Most people I’ve talked to about Noah’s Ark find its comic aspects to be the biggest problem. I’ve heard it called a “buffoon show,” and a Black face gay minstrel show. I wouldn’t go quite that far. However there is something that really really bugged me about the show.
Very early in the first season, Alex decides to break the rules of the AIDS testing clinic where he works by administering an HIV test to a teenager. His boss admonishes him for it. When the test reveals that the Black teenager is HIV positive, Alex decides to quit so that he can make his own testing site in a Black community. Throughout the remainder of the series and the final movie, Alex and the crew work to build up his clinic and to provide HIV testing for Black gay men. Alex and the other main characters, hand out condoms at the club. By the standards of most public health officials, they do great work. They provide testing to alert men of their status so that if they test positive they can stop the spread of the virus and they hand out condoms for prevention.
But there is a major problem here. Alex and the crew support the dominant explanation for HIV-AIDS which, in its limits, allowed the rapid transmission of the virus in all manner of Black communities. That is, Alex and the crew unwittingly forward the idea that the primary locus of intervention to halt the epidemic is the sexual practices of Black gay men. By locating the problem in sex, they erase a wider framing of the disease which might allow us to think about it as a problem that is much deeper, wider, and structural than fucking after a hook up in the club. Sex is not the fundamental cause of the epidemic. It might be the most identifiable and direct, but it is not the primary or fundamental one. Disparities in economics go much further in explaining the differences in rates of HIV-AIDS in specific communities than any study of the sexual practices of specific groups, for instance. And by focusing on economic disparity, we might address the multiple problems facing Black communities.
For instance, some research suggests that the heat from shoddy crack pipes cause sores on users’ lips which open routes for transmission. Other research suggests that high transmission rates from the re-use of needles and surgical supplies might be responsible for the astounding rates of HIV/AIDS in many Africans nations. And, despite the hype, HIV-AIDS is not nearly as infectious during sex as we are urged to believe. But there are factors that make some people more susceptible to initial infection than others. Nutrition, stress, the presence of other STI’s, etc. all make a person more or less susceptible to initial infection. Economic disparities go much further in explaining the nature of the HIV-AIDS epidemic in Black and Black gay communities.
Additionally, the predominant narrative of HIV-AIDS continues to funnel large amounts of resources into ineffective solutions like handing out condoms. Public health officials urge us to sanitize our sex. While I don’t deny that condoms are important for safe sex, the focus on sex inflates condoms’ role in prevention. Handing out condoms might do a bit of the prevention, but the staggering rates of infection in DC, Central Harlem, the Southside of Chicago, and Atlanta show that these are not fully effective solutions for Black communities. Again, gearing our AIDS activism toward one of the fundamental causes of the epidemic, economic disparities, might get us much further in halting the epidemic itself.
