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Public perception
The number of people living with HIV in the United States, and the total cumulative number of deaths. One of the best known works on the history of HIV is 1987's book And the Band Played On, by Randy Shilts. Shilts contends that Ronald Reagan's administration dragged its feet in dealing with the crisis due to homophobia, while the gay community viewed early reports and public health measures with corresponding distrust, thus allowing the disease to infect hundreds of thousands more. This resulted in the formation of ACT-UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power by Larry Kramer. Galvanized by the federal government's inactivity, the movement by AIDS activists to gain funding for AIDS research, which on a per-patient basis out-paced funding for more prevalent diseases such as cancer and heart disease, was used as a model for future lobbying for health research funding.

The Shilts work popularized the misconception that the disease was introduced by a gay flight attendant named Gaëtan Dugas, referred to as "Patient Zero," although the author did not actually make this claim in the book. However, subsequent research has revealed that there were cases of AIDS much earlier than initially known. HIV-infected blood samples have been found from as early as 1959 in Africa (see HIV main entry), and HIV has been shown to have caused the death of Robert Rayford, a 16-year-old St. Louis male, in 1969, who could have contracted it as early as 7 years old due to sexual abuse, suggesting that HIV had been present, at very low prevalence, in the U.S. since before the 1970s.

An early theory asserted that a series of inoculations against hepatitis B that were performed in the gay community of San Francisco were tainted with HIV. Although there was a high correlation between recipients of that vaccination and initial cases of AIDS, this theory has long been discredited. HIV, hepatitis B, and hepatitis C are bloodborne diseases with very similar modes of transmission, and those at risk for one are at risk for the others.

Activists and critics of current AIDS policies allege that another preventable impediment to stemming the spread of the disease and/or finding a treatment was the vanity of "celebrity" scientists. Robert Gallo, an American scientist involved in the search for a new virus in the people affected by the disease, became embroiled in a legal battle with French scientist Luc Montagnier, who had first discovered such a virus in tissue cultures derived from a patient suffering from enlargement of the lymphnodes (an early sign of AIDS). Montagnier had named the new virus LAV (Lymphoadenopathy-Associated Virus).

Gallo, who appeared to question the primacy of the French scientist's discovery, refused to recognize the "French virus" as the cause of AIDS, and tried instead to claim the disease was caused by a new member of a retrovirus family, HTLV, which he had discovered. Critics claim that because some scientists were more interested in trying to win a Nobel prize than in helping patients, research progress was delayed and more people needlessly died. After a number of meetings and high-level political intervention, the French scientists and Gallo agreed to "share" the discovery of HIV, although eventually Montagnier and his group were recognized as the true discoverers, and won the 2008 Nobel Prize for it.

Publicity campaigns were started in attempts to counter the incorrect and often vitriolic perception of AIDS as a "gay plague". These included the Ryan White case, red ribbon campaigns, celebrity dinners, the 1993 film version of And the Band Played On, sex education programs in schools, and television advertisements. Announcements by various celebrities that they had contracted HIV (including actor Rock Hudson, basketball star Magic Johnson, tennis player Arthur Ashe and singer Freddie Mercury) were significant in arousing media attention and making the general public aware of the dangers of the disease to people of all sexual orientations.

Risk Factors contributing to the Black HIV rate
Accessibility to healthcare is very important in preventing and treating HIV/AIDS. It can be affected by health insurance which is available to people through private insurers, Medicare and Medicaid which leaves some people still vulnerable. Historically, African Americans have faced discrimination when it comes to receiving healthcare. During the time of slavery, slave owners would get medical attention for slaves because they were deemed as property, while slaves that the slave owners believed were not able to recover were sent to be experimented on. In the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, universities dug up African American bodies to autopsy, and some night doctors would snatch people off the streets to examine. African Americans have been experimented on and exploited for centuries. The Tuskegee Syphilis study experimented vulnerable men in the South who had syphilis. They kept treatment from these men to see what would happen. Henrietta Lacks was also exploited when researchers took her cancerous cells and grew them to experiment on them.

Homosexuality is viewed negatively in the African American Community. "In a qualitative study of 745 racially and ethnic diverse undergraduates attending a large Midwestern university, Calzo and Ward (2009) determined that parents of African-American participants discussed homosexuality more frequently than the parents of other respondents. In analyses of the values communicated, Calzo and Ward (2009) reported that Black parents offered greater indication that homosexuality is perverse and unnatural".

