by Kevin Griffin
Darrell Oakford hadn't been able to contact his friend Tom for three weeks.
Then, one day, he got a return call from Tom. In the advanced stages of AIDS, Tom had been in the hospital with lymphatic cancer. Oakford picked him up in his old Pontiac. As they drove around town, Oakford, 46, noticed how frail his friend looked. He weighed only 40 kilograms (90 pounds).
"He asked me: `I don't look very good, do I?'
" 'No, you don't,' I said. That's all I could say to him," Oakford said in an interview. Two days later Tom was dead.
It was Oakford's third close friend to die from AIDS. In the past decade, Oakford estimates that at least a dozen people in his constellation of friends have died from acquired immune deficiency syndrome.
The story is familiar to many gay men in their 30s and 40s. Many, like Oakford, have nursed friends to the bitter end, cleaning bed pans and dropping off food packages. Others watch friends commit suicide before the physical decline sets in.
When the pain of lost friends gets too intense, Oakford closes the door of his West End apartment overlooking English Bay and meditates.
"You never ever really get over the deaths of your friends," he said, "but life is for the living - one must continue on."
In the past 12 years, AIDS has taken its toll on the gay community. Since 1983, there have been 1,969 cases of AIDS in BC; 1,711 or 87 per cent have been in gay men. Of all the people with AIDS, 1,502 have died. Provincial health officials estimate that about 7,500 people in BC have been infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) which is believed to lead to AIDS. About 5,000 are still alive.
Across North America, the gay male community has responded to the health crisis by practicing safer sex and forming a network of community and self-help groups. Although gay men constitute the bulk of people with AIDS and HIV infection, the number testing positive for HIV has recently been outstripped by intravenous drug users.
The trend is different for young gay men.
Studies in New York and San Francisco suggest that the level of infection in gays in their teens and early 20s is increasing and may be comparable to that in the gay male population in the early 1980s. Although information from the U.S. suggests there may be several reasons for this, one factor could be scatter-gun AIDS education campaigns that don't target groups most at risk such as young gay men.
It is unclear whether the same phenomenon is happening in Vancouver.
The Vanguard Project was launched in May by the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS to find out. The goal of the project is to discover the rate of HIV infection among 1,000 men who have sex with men and are between the ages of 18 and 30.
Steve Martindale, project coordinator, said the Vanguard Project is a follow-up to the Vancouver Lymphadenopathy-AIDS study started in 1982. The survivors of that study are in their 30s and 40s and not in the younger age groups.
"We have anecdotal information that younger gay men and bisexuals are at greater risk but we don't know for certain," he said.
The study, which has attracted about 100 men so far, is also looking at risk factors such as educational level and life experience. The study is trying to determine whether childhood sexual abuse is associated with higher HIV infection.
Call 687-2469 to contact the Vanguard Project. For information about AIDS contact the Pacific AIDS Resource Centre at 681-2122. Through that number you can reach AIDS Vancouver, the BC Persons with AIDS Society, Positive Women's Network, and several other community outreach groups. Multilingual help is available in Spanish, Cantonese and Mandarin.
For more information, contact:
Bonnie Devlin
Vanguard Project Coordinator
608 - 1081 Burrard Street
Vancouver, BC, Canada, V6Z 1Y6
Tel: (604)806-8306
Fax: (604)806-9044