AIDS.

It’s stunning, really, that so many years into this epidemic—a medical condition caused by a virus—that there’s still a stigma attached to AIDS that keeps us from talking openly and honestly about it and prevents us from doing the things we need to do to limit its spread.

In fact, we talk about AIDS even less in the gay community than we did 15 years ago, despite the fact that more than half of all new HIV infections in Illinois involve gay men, many of them—an alarmingly high percentage, in fact—under the age of 30.

Statistics don’t lie. The notion that AIDS has moved on and somehow doesn’t impact many gays anymore couldn’t be farther from the truth. Another notion—that AIDS is an “old gay man’s disease,” one that you can’t get if you only have sex with younger guys, is also just plain wrong and very stupid.

And yet when’s the last time anybody on Halsted Street or Clark Street asked if you’ve been tested lately? When’s the last time anyone offered you a condom pack and information about AIDS in a gay bar? When’s the last time someone asked you about HIV before jumping in bed with you? When’s the last time you asked?

We need to quit not talking about AIDS in the gay community. We need to quit being scared that raising awareness about AIDS in our bars and clubs will “spoil the fun” of going out.

We need to revive another tradition, too. In the “gay” debate involving the Democratic presidential candidates in August, not one question was about AIDS. How can that be? Thousands of gay men in this country are still getting sick every year from a disease that may be more survivable but still isn’t curable. And while it’s more manageable than it used to be, it still costs thousands and thousands of dollars to treat with medicines that carry major side effects.

Again, how is it possible that a debate on gay community issues took place without anyone even mentioning AIDS?

That needs to change. So far two candidates—John Edwards and Barack Obama—have issued comprehensive plans on AIDS. Both, to their credit, have said that our HIV/AIDS policies need to be based on science, not ideology. Only Edwards has specifically mentioned the involvement of the gay community in that effort.

We should make it our business to hear more about AIDS from every presidential candidate, Democrat and Republican. We should ask them specific questions about what their administrations would do to lower HIV infection rates among gay and bisexual men. We should ask them how they would further target those efforts in the black and Spanish-speaking gay communities. We should ask them how they envision removing the stigma from AIDS once and for all.

We can continue to be quiet about this disease. But more than 20 years ago, AIDS activists in our community came up with a simple, brutally honest slogan that still rings true today. “Silence=Death” was the equation those activists brandished on banners, signs and T-shirts as they marched by the thousands to get people to care that far too many gay men were getting sick and dying from AIDS.

We’re still getting sick today.

And silence still equals death.

Stop being silent.

Stop AIDS.