Couched as a “personal journey” through the history of H.I.V. and AIDS, “House of Numbers” is actually a weaselly support pamphlet for AIDS denialists.
…
Rife with fuzzy logic (most people with AIDS live in poverty, therefore poverty causes AIDS) and a relentless fudging of the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions, this willfully ignorant film portrays minor areas of scientific disagreement as “a research community in disarray” and diagnostic testing as a waste of time.

In short, “House of Numbers” is exactly the sort of bogusness and evil lies packaged as science that this site is dedicated to exposing and refuting.

It was strange. I had gay friends. It was impossible not to. My entire professional life was in song and dance. Musical theater and political activism.

But that didn’t stop me from getting educated, and fast. Volunteering for APLA.
The seriousness and gravity of it all, I knew. Once at APLA, that’s when I started meeting infected people who’d become ad hoc activists themselves. I told them outright, how could I have not been able to see anything first hand before being in the trenches with them?

One time, I met a beautiful young man who was a friend of a colleague at the art museum I worked in. He just happened to sit and chat with me for about ten minutes while he waited to see her for lunch.
He was SO handsome, like a movie star. Charming and bright eyed. He was 23.
Two months later, my colleague came to work with red eyes, crying and exhausted. She told me he’d died. Of AIDS related pneumonia.

That was like a punch in the face to hear that. I held her hand, held HER, gave her as much comforting words as possible. But I was sad, SAD…for weeks after that. It was so cruel and wrong!

Since then, ten years ago I heard that a talented singer from the show choir we’d been in as teens had died of the disease. His brother told me.
And it had been two years prior that it happened.
Then two years ago, I heard another boy from our same show choir had died of AIDS about 16 years ago.
He had been 32 years old.

I was saddened all over again by this news. These were guys I’d lost track of in our young adulthood, and all this happened while I didn’t know them.

I know people with HIV. But not AIDS, right now. Lifestyle changes (like not smoking, drinking, or using illegal drugs and safer sex), and drug therapies are keeping them alive. They are in their 40′s and 50′s and 70′s.
They are at normal spans, but at ages at risk more for heart attack and cancer, rather than AIDS.

Black women were mislead by their churches and social networks into thinking that AIDS was a ‘gay disease’. And sometimes fell victim to their own illogical conclusions and denial.

All too easily were they told that the infection rates in their ranks was because of deceitful gay men, rather than the deceitful straight men who didn’t disclose their relationships with other concurrent partners, how many and who refused to use protection.
And a lot of black women bought into that to their own peril.
Black folks sometimes love a conspiracy theory, but are hard pressed to be accountable for something they had the power to prevent in the first place.

Being one of the high risk demographics as a black woman, and a participant in the Black Woman’s Health Study for over twelve years, I AM keeping up with the pulse and progress on this issue.

It concerns us so much. Africa was the foundation of this terrible plague and many in leadership of several African nations are complicit in keeping their people in the very denial, misinformation, myth and poverty that exacerbate it.

I tend to jump into a fight, whether it affects me or not. That’s why it didn’t matter if I actually knew and loved someone who had HIV/AIDS, what mattered was helping to fight it because it’s terrible, CAN be fought and should be.
It’s a GOOD fight. THAT is the point.

Peter, Leon, Rick…you touched me… You are remembered…