Studying HIV Risk in Vulnerable Communities: Methodological and Reporting Shortcomings in the Young Men's Study in New York City

This article considers demographic categories used in the Young Men's Study on HIV risk for men who have sex with men. We critique oversimplified pan-ethnic categories and the polarization of US racial discourse. We also interrogate the use of certain gender and sexuality markers that produced confusing results in this study. We use a critical standpoint derived from cultural studies to suggest that quantitative and qualitative methods of studying health risks and intimate behaviors in vulnerable populations require reorganization to more accurately represent the lives of members of these groups. Interviews, surveys, and statistics can be crude and lacking in practical information. Finally, we address media and governmental response to the Young Men's Study, and the continued need for organizing across minoritized communities. Key Words: Young Men's Study, People of Color, Pan-Ethnicity, Youth, Sexuality, HIV Risk, and Men who have Sex with Men Introduction The social categories "Black," "White," "Latino" and "Asian" are sites continually contested and reinforced in North America, but they serve to delineate the racial landscape of most cities in the northeastern United States. (1) These terms indicate broad, pan-ethnic racial groupings, and pan-ethnic alliances allow for multiple nationally-defined (although, increasingly, internationally mobile) communities to be drawn together, often constructed as homogeneous. This reclassification is simultaneously an act of external collapsing and an opportunity for internal coalition building. It also generates tension among the various groupings, as their most visible identifications primarily determine and enforce boundaries. (So does she look Asian or does he dance like a Latino?). These boundaries can in turn obfuscate the various functions of "People of Color" (POC) organizing. As well, "Whiteness," as a category of analysis posited as independent of the complexity of pan-ethnic alliances, remains central to any racial discourse even as it also remains dangerously under-examined. While Whiteness is actually as complex as any other pan-ethnic category, its contents are often articulated as homogeneous, thus concretizing Whiteness as an oppositional concept. Terms such as POC become especially problematized when non-Whiteness and Whiteness are polarized, as if they were natural groupings, emerging with similar histories, out of similar grounds. In the last few years, we have seen economic and political factors breaking down barriers between certain racial groups and "Whiteness," even while they make the new and privileged status of those groups more tenuous than ever. For Arab Americans, for example, their identity as people of color gradually (and unevenly) slipped away through most of the 1990s and, then, radically swung back into place after September 11th, 2001 (Ahmad, 2002). We speak to the ambivalence of these pan-ethnic categories: For example, how one can be Latino in terms of US racial constructs, but often read as White on the basis of skin color (Vidal-Ortiz, 2004), or how someone can be racially categorized as Asian, but achieve a "White" status in terms of professional-economic class. How are these people, these scenarios, situated in terms of POC classifications and alliances? We consider this study of HIV risk because, as Paula Treichler (1999) and others have said, AIDS is an "epidemic of signification," and because it allows us to think about flows of information and the fluidity of categories, racial, national, gender, and sexual, particularly with respect to research and policy decisions. We focus on the Young Men's Study (YMS) conducted in New York City, as well as our own research/organizing experience, to illustrate our argument. Having worked with communities of color and queer (2) organizations in New York, as community organizers, social workers, and sociological researchers, the authors of this paper have frequently observed how HIV/AIDS is deployed to define communal categories (see, for instance, Mukherjea, 2004). …