Harper: It's Crippling Our Community

Hill Harper (CSI: NewYork's Dr Sheldon Hawkes) is doing his part to educate the African-American community about the dangers of HIV/AIDS.

"I know all the data about how it's crippling our community," Harper told SF Gate. "And it has to be stopped." The 41-year-old actor said that, as "an entertainer, I have an opportunity to lend a voice." He contributed an essay to the book Not in My Family: AIDS in the African-American Community in which he discussed the reluctance to openly discuss sexuality. In the essay, Harper said that "[t]here still seems to be a stigma and so much homophobia in the African American community." He also explained that AIDS "was once considered a 'gay disease'; therefore many were fearful of having that label applied to them and, as such, avoided being tested. There is still a wide gap between truth and perception."

During his career, Harper has tried to close that gap and provide information about HIV/AIDS. In The Visit, he received praise from critics for his portrayal of a man in jail who was dying of AIDS. "I met so many people who had full-blown AIDS and were incarcerated," he said. When he was a grad student at Harvard, Harper saw a lot of paranoia surrounding the disease. "I was working on a project that helped people who were getting evicted from their apartments when the landlords found out that they had AIDS," he said. "I learned about the discrimination side of the disease before I actually learned about the disease itself."

Harper called on African-American political and social leaders to do more to combat the disease. In his essay for Not in My Family, he pointed out that "[t]here are some church and religious leaders who are also guilty of falsely identifying AIDS as the 'gay disease.'" Harper went on to name the Reverend Jesse Jackson and said that he is "widely respected as a leader, but he and other charismatic leaders like him don't get out in front of this issue enough."

The original article is from SFGate.com.

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