Coauthored by Venton C. Jones Jr., Program Officer, LGBT Health and Wellness Initiatives at National Black Justice Coalition.
Liberation for Black folks must start with a focus on the issues that hinder the most marginalized in our community. Fueled by movements like #BlackLivesMatter, there is a new generation of freedom fighters that are shifting the conversation — Black millennials. This has led the National Black Justice Coalition (NBJC), the nation’s leading civil rights organization dedicated to the empowerment of Black lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people, to continue to empower young professionals and emerging leaders, including ourselves.
Last December, NBJC launched its health and wellness initiative to address current health crises and disparities in culturally competent wellness programs that target Black LGBT people and families with an emphasis in supporting youth leadership to take swift and strategic action. Central to this work is addressing the HIV/AIDS epidemic that disproportionately impacts Black communities. Today, on World AIDS Day, the time for us to act is now!
This work is not just significant to us as leaders of NBJC–it is personal. We are both Black gay men living with HIV, and have had to face a number of challenges to advance our own physical and emotional health. Unfortunately, our stories are not unique for the lived experiences of many Black gay men because HIV has become the new normal for our community. In fact, Black gay men are only 1.4 percent of our nation’s Black population, but we represent more than half of new HIV infections in the United States, annually. Poverty, and lack of access to health insurance and culturally competent health care, contributes directly to this dismal reality. This — on top of stigma and shame — continue to permeate the lives of Black gay men, representing an even more pressing issue in the fight to end HIV/AIDS in the Black community.