New York: World AIDS Day Draws Small Crowds for Big Plight

Hundreds of people gathered across New York City Sunday at rallies and memorials for World AIDS Day, though advocates said the sparse attendance reflected a need to refocus attention on the disease. "It is hard to grasp that we can be this far in the crisis and still have this far to go," Brent Nicholson Earle, a veteran AIDS activist, said during a rally at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center in Greenwich Village. Last year, AIDS was diagnosed in more than 6,000 people in New York City.

Drug cocktails are allowing people with AIDS to live longer, and young people who have grown up knowing about the disease may not fear contracting it, experts say. Justine Davis, 17, rarely talks about AIDS with her friends at Louis D. Brandeis High School in Manhattan. Except in her health class, sex is never a topic of discussion, she said. "We get embarrassed," said Davis, who attended an event Sunday at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center in Manhattan that featured comic books addressing AIDS and a youth theater troupe focusing on HIV/AIDS.

The youth theater troupe, NiteStar, performs plays that explore students' attitudes toward sex in schools throughout the city. "On the one hand, you don't want them to be scared of someone with AIDS, but you also don't want them to think it's no big deal if they get it. It's difficult to try to find that balance," said David Williams, who has performed with the group for the last three years.

Other events in the city focused on how the disease has spread into all communities. At a 24-hour vigil on 125th street in Harlem, the names of hundreds of people who have died from AIDS were read. "It's time to stop the denial, the partying and the pretension: AIDS kills gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and straight people," said Doneley Meris, who runs education services at the LGBT Center.

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