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Two years ago there was a growing effort to educate African-American women to the growing presence that HIV had in the young African-American community in order to lower the rates of transmission among African-American women, who had an alarming rate of HIV infection as opposed to the rest of the country. Rates were rising at an incredible pace; AIDS amongst African-American women was 18 times that of Caucasian women, and more than half of the women who had died from AIDS were African-American. There were many theories given as to why African-American women were contracting and dying of AIDS to the extent that they were, one of the reasons given were that Black women were often stuck in relationships with a bisexual male, even after the fact of knowing of his bisexuality not fully understanding the high rate of infection that persisted amongst gay Black men. Other theories suggested that Black men preferred unprotected sex, and that women would rather sleep with the man in order to validate the relationship as opposed to risking being alone thinking that their man would not want to be in the relationship with them if they asked him to use a condom.

There were also older, more institutionalized ideas about men having protected sex with their significant other in the first place; if either suggested using protection it must mean that the one who wants the protection is having an extramarital affair or committing infidelity of some sort. The truth is that often the one who does not want to use the protection is the one who truly has something to hide, because a true cheater will turn the tables on someone and try to manipulate an individual into believing that they are the one's who are unaware of their subconscious need to stray, when in truth all they really want to do is to be intimate with that other individual they are in the relationship with. The underlying tone to these theories was that ignorance, and a failure to communicate effectively in relationships and to assert one's rights over their own body was the true reason that Black women were catching AIDS and other women weren't; primarily at the hands of the Black men who were supposed to be protecting them from evil in the first place.

What those studies didn't address were the growing numbers of interracial relationships that Black women were becoming involved in, which we didn't know about two or three years ago. There was a concerted response to the way that African-American women were

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