HIV Outreach Program for Latinos Grows

The San Fernando Valley arm of Bienestar, an HIV education, outreach and case management organization for Latinos, is looking to expand its services.

The organization distributes brochures on safer sex and provides a weekly support group conducted in Spanish.

It also dispatches outreach workers--who are themselves HIV-positive and Latino--to places in the Valley where Latino men tend to congregate.

With 82 HIV-positive clients, the Valley Bienestar also hopes to begin offering a drop-in center. Currently, the organization’s two local outreach workers operate out of the Valley HIV/AIDS Center in Van Nuys.

Oscar De La O, executive director of Bienestar, said the primary way the virus has been spreading in the Latino population is through gay or bisexual men. De La O said many of these men do not consider themselves gay or bisexual, and are often uncomfortable about being approached about HIV, which they consider is a “gay” disease.

“A lot of them also don’t have a social support group,” De La O said. “In terms of the Latino population who are gay or bisexual in the San Fernando Valley, it is more underground and not as open and free as on the other side of town.”

De La O attributed the difference in part to the fact that there are no exclusively gay Latino bars in the Valley.

Sergio Sanchez, an outreach worker and support group facilitator, frequently sets up tables at local bars where he leaves safe-sex booklets and HIV testing information, along with packets of condoms and directions in Spanish.

“When we go to a bar, we don’t want to be competing with the music and they are drinking,” Sanchez said. “So talking to them is not very effective.”

Instead, he leaves on the table small brochures that an interested passerby can casually pick up and stick in his pocket to be read later and in private.