As Kansas City’s HIV infection rate rivals Africa’s, some black ministers admit that silence equals death

"I had no idea about HIV/AIDS until probably about the mid-'90s," Prim says. "What I learned then was that it was a disease for gay, white males."

He decided it was God's punishment for sinners.

"I stood at the pulpit, and I preached that scripture presented certain lifestyles as sins and that we were the recipients of HIV/AIDS because of the sins we were committing," he says. "I was a great trumpeter in that cause."

Things went well for Prim's church. As he stayed, the membership grew.

Soon, though, Prim noticed a disturbing new trend. More and more young men were dying, each with the cause of death listed as "respiratory disorder." Their families kept quiet about the deaths, but when they asked Prim to minister to the dying, it was never much of a secret that the respiratory problems were the result of an HIV infection. He knew many people whose relatives died alone, ashamed of their diagnosis.

In the late 1990s, Prim got a call from an older church member who asked him to come to St. Luke's hospital.

There, in a hospital bed, Prim found a man in his mid-20s. He'd lived in New York City until a few weeks earlier, when he came home to Kansas City to die. In New York, he'd worked as an accountant during the day and pursued a career as a dancer in his off hours. Communication was difficult because his body had wasted away. When he did speak, he didn't talk about his illness, but he made it clear he was ready for the end.

"I remember the family in agony of not being able to tell the real reason or the cause of the sickness, or whispering very quietly so as not to disclose the information," Prim says. "He'd seemingly had a very successful, short life. He'd had a lot of accomplishments. But I don't think even at this point I was examining my thoughts on this. I was probably thinking to myself, You got this disease because of your lifestyle."

People who are keeping track of Kansas City's HIV infection rate are alarmed at how much it has risen over the past five years. It's been growing so quickly that it rivals the most heavily infected regions in the world.

In fact, the rate of new infections per capita in Jackson County over a four-year period rivaled that of sub-Saharan Africa, says Paul Showalter, the Good Samaritan Project's director of development.

"The HIV infection data I saw showed cases climbing so much from 2002 to 2006," Showalter says. The Kansas City, Missouri, Health Department reported a total of 798 new cases in Jackson County during those years, with an average annual increase of 14.25 percent. If that rate continues, the number of HIV cases in the county will double every five years.

More than two-thirds of those newly infected with HIV are minorities.

Outside of churches, Robinson does most of his HIV awareness work through the Good Samaritan Project, where he works as a community prevention specialist, giving talks in schools and anywhere else where people have questions about HIV.

Most of the people who seek help from Good Samaritan are gay men, who come to the organization for services such as mental-health counseling, case management, transportation and back-to-work support. But staffers there also see prostitutes, heterosexual women and children.

Showalter mentions the case of a 15-year-old boy who got tested as a joke while tagging along with his cousin for a checkup at their closest health-department clinic. He was too scared to tell his family that his results had come back positive. But a day after Robinson spoke at his school, the boy contacted the project and asked for Robinson. Showalter says the people at the Good Samaritan Project are still the only ones who know the kid tested positive.

"There are a bunch of little dudes out there that are actually my sons," Robinson says of the young men he has come to know through the project. "There are parents that accepted me as a role model, and it was cool. And I keep in touch with them, and they know if they need to talk they can always come to me. I'm a family man. I love my family."

But Robinson knows that for every kid who comes to the GSP for help, there's another who's keeping his diagnosis to himself.

And when Robinson preaches about his own experience with AIDS in Kansas City's black churches, it's an effort to reach people who are at higher risk for infection but have been unable to talk about it because of longstanding prejudices, some of which were advanced by their own ministers.

While Prim was building his church, Robinson was in prison, doing seven and a half years of a 15-year sentence. Robinson won't discuss the crime he committed except to say it was a Class A felony. "A lot of other people mixed up in that," he says. "I can't talk about it." He was released in March 1992 and completed his parole in June 1996.

In a way, he felt safe in prison. He never heard the word AIDS until after he was locked up. Along with gangbanging and crack cocaine, it was one of those mid-'80s issues taking up the first few minutes of the nightly news while he spent time in a cell.