Measuring a year in the life: what else can I do to get Black folks to care about the AIDS epidemic?(transformations)

I just saw Rent, the much anticipated movie adaptation of Jonathan Larson's 1996 Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning rock opera about a year--"five hundred, twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes"--in the life of a group of friends, some of whom are HIV positive, living on the lower East Side of New York City six years--or, three million, one-hundred fifty-three thousand six hundred minutes--before the arrival of the life-extending triple combination AIDS regimens used today.

I first saw Rent on Broadway with the original cast in 1996, the year protease inhibitors came on the market. It was a time in my life when my own mortality clock was ticking very fast. I had nearly died a few months earlier, and no one expected me to live beyond the end of the year.

So much has happened since the play opened that I expected the movie to be dated. After all, World AIDS Day has rolled around 10 times since Rent debuted. Many of us with AIDS are living longer. I have been living with HIV for over 25 years and full-blown AIDS for 15 years. But, more than that, the unimaginable has happened: We are making HIV/AIDS therapies available in the worst-hit parts of Sub-Sahara Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia. So I was surprised when, after the opening verse of the first real AIDS song, I found myself in tears.

The scene is of an AIDS support group. A few of my tears were a response to the memories that came flooding back. The faces of Chris, Rory, Craig, Roger, Lynn, Stephen, Bylinda, LeRoy and all my friends who are now dead suddenly filled my head. The grief and the fear that we all felt back then thrust me back into those support groups, those hospital rooms, those memorial services.

But even with all of that, most of the tears were not about my yesterdays. As I fought my way back from the memories, I realized the immense sadness and terror I was feeling was about what is going on with regard to Black America and AIDS today. You see, even with the new drugs, we are still dying in droves--and most of us don't seem to care. What makes me so sad and so terrified is that I just don't know what else to do to get Black folks to make ending the AIDS epidemic a top priority.

The statistics don't seem to do the job--AIDS continues to be the ...