Award will boost efforts to include gay black men in AIDS/HIV prevention research
Marlon M. Bailey's research recently received a boost designed to take it to another level.
An assistant professor in the departments of Gender Studies and American Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences, Bailey was accepted into the Training Program for Scientists Conducting Research to Reduce HIV/STI Health Disparities, a program of the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies at the University of California, San Francisco.
Bailey will spend six intensive weeks each of the next three summers working with Center for AIDS Prevention Studies faculty mentors intent on strengthening his research design and helping him obtain large-scale federal funding. The program also will provide Bailey, a visiting professor at the UCSF School of Medicine, with a $25,000 grant to launch a pilot study to begin next year.
"I am very excited about this prestigious award from the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies at UCSF," he said.
Bailey's current research agenda is informed by his previous research that examined sexual identities and practices of black LGBT and men who have sex with men, or MSM, in Detroit and Indianapolis. Significant numbers of gay black men reported having "raw" sex, or unprotected intercourse, with a man, despite the stigma associated with them and their sexual behavior and the high rates of HIV infection among their community.
Other research examining raw sex has focused on white gay men, Bailey says, adding that in conventional HIV/AIDS prevention research, the voices of black gay men also tend to be muted. His current research will try to remedy this by using a variety of research techniques, including in-depth interviews with black gay/MSM and discursive analyses of a range of elicit media catering to black gay men, as he seeks to understand why and how these men engage in raw sex.
"Examining the kind of sex black gay men have is necessary to tailor HIV prevention strategies to our needs and desires," he said. "I hope that my research will alter considerably current approaches to prevention because, thus far, these approaches have not worked for black gay men."
