The Secret Epidemic: The Story of AIDS and Black America

by Jacob Levenson

As we enter the twenty-first century, AIDS in America has become primarily a black disease. African Americans now constitute 50 percent of all new HIV cases, and AIDS is one of the top causes of death in young black men and women. The story of how this came to pass reaches across half a century, from the Great Migration north to the boom of the postwar era and the subsequent urban decay, the advent of heroin and crack, and the rise of the new South.

In The Secret Epidemic , Jacob Levenson tells this story through the experiences of the people at its center. Mindy Fullilove, one of the first black researchers to investigate the roots of the epidemic, leads us from San Francisco to the early appearance of the disease in Harlem and the South Bronx. Desiree Rushing must reconcile her crack addiction and HIV infection with the fate of her city, family, and the black church. Mario Cooper is a gay son of the black elite who becomes infected, works to mobilize the Congressional Black Caucus and the Clinton White House to respond to the epidemic, and eventually confronts the boundaries of American race politics. And David deShazo is a white social worker thrust into a hidden, rural black world in the heart of the American South, where he struggles to prevent the spreading epidemic and help two infected black sisters survive with the disease.

Interweaving personal stories and national policy, the legacy of discrimination and the battle for civil rights, sexuality and the role of the black church, this is a significant book for our time——a portrait of a devastating epidemic and an examination of our changing understanding of race in America.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, LGBT

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Suzy · Rating 3 out of 5]

the author is a white guy and he keeps referring to racism as a problem of the past. that is a real drawback, especially because the AIDS movement is struggling to put forward a really sharp analysis of racism and how it feeds the epidemic, and of course that is not what the media wants to hear or put out there.

The plus side to this book is it includes Mindy and Bob Fullilove's groundbreaking research. Mindy explains how the Bronx fires fed the epidemic and displacement and marginalization of NYC's Black communities allowed HIV to incubate before exploding. I should probably read her books instead of this one, but I did like the way this author relies on personal stories and interviews. Much more engaging than your average public health book!

[Jess · Rating 2 out of 5]

So I didn't actually finish this book, but I read about three chapters. The first chapter, I thought was very interesting, but then I found the book was jumping around too much for me, between stories of people who were HIV positive, policy, and history. Typically, I like books like this, but I found it to be poorly organized and I decided to stop reading it. For me, the book felt more like a chore to read, rather than something I was reading for fun.

[Joseph Hirsch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jacob Levenson sets himself the impossible task in "The Secret Epidemic" of trying to understand the AIDS crisis in the black community as both a product of historical indifference and oppression on the one hand, and as something which transcends race in an era where no one is even sure how much of a factor race is (though the consensus is racism is still present, though not totally culpable for problems in the black underclass). Sound confusing, contradictory even? It is.

Some elements of the black community were and are so grounded in the low church/protestant dispensation that they were likely to not only shun the HIV positive among them, but to sometimes consider those suffering from the disease as having reaped what they'd sown. And since no one can get around the fact that (excepting transfusions and exceptional cases) acquiring HIV is a matter of personal behavior, the theology is grounded in the most basic causality (regardless of how one feels about religion).

This leaves Jacob Levenson nothing to do but spin plates, to first point out that black people are more likely to contract HIV, and that while this doesn't point to something eugenic like "low preference" or "high preference" horizons (the idea that our genes control a lot of our decision making), he doesn't know where to look for explanations, since he himself (and most of the black people he talks to) aren't comfortable with writing the epidemic off to white racism or indifference alone, or even primarily.

A book about race (for good or ill) tends to get all of our antennae dowsing for an answer to that unbidden question that keeps surfacing: who's to blame? Everyone, it turns out. Or maybe no one. Or maybe (and here's a radical idea) the person who decides to put a needle in their arm or a penis sans condom in their rectum.

So where does this leave us? Nowhere. Or back at square one.

The book is at its best when it gives up on the macro-features and shows us the daily life, struggles, horrors, and minor heroism of those involved in the battle against the disease, especially when it was in its early stages of being mapped out as a pathology (Gay Pneumonia, as I believe it was provisionally called at first).

It's easy enough for politicians (and activist journalists) to talk about raising awareness to combat societal ills, so the early stages of a pandemic always have clearly delineated good and bad guys, with those trying to get the word out being good and those trying to suppress the word (or at least focus resources elsewhere) as bad.

But once awareness is raised and people still engage in risky or even suicidal behaviors, frustration and even rage can set in among even the well-meaning (like a doctor Levenson describes in his book, whose experience with a patient who refuses her regimen leaves him exasperated).

Some of the specific descriptions of sexual behaviors detailed in the book may be too coarse for some readers (a couple acts were new to me), but if you can read about Nancy Pelosi or Maxine Waters behaving heroically without losing your lunch, a bit of graphic detail about rimming, swallowing semen, or taking alkyd nitrates to dilate one's rectum for sodomy are comparatively mild.

And speaking of semen, Bill Clinton makes his appearance throughout the book, playing the black community like the maestro he was, slashing all kinds of entitlements and holding a nonexistent center, while doing his best oleaginous, lip-biting "I feel your pain" act. How people can pretend that the Ozark Crime Family didn't prime our viscera for something like Trump is anyone's guess (the Oval Office is going to need a hazmat crew in there if someone who isn't made of slime somehow makes their way back into the highest office in the land at some point).

Anyway, this book gets a frustrated shrug from me. It's not that I don't care. But I'm also not trying to pick up Progressive Pokemon points or win a Peabody, and a bit more honesty and penetration (no pun intended) from Levenson would have been nice. His view isn't Manichean, which is nice in a book about race, but he is so wary of offending anyone, catching the scarlet "R" brand on his forehead, that he barely has a view (or rather, he's unwilling to risk sharing it with the reader).

The guy's heart is in the right place but his balls are MIA.

[Clarissa Donnelly-Deroven · Rating 4 out of 5]

really beautiful portraits of so many people impacted by HIV/AIDS, and very compelling arguments laid out by experts about how and why HIV AIDS made its way into rural black communities. Some dated language that made me cringe (“junkies” “crime infested” “blacks” etc) but overall really wonderful work of journalism.

[Mali · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good read with an awful lot of info on aids and the backstory of groups trying to fight the disease

[Whitney · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved reading this book. It really speaks to the untold side of the AIDS epidemic in America, and it left me wanting to do something to help.

[Jocelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book changed my life!