by Dana Asher

an evolving epidemic

It's been 20 years since the Center for Disease Control made its first report of the strange new "gay cancer" afflicting five homosexual men in Los Angeles. Two decades since the precursor to the Gay Men's Health Crisis met in the home of writer/producer Larry Kramer and passed around a hat to raise funds for this inexplicable disease for which there was -- and still is -- no cure.

But there is something now known about this disease of the immune system, this illness transmitted chiefly through blood or blood products, especially through sexual contact or contaminated hypodermic needles. While it may have initially been charac-terized as a plague of gay, white males, the face of the epidemic has changed. "You're seeing a lot more women infected, a lot more people of color," says Marty Algaze, GMHC's director of communications and himself a Jewish man. Of course, says Algaze, there are Jewish men within the gay community. And then there are men who don't identify with the gay community but still have sex with men. "Over the years, I have seen Orthodox men frequent gay sex establishments, such as gay bathhouses, who are obviously not openly gay but still have sex with men. Some of them then go home to their wives. If they're not taking precautions, they can be putting their wives at risk."

Today, heterosexual intercourse is the fastest-growing mode of HIV transmission in the United States and the dominant mode of HIV transmission worldwide. Women com-prise the fastest-growing population of new HIV infections in the country, being eight times more likely than men to contract HIV from one act of intercourse. Every hour of every day, two young Americans between 13 and 24 are infected with HIV. Still, in the eyes of much of the Jewish community, it doesn't happen in Jewish families. If it's not nice, don't discuss it. Don't air the family's dirty laundry. Hasn't the Jewish community gotten beyond this? Do Jewish families - and Jewish mothers in particular -- shoulder the burden alone? And if we do accept that AIDS has come into our living rooms, what are we doing about it? Is it enough? the search for support

Barbara Gaynor of Miami says no. Both of her two sons have been infected with AIDS. Her older son, who is gay, told his mother he was HIV-positive in 1987; her younger one was infected by an ex-girlfriend from college who had received tainted blood during a blood transfusion. "He asked me to keep his illness a secret because of the stig-ma. He thought his friends wouldn't want to be near him anymore," Gaynor says of her younger son, who died six years ago at the age of 31. "There wasn't anyplace for me to go. There wasn't a network. There were plenty of AIDS organizations, but they didn't fit."

So Gaynor started the Miami chapter of Mother's Voices, working to educate parents through training programs and "making sure that it doesn't happen to anybody else's children."

Still, says Gaynor, support came as a byproduct rather than by design. She sought guidance from the rabbi of her Reform synagogue in Miami, a man she says was sym-pathetic, but unsure of how to respond. He referred her to another woman in the con-gregation whose son was living with AIDS, a first link between devastated mothers watching beloved children battle a ravaging illness - and often losing. For Gaynor, however, the major assistance came outside the Jewish community, which she says has "absolutely no resources" for mothers like her. "I remember going to a meeting at the Jewish federation in Miami with two other mothers whose families were affected by AIDS. We were trying to start a support group or get some programs rolling for families like ours. But that wasn't their focus and it's still not something in which the federation wants to get involved. It's not like domestic violence; I don't think much of the community is ready to admit that HIV and AIDS have entered Jewish families. And they have."

According to Algaze, organized religious communities as a whole are ill prepared for dealing with the AIDS crisis. "It's not just the synagogues; it's similar in the churches, in the Latino churches and in the Black churches, especially. Church leaders don't want to talk about how AIDS has devastated their communities. They don't want to talk about sex and they don't want to talk about the fact that there are African-American men who are gay. Or that there are people who have sex with members of the same sex and then go on to have sex with the opposite sex."