Beyond The DL

 

Trauma also had an impact on Linda Hamptlon, 64, a Harlem native who was diagnosed in 1998 after spending more than 40 years battling a range of addictions to alcohol, crack, cocaine, PCP, and later—men. “I started out drinking… after being sexually abused at the age of 10,” says Hamptlon.

 

When she became an adult, saying no to sex was something Hamptlon had trouble doing because she could not say no to drugs and alcohol. “I had to use,” said Hamptlon about her life as an addict in the infamous Kenmore Hotel, now called Kenmore Hall, located near New York’s Gramercy Park.

 

“There was 22 floors in that hotel, and I ran through all those floors,” Hamptlon said of the sexual encounters she had, sometimes with intravenous drug users, in the red brick building she called home. “I would knock on their doors and present myself and see if they had any money, drinks, or drugs, and I would give myself to them for those things,” recalls Hamptlon of one theory she has about how she became infected with HIV.

 

Authorities came in 1997 to arrest Hamptlon for solicitation, only they came on the day of her sister’s funeral. “You can’t arrest me today, my sister passed and I have to be with her,” she recalls pleading to officers. When her begging fell on deaf ears, she found herself appealing to a higher power. In a cold cell at Central Booking, she got down on her knees and asked God “to take the taste of alcohol and drugs out [of ] my mouth.”

 

Soon after, Hamptlon, who is the seventh of 10 children, mustered the courage to detox for five days in the Cornerstone of Medical Arts Center in New York. She then spent six months in the Realization Center outpatient clinic near Union Square in NYC. “It was God and the people He put in my path,” she says of the therapist, psychiatrist, and the women’s groups she frequented.

 

It seemed that Hamptlon’s prayers had been answered, until she fell in love. “I ain’t using alcohol and drugs, but I want to use somebody,” Hamptlon remembers of the man who was 10 years her junior, who would arrive to her apartment often with flowers, teddy bears, and cards.

 

He was also carrying something else.

“I wasn’t feeling right,” Hamptlon said about her health shortly after her affair. She tested positive for HIV. “I want to tell you something,” she started to tell her partner with a Realization supervisor in the room, “I tested HIV positive today.” Her partner kept his composure until they went home together that night. “He was so angry he beat me and threw me in the bathtub saying I messed up his life,” she says. Although Hamptlon acknowledges that condom use could have prevented transmission, one thing was clear to her about her boyfriend. “He was trying to kill me,” she said. After he left, she went downstairs and told the security guard he was no longer allowed to come and visit her.

 

Three months later, her ex-boyfriend wrote her a letter saying he was sorry. He had the virus all along.

 
In response to trauma, Dr. Wyatt has designed Healing Our Women, an intervention developed for black and Latina women. For 11 weeks, women are encouraged to talk about their experiences and identify the most terrifying aspects of their trauma. Instead of engaging in a risky behavior to cope, the women learn new skills to handle their experiences; how their abuse has affected their decisionmaking; and how to reduce their sexual risk-taking behavior, havingunprotected sex with an uncommitted partner.Surveys between 2008 and 2010 by the University of Chicago give further insight into concurrency. Considering those who have been married, 37 percent of African-American men admitted to having affairs, compared to 19 percent of white men; 17 percent of African-American women admitted to having affairs, compared to 11 percent of white women.

“Concurrency in the black community is attributed to the fact that there are more black women than men, and the mass incarceration of black men,” explains Phill Wilson, CEO of Black AIDS Institute (BAI). “And part is due to black men being more vulnerable to young death.”

Wilson, whose institute leads the only national social marketing campaign targeting the black community in 40 markets across the country, also points out challenges in disclosure. “Many black men do not have the experience of sharing their feelings—physical or emotional. Because they do not have the practice of doing this, one’s HIV status or high-risk behaviors become an additional area that is difficult to discuss.”

Having disclosed and undisclosed affairs com-bined with the interconnected nature of sexual networks contribute to “population dissemina-tion of HIV,” according to a report by American Journal of Public Health. The report also shows that in the past year, 15 percent of black women had a male partner who they knew had more than one partner, almost twice the rate of white women and two and a half times greater than Latinas. These rates are much lower than admitted “affairs,” presumably done in secret.

The numbers tell some of the story, but the consequences of concurrency are best understood by the toll it has taken on women’s lives.

“I thought I found love,” says Monique Howell-Moree, an Oklahoma native and Army veteran. “I had two kids prior to him marrying me. It was just like, this is the one.”

Less than a year into their marriage, Howell-Moree became pregnant with her third child. When the doctor called with news that her HIV test came back positive, Howell-Moree was in disbelief. “You have the wrong person, it’s not me. I am a wife, this man loves me and my children,” she recalls saying.

“Three months into my diagnosis another female calls me and tells me that she had an affair with him the whole time of our marriage… That she, too, was infected with HIV,” said Howell-Moree, who never knew of her husband’s affairs. “There was so much going on in my mind: confused, disgusted, heartbroken,” Howell-Moree says. “We ended up divorcing eventually.”

Dázon Dixon Diallo, CEO of SisterLove, an Atlanta-based HIV/AIDS organization focusing on women of African descent, believes that when concurrency involves a lack of honest communication between intimate partners, this drives the HIV epidemic.

Hamptlon, who is known by her peers as “Nana,” is also the proud convener of the Narcotics Anonymous program held weekly at the organization. “I remember times when I was in the hotel… I never had to leave out of the hotel because they had all the drugs that I needed,” Hamptlon says. “Now I have all the love that I need.”