In commemoration of World AIDS Day, Penn Visions and the Black Student League hosted an AIDS benefit yesterday, featuring a variety of local and national AIDS experts.
AIDS affects almost 40 million people worldwide and killed 3.1 million people last year alone. The World Health Organization estimates the AIDS epidemic could be wiped out with a U.S. commitment of $10 to $15 billion per year.
"It is something that affects every race, religion -- it's non-discriminatory," College senior and Penn Visions Co-President Claire Constantine said. "You can't assume, just because you're at an elite college, you are immune."
The first speaker of the night was Waheedah Shabazz-El, a peer educator who works for Project Treatment Education Activists Combating HIV, run by the AIDS service organization Philadelphia Fight.
"AIDS is a pandemic because it touches people all over the world," Shabazz-El said. "There are 794,000 people infected with HIV/AIDS in America, 20,000 in Philadelphia. I am one of those 20,000."
Shabazz-El spoke candidly and lucidly about the difficulties she faced when she discovered she had AIDS.
"I wanted to die," Shabazz-El said. It would have been easier than facing you all and telling you I have a disease there is no cure for."
The next speaker, Keith Boykin, served as special assistant to then-President Bill Clinton and was the highest-ranking openly gay official in the Clinton White House. Boykin began his lecture by asking how many people in the room knew someone diagnosed with AIDS; over half of the audience members raised their hands. Boykin noted that 99 percent of people are familiar with how AIDS is transmitted.
Boykin focused a lot of his lecture on the "down low" -- a term for men who are involved with women while they secretly sleep with men.
Boykin read passages from his upcoming book about the "down low" and debunked several myths about it and the men it involves.
"AIDS is not spread by an identity -- it is spread by a virus," Boykin said.
He noted that if people spoke "openly, honestly, without prejudice or jeering about sex," many false beliefs about how the virus is spread would be exposed.
"We all thought it was a gay disease," Shabazz-El said. "HIV is a people disease. It is a people problem."
College junior Arati Jasani wants students to look at the statistics.
"Youth are the most newly affected people," Jasani said. "We're the ones who grew up with knowledge of it, with education. Act on what you know. We think we're invincible, that it won't happen to us."
Jasani's sentiments echoed a sentence Boykin repeated several times throughout the evening.
"Knowing the right thing to do isn't necessarily doing it," Boykin said.
Fellow Philadelphia Fight member Kim Butler advised listeners to be careful.
"The only way to know for sure [if you have AIDS] is to take the test. Now it takes only 20 minutes, no blood required," Butler said.
About 60 students attended the benefit at the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Center, which included dinner sponsored by Marathon Grill.
