insults and assaults from within their communities.

When The New York Native, a now-defunct gay newspaper, in its May 18, 1981, issue first reported on a virus found in gay men then known as GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency), an editorial noted that "even if the disease first became apparent in gay men, it is not just a gay disease."

The feminization of this disease made many of us AIDS activists and scholars wonder if the same amount of money, concern, communication, and moral outrage that was put into white gay men with the disease would be put into curbing its spread among black women.  It wasn't!

There are still many persistent social and economic factors contributing to the high rates of the epidemic — racism, poverty, healthcare disparity, and violence, to name just a few. While we know that the epidemic moves along the fault lines of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation and that HIV transmission is tied to specific high-risk behaviors that are not exclusive to any one sexual orientation, the significant barriers to ending the AIDS epidemic still today are information and access to health care, which overrides homophobia.