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MIAMI: she says.

New Jersey Online - http://www.nj.com
02.14.02

One Sunday, while riding a bike past Mount Tabor as members left after morning services, she tottered and fell. Rev. McRae and others helped her up, gave her a hot meal and persuaded her to enter a treatment program the following day. When no one came for her on Monday, she resumed her search for crack, she says. But Tuesday morning, Rev. McRae pulled up in his car at the abandoned house where she was camping. He drove her to a treatment program for addicted mothers, where she began a recovery that continues eight years later.

She tested positive for HIV, but by taking the drug AZT was able to avoid passing the virus on to her baby. She and her five children now receive counseling through Movers. Confident in her fashionable wire-rimmed glasses, Ms. DeShazior is working toward an associate's degree in education at a community college. She also works as a paid counselor at a substance-abuse program and gives talks to prostitutes, encouraging them to use condoms. So far, her immune system has remained strong, so she hasn't had to begin taking the complicated "cocktail" of anti-retroviral drugs used to prevent full-blown AIDS.

While much of the Mount Tabor congregation has cautiously embraced drug addicts who contract HIV, the church hasn't directly addressed the prevalence of AIDS among male homosexuals. Rev. McRae and his allies maintain that drug abuse, not gay sex practices, is the main root of Liberty City's HIV problem. Movers, the nonprofit spinoff from the church, collaborates with another Miami organization that serves gay men. But Ms. Kelly, who heads Movers, says many male drug addicts have unsafe sex with other men not necessarily because they are gay, but because it is "economically feasible for them to have sex with men for money. They're doing what they need to do to get their drugs."

This perspective plays down the link between the sexual behavior of some gay men and transmission of HIV. Rev. McRae says addressing homosexuality in the black church is difficult. "Homosexuality, in the African-American community, is an unforgivable sin," he says. "It's something deeper than the church's stance on it."

Some white churches interpret the Bible as condemning homosexuality, as Rev. McRae does. But the issue is more complicated in African-American churches because it touches on the culturally fraught topics of black sexuality and masculinity. "Once you admit you're gay," says Rev. McRae, "it puts a question mark behind your manhood. It's like, he's not sure he's a man, or not sure he wants to be a man."

Despite such attitudes, it is common even for socially conservative black churches to tolerate gays in certain leadership roles -- such as coordinating music -- as long as they don't advertise their sexual orientation. Mount Tabor's late music minister was revered even though he was assumed by many in the congregation to be gay. When he fell sick in 1990, no one pressed him for details. His death that year was publicly attributed to cancer, although some church members today whisper that he died of AIDS -- a belief that some of his relatives deny.

Although he has never identified the music minister publicly as gay or as having AIDS, Rev. McRae says the popular minister's death presented an opportunity. In the months after he died, the clergyman invited church members to attend training sessions about AIDS and to accompany him to Jackson Memorial Hospital to visit patients. The unspoken message: This was a way to honor the minister's memory.

In response, members such as Marguerite McKain began volunteering. She concedes that it frightened her at first to don protective clothing before seeing AIDS patients at the Hospital. But, she says, "We learned that when we wore face masks while visiting patients, it was to protect them from our germs, not the other way around." Today, about 15 church members continue visiting AIDS patients, separately from the more formal clinical and social services provided by Movers.

There is broader evidence of progress. Last spring, 10,000 black churches participated in a "week of prayer" against AIDS organized by the Balm in Gilead, a New York-based nonprofit group working to mobilize black clergy against the disease. About 350 African-Americans, many of them pastors, gathered last year at a separate training institute the group put on in Tuskegee, Ala., to discuss expanding church involvement.

But Rev. McRae and Mount Tabor remain the exceptions, rather than the rule. In the fall of 2000, he fielded a request for help from a minority AIDS-outreach task force in Key West. The southern tip of the state has at least eight black churches, but their pastors had hesitated to address AIDS, says Charles Martin, executive director of the task force. "I was told by one church, 'This isn't our fight,"' he recalls.

When Mr. Martin met Rev. McRae at a conference and vented his frustration, the pastor offered to talk to the ministers. In December 2000, Mr. Martin invited nine ministers to a lunch meeting with Rev. McRae. But when Mount Tabor's pastor made the four-hour drive from Miami, just one minister showed up.

Unwilling to concede defeat, Rev. McRae proposed an old-fashioned tent revival in Key West. Over the course of three nights last April, he and others delivered sermons and disseminated information about HIV testing. But Rev. McRae was disappointed when only three local black ministers attended. "There was an apathetic spirit you could just about reach out and grab," he recalls. Generally, he says, "if the pastor doesn't want to do it, it's not going to happen."

Copyright 2002 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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