Reaching Young Black Gay Men
Date: 01/25/2017
Smartphone apps could be a powerful new tool for reaching out to young black gay men at risk of contracting HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.
“For young people, social network apps are often their first introduction and access to the gay community,” says pediatrician Errol Fields, whose research has shown that mobile apps have become more popular than clubs for meeting other gay men among the youth he studies. “We want to know how to reach people in these virtual spaces to educate them about prevention, get them tested, get them on PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) or, if necessary, treat them for HIV.”
When Fields started doing HIV research, he was struck by a startling disparity. Though young black gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men are no more likely to engage in high-risk behaviors than their white, Latino and Asian peers, they are at a significantly higher risk for HIV.
“Growing up in rural South Carolina, I’d always wanted to have an impact on racial disparities in health,” says Fields, who in 2009 earned his M.D. at The Johns Hopkins University and his Ph.D. from the Bloomberg School of Public Health. “And as a black gay man, I recognized the impact of this disparity on my community.”
Fields has authored or presented nearly 20 papers on gay black adolescent male attitudes and behaviors. But with a new four-year grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a supplemental grant from the Johns Hopkins University Center for AIDS Research, he is now zeroing in on how and where HIV transmission is occurring and how to most effectively intervene, including on social media.
“There are a lot of theories—poverty, discrimination, stigma, racial segregation of inner cities, other health disparities—about why HIV prevalence is higher among African-American gay and bisexual men,” he says. “But now that it is higher, it’s perpetuating itself. Figuring out where and how to intervene is critical to addressing this disparity.”
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