Philadelphia pulls ads for HIV testing featuring young black men in crosshairs

By Marie McCullough
Philadelphia Inquirer
(August 7, 2006) While Philadelphia's mayor and police commissioner have been campaigning against surging gun violence, the city's department of public health has been fighting another scourge with both barrels.

In public service ads urging HIV testing, young African-American men are shown in the crosshairs of a gun with the tagline "Have You Been Hit?"

The $236,000 campaign - aimed at gay, bisexual and "down-low" men - ended abruptly Monday, a few days after the Black Gay Men's Leadership Council went public with concerns it has been raising since December.

"Putting the face of a Black man in the crosshairs of a gun paints a damaging message about violence and Black men. ... Given the violence perpetrated against gay men, it is not far-fetched to see how this campaign fosters violence," Lee Carson, chair of the year-old leadership council, wrote last month to interim Health Commissioner Carmen Paris.

Monday, Paris stressed that she "inherited" the campaign and only recently saw the ads. But she added, "The right thing to do, of course, is not to promote any message that could be perceived as promoting violence."

The campaign launched in late May with ads on city buses, television, postcards and a Web site, www.dontguess.org.

On Friday, the Web site featured ads and video clips of men in gunsights. Monday, they were gone.

Whether this was a result of planning or embarrassment is unclear. The kick-off press release said the campaign's developers would "promote the need for testing throughout the year," but Paris said the campaign was scheduled to end Aug. 3 - last Thursday.

That came as a surprise to UPN 57, one of the TV stations that has been running the ads. "There is no indication of a kill date on any material given to me," said Shelley Hoffmann, UPN's public affairs coordinator.

Even David Acosta, the city's coordinator of AIDS prevention programs, said he was told only Monday that the campaign he was overseeing had been "pulled as of August 3."

Philadelphia's seemingly intractable crisis of gun violence has gotten so bad - particularly in poor, predominantly minority neighborhoods - that Mayor John Street and regional leaders including Cardinal Justin Rigali held an unprecedented summit meeting at City Hall late last month. As of midnight Sunday, 238 people had been fatally shot, compared to 215 at the same time last year.

But HIV/AIDS hits the same neighborhoods. Originally the plague of young, middle-class, gay men, HIV/AIDS now predominantly afflicts the marginalized poor, especially African-Americans. Blacks account for more HIV and AIDS diagnoses and deaths than any other racial or ethnic group in Philadelphia and nationally.

The "Have You Been Hit" campaign illustrates the challenges of finding a catchy yet careful way of motivating them to find out if they have a potentially deadly sexually transmitted disease.

Zigzag Net Inc., the Philadelphia-based marketing company that developed the campaign, spent months setting up two focus groups to evaluate the most effective themes.

"We are aware of objections to the campaign," said Zigzag project manager Aaron McLean. "However, we acted under the explicit direction of the city health department. The response in the focus groups was very positive."

But while McLean said each group had "10 or 12" men who represented the types that resist testing, a letter from Gay Leadership Council member Kevin Trimell Jones to a city AIDS official suggests otherwise.

Jones, an AIDS researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, complained last December that the first focus group had only eight men and most didn't fit Zigzag's own recruitment criteria. Most had been tested for HIV recently and at least one worked with a local AIDS service organization.

Mark McLaurin, founder of the New York State Black Gay Network, said that to be effective, AIDS prevention campaigns must address underlying problems such as homophobia and substance abuse - and stop fear-mongering.

"I can't imagine the vetting process was well-grounded in this targeted community," he said of Philadelphia's ads. "Above and beyond the obvious issues of scapegoating and demonizing HIV positive people, for a campaign to simulate gun violence in a city that has been ravaged by gun violence, I'm almost speechless."


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