AIDS Awareness Week to celebrate relationships

This year, AIDS Awareness Week will be celebrated with loving relationships in mind.\nAIDS Awareness Week/Safe Love 2001, which began Saturday and runs through Friday, will be celebrated on campus with events to include all students, not only those who have been touched by AIDS. This is the first year AIDS Awareness Week has included the additional focus on relationships and the concept of safe love.\nHealth educator Kathryn Brown said AIDS Awareness Week is more inclusive and educational by adding relationships and safe love in the programs. Brown said she hopes the additional focus will raise participation in the week's activities.\n"Most everyone is going to be involved in some kind of relationship," Brown said. "It's a way to keep the focus on a very important health issue. We're trying to broaden it." \nHealth and Wellness Education director Anne Reese said adding Safe Love 2001 to AIDS Awareness Week is a step toward more student involvement. \n"It's positive," Reese said. "Everybody wants to be part of a relationship that includes love." \nMany campus groups, including OUT, ALLY and the IU Student Association, are sponsoring different campus events. OUT and ALLY co-sponsored Collins' PDA dance Saturday.\n"It just kind of works in Collins," OUT President and senior Jason Jones said before the dance. "People are more relaxed about it."\nBrown said unity among campus groups is encouraging.\n"It's really nice the way all of these groups come together each year," Brown said. "It just keeps growing and growing. We are always trying to reach out to other campus groups." \nJones stressed the week's events are for everyone.\n"There's a problem with the idea that if you attach the word AIDS to an event, it means it's gay," Jones said. "People think AIDS is a gay thing, when in reality, AIDS is growing in the heterosexual community."\nIDS "HIV Live" columnist Mark Price, a graduate student, will play host to a conversation at the Collins Coffee House tonight. Price has given presentations during AIDS Awareness Week on campus the last two years. About 50 people came last year to listen to Price talk about living with HIV.\n"This is information that anybody can use," Brown said. "(Price) emphasizes the need to understand what people are going through. It should include everyone, whether you know someone with AIDS or not."\nBrown and Price will hold a free safer sex program 4 p.m. Thursday in the Indiana Memorial Union's State Room East.\n"We'll deal with basic relationship kinds of issues," Brown said. \nBrown and Price will talk about testing, sexually transmitted diseases and HIV. For Safe Love 2001, condoms and information on safer sex will be available all week on campus and at the IMU Commons Information Desk. \nSteve Schalchlin, a musician who performs across the country, will express his experiences with HIV and AIDS at his free concert Tuesday, "Living in the Bonus Round." The concert is at 7:30 p.m. in the Whittenberger Auditorium.\nIn Schalchlin's online diary, he writes, "I call this the Bonus Round because I shouldn't even be alive." Schalchlin survived a bout with an AIDS-related illness in 1996 with help from the drug Crixivan. He has won awards for songs in a previous musical and has been featured in the New York Times and People magazine. \n"You will be mightily entertained," Brown said of Schalchlin's performance. She likened his style to rock legend Elton John's. "To me, there's absolutely no way anyone could be excluded from this."\nPositive Link, one of 17 care coordination sites in Indiana, will visit campus Friday to give free, anonymous HIV testing and counseling in the IMU's Georgian Room. Care Coordinator Tammy Dutkowski said Positive Link expects a large turnout.\n"We're usually jam-packed when we're over there," Dutkowski said. "It's not uncommon for us to do 150 to 200 tests. We anticipate having a pretty large crowd on past experiences."\nDutkowski said testing will be done with an Orasure Testing Device. The device is placed in the mouth and eliminates the need for blood tests to detect HIV antibodies, although blood testing is also an option. The test results will be in after two weeks. \nIf someone is found to have HIV, "we talk with them and find out what's going on," Dutkowski said. "We make sure they have a support system."\nBrown said she hopes students are more compassionate and educated after the week.\n"The majority on a typical college campus will say, 'This has nothing to do with me,'" Brown said. "But we're all interconnected"