One of Benita Paschall's first reactions when Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley declared a "state of emergency" in the city's fight against AIDS this week was: "Well, it's about time." "It's been an emergency. It's been an emergency for over 10 to 15 years," she said Wednesday. "The wreckage has already reached mammoth proportions."

The head of the Baltimore Prevention Coalition, a private nonprofit group with its headquarters in Mount Vernon, Paschall has been working as an HIV/AIDS prevention activist since the 1980s. She has done outreach on the streets, held education sessions at the city jail, and sponsored safe sex parties for women.

As executive director of the coalition, which has 12 employees and a budget of more than $500,000, Paschall herself does not do much prevention preaching on the streets anymore. But her group, founded in 1992, reaches out to people in all corners of the city, urging them to practice safe sex and get tested for HIV and other STDs.

As of June last year, about half of the 23,664 people in Maryland with HIV/AIDS lived in Baltimore, according to the state AIDS administration.

When it comes to HIV/AIDS, Paschall knows that while everyone tends to talk about labels -- gay, straight, bisexual -- she doesn't like to. She thinks they cloud the real issue, which is changing unsafe sexual behaviors. "Your orientation doesn't matter," she said. "It's the behavior that matters."

Under her leadership, the coalition launched another initiative known as "TransAm," which supports the city's African- American transsexual community -- offering referrals for HIV testing and substance abuse treatment. The group publishes a newsletter and sponsors "Ladies Social Teas" every Wednesday. For more than a year, Paschall has also hosted a weekly radio program on WOLB called "State of Emergency," which deals with topics ranging from AIDS to domestic violence and how they affect blacks in Baltimore.

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