Jim,

Thanks for posting this. It's news that's full of promise (and obviously some serious risk as well). I'm remembering two lovely conversations with African church leaders in Africa, one an Anglican priest, the other a Roman Catholic nurse. Both had done a significant piece of their advanced training in U.S. or U.K. settings. What they learned in our setting made sense to them. They saw it was relevant to their setting, but both said that the North/South division around the place of LGBT people in the church wouldn't really begin to resolve itself until African voices, African witness, African scholarship and African research helped Africa see that LGBT people aren't just a Northern 'us' or aren't just "among us" in the North but in Africa too.

In much of Africa, AIDS is also a very, very significant part of the story of empowering women, both as evidence to the disempowerment of women and in suggesting a way forward against the disease that demands empowering women - in many countries the most at-risk population is married women who are faithful to their husbands. And I should specify here married *Christian* women. Often the AIDS infection rate is lower among Muslims where pre-missionary polygamy remains legally and socially intact. (That's an epidemiological observation; certainly there are Muslim women and men who are questioning whether polygamy is a legitimate structure as Islam finds its way to acknowledging full personhood of women).

The Victorian era evangelization of Africa burdened many African churches (certainly the Anglican churches in much of Africa) with a religious taboo against talking about sex except in relatively veiled exhortations to monogamous commitment. Old African words and ways of talking were judged dirty or part of the devil worship the missionaries were trying to suppress (another story that the healers and practitioners of black magic got lumped together in much missionary teaching).

In the countries hard hit by AIDS, literally anyone you meet will have lost an immediate family member - parent, sibling, or child - to AIDS. The pressure of the AIDS epidemic is breaking open the taboo against talking about sex and talking about sex in church. (Does this sound at all familiar to any of us?)

In Africa within the last ten years we've seen some of our Anglican bishops not only asking everyone to be tested, but standing in line at the clinic (public witness) to be tested themselves. Some of our bishops always begin their visitations (before any liturgy, literally as part of the greeting) with the bishop announcing that he's had his HIV test and that he wants everyone in the church to do the same, and then he reminds the congregation of ABC's. (More on ABC's below.)

Once Brazil and India cracked open American drug company's proprietary stranglehold on life-saving drugs HIV testing made very good pragmatic sense. Anti-retrovirals are now available enough in some African countries that everyone knows people whose lives have been saved, who, thanks to ARV's are continuing their work as teachers or nurses, who are raising their children to adulthood, who are contributing to church and society. When someone begins to lose weight, have colds and flu that they can't shake, have mysterious headache symptoms, good friends and neighbors WILL say, "get tested."

Evidence based strategies!
Researchers have done substantial research on African sexual practices, including the discovery that the average African has about the same number of sex partners in his or her lifetime as the average American. And researchers have learned that what's different is that Americans with multiple partners are likelier to have sequential relationships while an African man who has more than one partner (and obviously not everyone does), is likelier to sustain the same three or four relationships off and on over a lifetime. That looks to me like a Victorian legacy - the missionaries driving polygamy underground. From an epidemiological perspective 'open sexual networks,' the overlap of those ongoing three or four person relationship patterns with other like networks gives the AIDS virus its best access to a large population. The rate of infection goes up significantly with - - - repeated exposure to the same strain of the virus. The stable networks are actually more conducive to a new infection than many, many partnered promiscuity.

This significant piece of data helps us see why promoting ABC (Abstinence, be Faithful, or use a Condom) has been so much more successful reducing the infection rate than either religiously inspired AB ONLY campaigns and secular NGO condom promotion.

Evidence-based epidemiology makes good sense to Anglicans inspired and shaped by Richard Hooker. It's the good use of reason and experience with a Gospel-outcome -
'The truth will make you free.'

Clearly part of the truth has remained unspoken and taboo and therefore, typically beyond the reach of evidence gathering. Northern Anglicans know that'no gays in Africa' is big lie. As Africa awakes from the lie and moves painfully to freedom, we might remind ourselves that our towns and villages until recently had our own version of that lie. How many Americans a decade ago could say, 'I don't know any gay people?' How many now?

For the African story, my hunch is that at least part of that 'no gays here' taboo is an inheritance from Victorian missionaries. Whatever local cultural adaptation and incorporation of same sex behavior was present when the missionaries arrived got hidden from missionary eyes and then covered with a veneer of Victorian-defined respectability. The patriarchal version of Christianity that nurtured U.S. and British missionaries as well-equipped to pattern denial as long as a man publicly acted like a man (played the role of husband and father).

Epidemiology counts on real studies and real evidence. Peter Anaminyi reminds us that one huge gap in the evidence - patterns of same sex contact across the population - stymies and distorts our best efforts to address the disease. Africans are beginning to find ways to ask the questions that will produce the evidence. This stage of learning the truth is risky for researchers who ask and risky for respondents who tell.

Anglicans in the North too often have addressed the South from an enlightened stance as if we'd always somehow known what in fact, we've learned painfully over the past generation and a half.

How many young men in the first devastating years of our own AIDS epidemic only came out to family because they were dying? Why had so many young gay men moved to New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, Houston, L.A. etc.

Sometimes the truth that makes us free comes unsought. Sometimes 'righteousness' and maintaining the appearance of being upright by some standard foreign to experience and more moralistic than the Gospel is just another name for denial.

What I find so moving in this article is the courage of Africans asking the questions and beginning to speak the truth. Temember when that began to happen in the U.S. in the second half of the 1980's? The African church is just learning to say "Our church has AIDS." And for reasons that epidemiologists are beginning to make clear to us, the first evident data what broke their silence and stigmatization was different from what broke it for us. In Africa, telling the truth and gathering evidence began with heterosexual and mother-to-child transmission. Now Africans are beginning to say (and some risk of professional position and sometimes worse risks), "There's more to the story. We need to look truthfully at who we are. Our sisters and brothers, our mothers and fathers, our children are dying of AIDS. There are many ways the disease is spread. Some of our sisters, some of our brothers and mothers, some of our children are gay. That's always been true, but we've forgotten or pretended otherwise. Time has come to tell the truth. It will make us free."