JONATHAN M. PERRY has never been shy about being identified as gay at Johnson C. Smith University, a historically black college here. He tells anyone who asks, and plenty who don't. At 6-foot-2 and a trim 150 pounds, he's hard to miss. He sometimes paints his fingernails and toenails black and wears flip-flops so no one will miss the fashion statement. He has an "I Like Your Boyfriend" T-shirt. "I don't believe in having any skeletons in any closets," he explains. So Mr. Perry was a logical choice to speak at a sorority-sponsored forum on AIDS during his sophomore year. As he recalls, he started off by posing a question: "How many of you know someone who has H.I.V.?"
"Turn to your left; turn to your right," he told them. "Do you know anyone with H.I.V.?"
No one raised a hand.
"Well," he added, "how many of you know me?"
On this campus of 1,600 students, they all knew Mr. Perry, and many in the audience began to cry. They had never associated AIDS with their own campus. In fact, Mr. Perry is the only student at Johnson C. Smith who is openly gay.
"I want black college students to hear my story," says Mr. Perry, now a 28-year-old senior. "I don't want them to be able to avoid thinking about this." He adds: "My school and lots of schools are very homophobic, and they are not going to address H.I.V. on black college campuses until they are able to get over the homophobia."
[...] ''The stigma of being gay drives kids into higher-risk behavior such as doing club drugs and engaging in anonymous sex,'' says Dr. Peter A. Leone, the state's medical director for sexually transmitted diseases and an associate professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. ''There's nowhere for them to go to explore their sexuality safely.''
That, according to Dr. Leone, is a key reason for the results he saw last year in a study of H.I.V. among North Carolina's college students.
Although the growth of the virus among minority groups is well documented, public-health officials had assumed the problem was greatest in low-income, poorly educated communities. College students had not been considered at risk for AIDS because prevention education and awareness is usually high on campuses. But the study -- of 42 colleges, public and private, historically black and predominantly white, secular and religious -- produced results that stunned Dr. Leone, the lead researcher. From 2000 through 2003, 84 male students were found to have H.I.V., and 73 of them were black. In a state where only 22 percent of college students are black, 87 percent of students contracting H.I.V. are black.
Data from 2004, not counted in his study, indicate the numbers are rising and will likely increase exponentially.
''We are seeing this huge outbreak among young black men who don't view themselves as at risk, and we're not doing a good job of delivering the message that they are,'' Dr. Leone says.
The problem the researchers documented also raises concerns about the vulnerability of young women. About 40 percent of the H.I.V.-positive black male students said they had also had sex with women in the year before their diagnosis. In the last two years, five female students in North Carolina, all of them black, have been found to have H.I.V. .....
