KQED-TV is the station to watch this coming Tuesday night, July 10, when the acclaimed series Frontline airs Endgame: AIDS in Black America, Renata Simone's riveting new documentary. The film shines a very bright light on a fact we already knew but haven't talked about: that HIV is as prevalent in the black community as it is anywhere else.
Simone's film isn't easy to watch, but the truth is often painful. As Endgame gets underway, AIDS researcher Dr. David Ho and others admit that as early as 1981, the year the AIDS crisis officially began, black gay men were dying of AIDS. Yet the publicly reported cases were white. This exclusion of facts wasn't just going on in the white community.
(Photo: Courtesy Renata Simone Productions)
"We thought about AIDS as about affecting white people, then only white gay people, and that there were no black gay people," admits Julian Bond, chairman emeritus of the NAACP. "Which is foolish, even criminal."
Oakland resident Jesse Brooks, a black gay man who's prominently featured in Endgame, has been acutely aware of the truth from the beginning. "It irks me that so many in my community are still dying," Brooks said in a telephone interview with the B.A.R. "I cry for the truth."
Brooks points to the lack of visual documentation of AIDS in the black community. "The fifth, sixth and seventh patients who died were black," he told us. "Things are better today, there's an awareness of the disparity. We need to collaborate. We need to work together to save lives."
Filmmaker Simone also introduces us to Nell, another Oakland resident. Your heart will go out to this quiet, dignified mother, grandmother and retired nurse. Fourteen years after her divorce, Nell marries a man she met in her church. Soon after, she gets the shock of her life: Nell is now HIV-positive. Her new husband, who knew of his status before the wedding, passed the virus along to her.
As Simone travels from city to city, we see firsthand the devastating effect AIDS has had on black communities. In Selma, Alabama, birthplace of the civil rights movement, we visit a cash-strapped HIV clinic that struggles to provide services to its impoverished clients, many of whom have nowhere else to turn.
In a run-down Atlanta neighborhood, we see clergy take to the streets, offering clean needles to addicts in direct defiance of laws that prohibit needle distribution. "Part of the fight is against the racist laws that were put in place," said Jesse Brooks.
The film also spends some time with sports legend Magic Johnson, who stunned the world when he announced that he was HIV-positive. Twenty years later, Johnson is thriving and doing his part to help his community and raise awareness. As he visits his doctor, Johnson is jovial, healthy and upbeat. After all the despair we've seen, Johnson lets us know that there is hope. He represents the light at the end of the tunnel.
Endgame: AIDS in Black America will air on PBS' Frontline on July 10 at 8 p.m.