What was the first church to go into the gay community to work with aids and

[biffridgeway]

which city? Since gays ignored the problem churches had to come into the gay community and help them. Which was the first church to do this and which city was it.

How come gays never started aids help centers on their own?

[Debra M. Pax et Bonum]

I do not know but why does it matter? Many churches my own faith included do try to help. We are called to love others not judge.

[Julia D]

There is already a church in the gay community, it's called the Metropolitan Community Church. It's been present in the gay community since 1968. It was the first church to tackle the issue of AIDS in the gay community and offer help to those who had AIDS.

There are approximately 300 MCC congregations in 22 countries around the world. More than 43,000 people are members of MCC as of last recent count.

MCC was founded in Huntington Park, CA originally, but soon after moved to San Francisco, Los Angles, and the rest of the west coast, then expanded to the rest of the country and then around the world. By the time the AIDS crisis hit, there were already MCC churches in most of the areas where the gay population is found in larger numbers.

As for your question about why gays never started aids help centers on their own, you're very mistaken. In fact it was ONLY gay-started help centers that were around for most of the first ten YEARS of the AIDS crisis.

Gays had to take care of themselves because the government refused to acknowledge the disease - it took President Reagan himself something like 8 years into the AIDS crisis before he even uttered the word "AIDS" in a public address.

Gays began their own testing centers, their own support networks where they assigned caregivers from the gay community to take care of sick AIDS patients in their own homes, they fed them, brought them medicine, took them to the doctor, etc.

There were extended networks set up like this in the gay community YEARS before the government or even outside churches were able to stop sticking their noses in the air and do something helpful.

The gay community was on its own for a very long time. The gay community figured out ON ITS OWN that unprotected sex in the bathhouses and bars mainly, were huge centers of AIDS being spread from one person to the other, and it was the gay community's representatives who went around shutting down those facilities - again, long before any government or outside church got involved.

It was the gay community who began educating gays all over the country about how having unprotected sex spreads AIDS, and began HUGE campaigns to hand out condoms and teaching MONOGAMY to the gay communities.

After several years of very hard work on the part of gay activists to help the gay community learn where AIDS came from, how it is spread, and how to prevent it, the incidents of AIDS in the gay community dropped dramatically.

I myself lost several friends to AIDS in the early to mid 1980's, as the gay community was just gearing up to begin huge educational efforts and helping centers all over the country.

I'm not gay myself (married almost 30 years, five kids, several grandkids) but I've had many gay friends over the years, some of them for most of my life.

I saw all this happen from the beginning, and watched some of my friends die, and others live as the gay community got up and began taking care of itself because the outside churches and the government WOULDN'T.