Attention readers! Vital information is coming your way. It’s no secret that HIV/Aids is often associated with the gay community. Most of us know by now that HIV is not strictly a “gay” disease but that doesn’t mean that the illness has completely ventured away from this sexual orientation.  As it turns out, it may be rising among one particular group (the Black gay male community) for more reasons than one.

Ladies, if you suspect that you’re in a relationship with a down-low brother, you better confirm it and confirm it quick! According to The Huffington Post, there are three reasons why HIV may be one the rise in the Black, gay, male community: “age gaps between partners, sexual networks more tightly drawn by race, and the fact that partner familiarity affects condom usage”.

Look at Kerry Rhodes and his alleged lover, Rhodes’ supposed boyfriend or “wife” as he refers to himself is younger than him. Who do gay males hang around other than women? More gay men and all these DL brothers out here that are double dipping between their wife and boyfriend(s) are most likely not using condoms for protection. Since the Black, gay, community is so close-knit not only socially and privately (sexually), researchers believe this may be contributing to the rise of the virus among them.

Huff Post reported that researchers studied 143 HIV negative, gay men who had sex with partners under 40 from different ethnic backgrounds and were asked to record their results in a journal.

As reported by The Huffington Post:

What they found: that while black men were considerably less likely to report having unprotected sex than other racial groups, they were the most likely to have sex with other black men (African Americans were 11 times more likely to have black partners than partners of another race) and more likely to have partners who are older than they are, a group shown to have higher rates of HIV as compared with younger men.

To add to these growing numbers the results from last year’s CDC report said there was “78 percent of new HIV infections in men in 2010, and 63 percent of total new HIV infections in both men and women that year [2010]” and gay men experience a 22 percent increase in new HIV cases between 2008-2010.

So, what do you think of this readers? What do you think the stats are for the Atlanta Black, gay community?

Dr. O

Picture source: http://survivingdating.com/black-churches-aids-hiv-black-women