Carn will celebrate his 20th anniversary this year during the Black Gay Pride Celebration on Labor Day weekend in Atlanta. The organization will host a pool party honoring it’s 20 year history. “We want people to have a good time, but we also still want them to remember that HIV is still impacting our community dramatically, so we will have the Fulton County Department of Health and Wellness conducting on sight instant HIV testing,” Carn stated.
NAESM has changed greatly over the years. “One of the things that we have been seeing is that blacks continue to be more affected than any other population,” Carn says admitting that an even more pressing issue is that “the number keep going up.” His concerns are two fold. To receive funding, standard intervention models developed by the CDC must be employed to get support for his efforts. “We do have more intervention that has been approved by the CDC, but when you look at the whole continuum of interventions suggested by the CDC, there are still few for African Americans, especially African American gay men. “Interventions are tied to funding and it is mandatory that we use their interventions, so we can’t use any home grown interventions or interventions that we have seen or have used effectively in the past,” he adds.
Carn has worked across the board and notes that although he is “required to use” CDC models to collect state and now even private funding, some effectiveness has been obtained using CDC “supported intervention models.” Specifically the Many Men, Many Voices (3MV), which is a group-level intervention that addresses behavioral and social determinants influencing the HIV/STI risk and protective behaviors of black MSM. The intervention involves six consecutive two- to three-hour sessions delivered during a weekend retreat. He also notes moderate success has been obtained using the Defend Yourself (D-Up) empowerment intervention.
The problem is that these are “small scale” and Carn asserts that “what we need is a large community intervention that will work for black gay men.” He continues, “we need to change communities more, because we have not been getting the funding at the same level and the length of time as others. … we have not had the resources for a long enough time to make a [dent] in reducing HIV rates among gay black men.
In the past Carn has worked with inmates in concert with Dr. Earl Joiner in Fulton County prisons and several churches. Although Carn says that he tries to stay away from churches, he has worked collaboratively with Ebenezer Baptist Church, which he described as being “definite trail blazers in the area,” the National Black Leadership Commission on Aids, and his church Unity Fellowship Church. He has not worked with what he described as main stream churches like New Birth, but addes ” [It is] one of the things I have committed to do over the next year, because we have to get into the churches because that’s where the majority of us go.”
Carn also spoke of the tragic death of long time friend Durrand Robinson, who was gunned down in cold blood after he resisted an attempted robbery and died from a bullet wound to the chest. Speaking of Robinson, Carn spoke of his nature and of him being a nice, kind and pleasant human being. “His death will be a loss. He always helped people. We are going to do an annual award to honor his passing. He was just easy to get along with … [I] never had any confrontation with him, he got work done and he worked with us, it just doesn’t make any kind of sense.”
