Last Thursday, a group of about 30 students gathered in room 133 in the Old University Union to discuss a number of current health issues and how they affect different groups of people, both medically and socially.

The discussion, which was sponsored by Rainbow Pride Union (RPU), Real Education About College Health (REACH) and Binghamton Association of Mixed Students (BAMS), mainly addressed issues affecting African Americans and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transsexual (LGBT) community.

Alan Weissman, health outreach coordinator and organizer of the event, began the forum by pointing out that LGBTs and African Americans are disproportionately affected by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV).

“MSMs [Men who have sex with men] represent a large portion of people infected with HIV,” he said. “But if you look at current trends in HIV and other STDs, not only LGBT are being disproportionately affected, but also communities of color.”

Weissman invited three guest speakers to contribute to the discussion. Brian Roach and Larry Parham, from Southern Tier AIDS Program, and Leo Wilton, an assistant professor in the School of Education and Human Development, contributed to the forum.

Professor Wilton described a recent study, in which black homosexual men from six cities were tested for HIV. The results showed that 46 percent of the participants were HIV positive and over two thirds of them didn’t know about it.

“This was a mean number, in some cities it was much higher, around 65 percent,” Wilton said. “We are in a state of emergency.”

But it was the study described by Brian Roach that drew gasps from the crowd.

“Last week I was at a conference and this woman from the University of California was working on a study of trans women in San Francisco and 80 percent of the women were HIV positive,” Roach said.

The guest speakers all insisted that HIV prevention techniques in the United States have to be changed.

“We have the highest STD rates of any industrialized nation,” Parham said. “It’s not working the way we are addressing this, it’s not working, what it is doing is shifting [HIV] from population to population.”

Weissman also added that people of color are overrepresented in the portion of the population living without health insurance.

“Probably the biggest barrier to proper health care for LGBTs is a lack of appropriately trained health care practitioners and also the fact that the health care industry is heterosexist,” Weissman said.

Lyn Nelson, one of the directors of RPU, responded in concurrence.

“Its very impossible for a lot of people to be honest with their doctors, so one thing that really bothers me is that doctors will make heterosexual assumptions automatically and will not offer information,” Nelson said.

She related an incident in which a friend of hers went to get tested for STDs and when she responded in the negative to having had intercourse with a male in the last six months, her doctor crossed out a list of STD tests, assuming that she could not have contracted them any other way.

Audience members and speakers also discussed stigmas surrounding LGBTs, people of color and HIV.

Weissman described a Red Cross policy, which was only recently relaxed, that denied MSMs the ability to donate blood for life, regardless of their HIV status, while heterosexual men and women who had anal sex could donate blood after a one year waiting period.

“Anal sex is anal sex,” Parham responded. “It doesn’t make any difference whether you’re a woman or a man. It is the act itself and not the fact of who’s engaging in it.”

Parham also stated that because LGBTs were the first people to be diagnosed with HIV, the virus has been tied to issues of morality.

“From the very beginning, gay men and drug users were identified as primarily affected by HIV,” he said.

As a result, Parham argued, many heterosexuals think that they will not be affected, because “they believe that the sex they’re engaging in is OK by moral status.”

“As long as we allow [HIV] to be tied to religious beliefs, we’re always going to fight an unfair battle when it comes to HIV prevention and education,” Parham said.

The forum lasted almost two hours and many students expressed their satisfaction with the discussion.

“I feel that this was very successful,” said Lisa Pantuso, a junior and co-director of RPU. “I think a lot of interesting things happened tonight.”