Homosexuality is seen as a threat to the African American empowerment. Masculinity is seen as important for the African American community because it shows that the community is in control of their own destiny. Since the stigma circling homosexuality is that it is “effeminate”, then homosexuality is seen as a threat to masculinity. “Black manhood, then, depends on men's ability to be provider, progenitor, and protector. But, as the Black male performance of parts of this script is thwarted by economic and cultural factors, the performance of Black masculinity becomes predicated on a particular performance of Black sexuality and avoidance of weakness and femininity. If sexuality remains one of the few ways that Black men can recapture a masculinity withheld from them in the marketplace, endorsing Black homosexuality subverts the cultural project of re inscribing masculinity within the Black community." This critical view is influenced by Internalized homophobia. “Internalized homophobia is defined as the lesbian, gay, or bisexual individual's inward direction of society's homophobic attitudes (Meyer 1995)."

The African American community's social norms regarding homosexuality have influenced a higher percentage of African Americans with internalized homophobia. This homophobic culture is sustained within the African American community through the church because religion is a vital part of the African American community: "As reported by Peterson and Jones (2009), AA MSM tended to be more involved with religious communities than NHW MSM." Because the church reiterates this stigma of homosexuality, the African American community has higher rates of internalized homophobia. This internalized homophobia causes a lower chance of HIV/AIDS education on prevention and care within the African American community.

Sex education varies throughout the United States and in some areas could use more informative measures. African-Americans and Hispanic/ Latinos experience higher rates of lower socioeconomic statuses and fewer opportunities than white people. This causes limited access to (higher) education in lower socioeconomic areas. Sex education on HIV prevention has decreased from 64% (2000) to 41% (2014). Out of the 50 states, 26 put a larger emphasis on abstinence sex education. Abstinence only sex education is correlated to increasing rates of HIV especially in teenagers and young adults.

With mass incarceration of the African American community, HIV has been spreading rapidly throughout jails and prisons. “Among jail populations, African American men are 5 times as likely as white men, and twice as likely as Hispanic/Latino men, to be diagnosed with HIV.” Since most people contract HIV before being incarcerated, it is hard to know who has the disease and to keep it from spreading. A lack of hygiene in prisons perpetuates these problems. Many inmates do not disclose their high-risk behaviors, such as anal sex or injection drug use, because they fear being stigmatized and ostracized by other inmates.There is also a lack of educational programs on disease prevention for inmates. Because “nine out of ten jail inmates are released in under 72 hours which makes it hard to test them for HIV and help them find treatment,” the problem persists outside of prison.

Perspective of Doctors
AIDS brought great fear and concern to the nation, much like any other epidemic, and those who were primarily affected were people that the majority did not look upon with the best attitude, Homosexuals, African-Americans, Latinos, and Drug users. The general thought of the population was to create distance and establish boundaries from these people, and some Doctors were not immune from such impulses. During the epidemic, Doctors began to not treat AIDS patients, not only to create distance from these groups of people, but also because they were afraid to contract the disease themselves. A Surgeon in Milwaukee stated, "I've got to be selfish. It's an incurable disease that's uniformly fatal, and I'm constantly at risk for getting it. I've got to think about myself. I've got to think about my family. That responsibility is greater than to the patient." Some doctors thought it was their duty to stay away from the virus because they have their other patients to think of. In a survey of doctors in the mid to late 1980's a substantial number of physicians indicated that they didn't have an ethical obligation to treat and care for those patients with HIV/AIDS. A study of primary care providers showed that half would not care for patients if they were given a choice. In 1990, a national survey of doctors showed that "only 24% believed that office-based practitioners should be legally required to provide care to individuals with HIV infection." However, there were many doctors who chose to care for these patients with AIDS for different reasons, they shared the same sexual orientation as the infected, a commitment to providing care to the diseased, an interest in the mysteries of infectious disease, or a desire to tame the awful threat. Treating patients infected with the AIDS virus changed some doctors personal lives; because it caused them to have to deal with some of the same stigmas that their patients had. This disease also weighed on their minds, because they often had to deal with witnessing the death of patients and most often those patients were as young or even younger than they were.