Columnist addresses AIDS

To help bring AIDS issues to students, graduate student Mark A. Price read reader responses to his IDS HIV Live column to about 50 people Monday at "Another Year of AIDS: Conversation with Mark Price" in the Collins Center Coffee House.\nThe program was sponsored by Health and Wellness Education of the Health Center. Kathryn Brown, health educator, said it is the second year Price has done the presentation, and he is effective for AIDS Awareness Week/Safe Love 2001 because he brings realism to his talks. \n"Here he is, a student on this campus, willing to share his thoughts about the whole situation," Brown said. "We particularly chose the Collins Coffee House because it is a small, intimate setting."\nBrown said she was glad he brought in samples of his columns because some people might not be familiar with them.\n"He's a good public speaker because he can talk about his personal life, his philosophy; he can do whatever he wants," she said.\nThe reader response letters covered a wide range of topics. \nOne woman who wrote to Price said she didn't have the courage to apply to the masters program in information science, but after reading Price's column about living with AIDS, she applied and was enrolled in her first semester. Another woman wrote that she sent his column to her freshman daughter at IU and advised her to read it.\nHe sees his job as a columnist not as talking to students about condoms all the time, but as talking about how HIV enters one's life. \n"And I don't mean your life just as in your body. I mean how your attitudes play out towards sex -- how people act towards you if you admit to being a sexual person; how people judge you if you admit that you had unprotected sex," Price said. "These are all consequences of what HIV has done to public discussion of sex in the United States."\nPrice said times have changed such that the ultimate cultural marker of irresponsibility is first, being infected with HIV, and second, spreading it to others. He said it is becoming common that the "ultimate red flag" is to say they are HIV-infected and would deliberately infect other people because they don't care, he said.\nIn his job as an HIV test counselor at Positive Link, a woman revealed she had sex with someone who she later found out was HIV positive. After an investigation, it was found she knew the person was infected with HIV. \nSomething went wrong in their relationship, and she decided she would raise the red flag on him, Price said. \n"We are in a culture that really has ideas about who's a good person and who's a bad person," Price said, adding that many people think he is a bad person because he acquired AIDS through unprotected gay sex. \nWhile disagreeing that what he did was immoral, Price said he thinks he was "dumb" because he didn't heed the warnings.\n"In 1981, when I was 21 and people started dying, I didn't even understand it was personal to me and didn't understand that it was ever going to be part of my life," Price said. \nIt became a part of his life when his first partner, Ken, died of AIDS in 1988. \nIf people become infected today, a lot of people will ask them how it was possible with everything known about HIV and AIDS, he said. \n"The fact is it does happen. It happens because you have a lapse. It happens because you got drunk. It happens because you were stoned," Price said. "It just happens sometimes because you just didn't care. But none of those things mean you are a bad person or that you have deserved what has happened to you."\nHe writes about attitude rather than condoms, he said, because he is tired of talking about intercourse. \n"The basic facts are out there. If you want to find them, they're easy," he said. The idea of safer sex goes much deeper than HIV statistics, he said.\n"When I came into the experience of actually being diagnosed with AIDS, I understood, probably because of my parents most of all, that the one thing that would save me was if I believed in myself," Price said.