When Claudia Pryor’s cousin was diagnosed with AIDS in the 1980s, she was the only family member willing to visit him. As a gay Black man, his family ostracized him.
“I was told as a little girl that Black people were not (gay),” Pryor said.
Even when she went to the hospital to visit him, she couldn’t touch him.
“The nurse put me in essentially a hazmat suit,” she said. “Suddenly, I just couldn’t visit my cousin for the last time like that, so I took it off.
“That was my first big experience with AIDS,” she said. That visit led her to start work in 2001 on a documentary that explores the awareness and attitudes of a group of Black Pittsburgh youth toward HIV. The documentary, “Why Us? Left Behind and Dying,” will be the basis of new curricula aimed at dispelling myths surrounding Blacks with the disease.
In 2006, Blacks accounted for 46 percent of the 1.1 million people in the U.S. living with HIV, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Homophobia, shame and secrecy stymie African-Americans from dealing with the spread of the disease, Pryor says.
“It’s a Black disease,” but no one wants to hear that, she said.
