A new social marketing campaign will send guardian angels across St. Louis to encourage safer, smarter sex with the hope it will reduce the HIV infection rate.

About half of all new HIV infections occur among young adults, according to national statistics. Young gay and bisexual men are part of one group seeing a surge in infections, which is why they are the primary target of The Guardian Project being launched in September by the AIDS Foundation of St. Louis.

The organization will promote the Guardian Project on billboards, bus shelters and in radio messages. Uniformed "guardian captains" will visit bars, nightclubs, coffee houses and the Stroll, the strip where gay hustlers work along Washington Avenue, to distribute condoms and answer questions.

Like their target audience, most of the volunteers are under 30. Each will wear black Kangol caps and T-shirts emblazoned with the black and gray Guardian logo, a sleek, Matrix-like letter "G" on a set of wings. The logo will be stamped on condom packages, postcards and coasters that will be widely distributed in bars and clubs. The first set of billboards promoting the project will ask, "Who's Looking Out For You?" Others will call condoms "Software For Your Hardware," and describe HIV as "The Virus of Mass Destruction."

Duane Westhoff, a guardian captain, said the idea is to saturate the target market with the Guardian image and its safe-sex message.

"If the campaign is successful, it will be like when you see that McDonald's sign - you instantly know what that's associated with," said Westhoff, 27.

The Guardian Project hopes to promote safe sex as a permanent lifestyle behavior. The two-year project, funded by a $194,000 Missouri Foundation for Health grant, had to narrow its target group to increase its chance for success.

"A prevention message to a heterosexual woman is completely different to a gay man," said Thomas Adams, executive director of the AIDS Foundation of St. Louis. "You can't do these big sweeping prevention programs using all the same materials and tools because they don't work."

The safe-sex message once dominated airwaves at the peak of the AIDS epidemic during the late 1980s. Celebrities such as Madonna promoted using condoms. Actors wore their red ribbons to highlight the disease while making their Academy Award speeches. But the emphasis on prevention slowly faded as its message appeared to work and more attention was shifted on keeping those who were infected healthier and alive longer.
Today, AIDS often fails to make headlines, although it is increasingly affecting Americans, particularly the young. Nationally, half of all new HIV infections are among people 25 and younger, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About one-quarter of the new infections are among those under 22. Local health officials say the trend also holds true for the St. Louis area.

"It's sad to say, but we're really back to where we were 20 years ago," Adams said.

The number of AIDS-related deaths has declined substantially over the years because of improved treatments keeping people healthy and symptom-free for years. But the medical breakthroughs may be lulling people into complacency, contributing to an increase in unprotected sex and a spike in HIV infections, and other sexually transmitted diseases, among gay and bisexual men.

Many Americans view AIDS more as a chronic condition, or perceive the newest drugs as some kind of cure. And many don't even consider the disease a big deal, said Ronald Valdiserri, deputy director of the National Center for HIV, STD and TB prevention at the Centers for Disease Control.

But he warned AIDS is "still an incurable lifelong disease that consumes significant amounts of time, money and energy to treat, and it's still killing people."

When AIDS first hit the news in the early 1980s, it was viewed primarily as a disease affecting the gay community. Those in it "were seeing their partners or friends dying right in front of their eyes," said Sheila Grigsby, program coordinator for the Metropolitan St. Louis HIV/AIDS program. "You're not seeing that as much now."

A growing concern in the health community is the fact that many more Americans, gay and straight, are acquiring drug-resistant strains of HIV, Grigsby said. The virus, like many others, modifies and mutates, often outsmarting drugs used to treat it. That means that someone newly infected with HIV from a partner who has been on medicines for a decade could find himself immune to nearly every available medication.

Mistaken HIV ideas

Lawrence Lewis, 24, acquired HIV from unprotected sex just after his high school graduation. He said he is certain a program like Guardian would have helped him because he could have learned not only about safe sex but about all the ways the virus can be transmitted.

Lewis, who will be a guardian captain, said many of the young people he works with as an HIV/AIDS counselor have mistaken ideas about HIV. Some, he said, believe men can't pass the virus to each other.

"When it comes down to it, there is so much misinformation out there and people don't really know where to go to talk about it. Hopefully, we will be that resource for them," he said.

Lewis emphasized the program is not intended to scare people into never having sex, but just being smarter about the decisions they make.

Another goal of the Guardian Project will be to teach people how easy it is to acquire HIV and encourage people to get tested. Adams said once the project gets going, it will hopefully recruit others to become guardian captains and spread the message.

"It's like the pyramid scheme of safer sex," he said.

Reporter Eun-Kyung Kim
E-mail: ekim@post-dispatch.com
Phone: 314-340-8116