‘It’s Just Too Painful To Watch Them Die’ Aids Rate Soars Among Seattle Teenage Boys
Teenage boys are being infected with the deadly AIDS virus by men who pick them up at bars, in parks and on the streets of the city’s gay district.
“These beautiful, beautiful young people, and it’s just too painful to watch them die,” said Dick Gunderson, longtime director of an addiction-recovery agency whose office overlooks Broadway, the district’s main street.
“Too many, too soon,” he said with a sigh.
On Broadway, young adventurers from this city and its suburbs and from communities across the country are drawn to a magnetic street scene that mixes drugs, music and sexual intrigue.
Men looking for young partners can link up easily with teenagers willing to exchange sex for love or money.
And the money’s good, an AIDS researcher said. Customers pay $100 to $150 for anal sex without a condom - the sexual practice considered to carry the highest risk for AIDS transmission. About one in five gay men in Seattle carries the AIDS virus, health officials estimate, though symptoms may not be visible.
A boy infected with HIV the human immunodeficiency virus - in his teens can expect to be diagnosed with full-blown AIDS in his 20s.
“The kids are dying,” Arlis Stewart of the American Friends Service Committee’s Pacific Northwest regional office told The Associated Press.
The former director of a gay and lesbian youth program for the AFSC, Stewart has heard many stories of young boys just becoming aware of their homosexuality and vulnerable to advances from older men.
The death last year of a talented 21-year-old theater director - a young man who went “looking for love and found sex and AIDS” prompted her to speak out on this highly sensitive topic.
Many would not.
An Associated Press analysis of Seattle-King County Health Department records from 1982 to June 1996 shows at least 399 boys and men between ages 13 and 29 have died after being diagnosed with AIDS linked to male-to-male sex.
Because the disease takes a median eight to 10 years to develop, that means many of those AIDS victims were infected as teenagers, said department epidemiologist Hanne Thiede.
How many are infected now? Nobody knows for sure, because state law does not require health agencies or practitioners to report HIV cases.
At the University of Washington’s Department of Pediatrics, Dr. James Farrow, director of the Division of Adolescent Medicine, figures at least 20 teenage boys ages 16 through 19 are infected with HIV each year in King County - a majority through male-to-male sexual activity and some through intravenous drug abuse.
Nationally, a recent study showed 7 percent of homosexual and bisexual men ages 15 to 22 are infected with HIV, said Dr. Linda Valleroy of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
In Seattle, Stewart co-founded the Lambert House drop-in center five blocks off Broadway partly to provide a safe place for young gay people to socialize. But many more teenagers know about covert sex at Volunteer Park, a mile away.
“You take a frightened, scared kid in Puyallup, for example, who … hears there are gay people on Capitol Hill. He goes and hangs out in a park or bar until somebody picks him up for a one-night stand,” she said.
“There are way too many kids who are getting infected this way.”
Dr. Bob Wood, AIDS-control director at the city-county health department, would confirm only that with sexually transmitted diseases in general, “young folks get it from older folks.”
Teenagers examined at clinics for street people routinely report sexual activity with men about 10 years older, Farrow said.
“We kind of know when they’re getting it, and only now are we figuring out why,” he said.
On the streets, gay, lesbian and bisexual youth mingle with the heterosexual runaways, sharing a desperate need for money to buy shelter or drugs.
Drive-by sex customers from all walks of life sample the pickup market in vulnerable young boys. In the alley behind a popular all-night gay dance bar, homeless teens and others wait against a wall for customers.
“The guys come out, if they haven’t found anybody (inside), and they pay,” said Alex Cleghorn, who leads the Q-Safety Patrol that monitors the street scene to stop violence.
Rates are highest - in the $100-$150 range - for unprotected anal sex, said M’Bwende Anderson, an outreach specialist for the Northwest AIDS Foundation.
Rates for other sexual activities are generally also higher when condoms are not used, she added, noting that two male prostitutes told her even mentioning condoms reduced their desirability.
Why would teens risk getting AIDS?
Most think it won’t happen to them, Anderson said - or they figure life is so bad that it makes no difference. Some wrongly believe partners who look clean are not infected, or expect science will find a cure for AIDS.
“But it always came back to the money,” Anderson said.
A 21-year-old gay man, who did not want his name used, told the AP that simple promiscuity also helps spread the deadly virus.
Some men avoid HIV testing so they cannot be held responsible, he said. Others who are HIV-positive “are very responsible and they will tell you right up front.”
“Then there are people who are positive and are so bitter and so angry that they are HIV-positive that they are going out and infecting people,” he said.
xxxx TEENS AND AIDS Here are some facts on teenagers and the AIDS virus: An estimated 25 percent of new HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) infections in the United States occur among young people ages 13 to 21, who are contracting the AIDS virus at a rate of more than one per hour, said a March report by the White House Office of AIDS Policy. Seven of every 100 gay and bisexual males ages 15 to 22 in the United States are infected with HIV, according to a study by epidemiologist Linda Valleroy at the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By comparison, the infection rate among young people applying for the Job Corps is two per 1,000. A San Francisco study, based on a survey of men interviewed at gay meeting places, found 9.4 percent of 425 gay and bisexual men ages 17 to 22 were infected with HIV, and more than two-thirds of them did not know they were HIV positive. The study, led by the San Francisco Department of Public Health, was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1994. By December 1994, a total of 14,082 U.S. males between ages 13 and 25 had been diagnosed with AIDS from unprotected sex with other men, the CDC said, representing about 3 percent of the 484,940 cases reported at that time. Almost 52 percent of those cases involved men infected through sex with other men. In King County, at least 81 percent of male AIDS patients reported through June 1996 were infected by male-to-male sex. An additional 11 percent reported two behaviors considered to increase the risk of AIDS intravenous drug abuse and gay sex activity. By June, 4,861 AIDS cases had been reported in King County - 4,678 men and 183 women. Associated Press