Like other organizations in the city, the ClubHouse quickly responded to the AIDS crisis. Its staff collected money for patrons who were too sick to work and pay rent. The club also partnered with Whitman-Walker Health, a D.C.-area clinic focused on HIV and LGBTQ care, to raise awareness about HIV and AIDS. With city funds, Whitman-Walker started programs like syringe exchanges, which research showed could stymie the spread of HIV among injection-drug users by providing access to clean needles.
But as local organizations confronted the virus, the federal government often stood in their way. When Bill Clinton was sworn in to the presidency in 1993—after roughly 200,000 people diagnosed with AIDS in the U.S. had died—he launched a far more rigorous federal response to the epidemic than his predecessors had, dramatically increasing funding for research, treatment, and care. But the ramped-up efforts to stifle the epidemic left some communities behind when political fights got in the way. In 1998, Clinton upheld a Reagan-era ban on the use of federal funds for needle exchanges amid unsubstantiated concerns that those programs would promote drug use. That same year—when the epidemic’s death toll had reached more than 400,000—Congress, which oversees Washington, D.C.’s budget, banned the city from using its own municipal funds for syringe exchanges.
The D.C.-specific ban lasted for nine years. During that time, the District suffered the highest rates of HIV in the country, while other cities that were allowed to fund their own exchanges saw drops in transmissions caused by intravenous-drug use. By the time the ban was lifted, the nation’s capital had reached a higher rate of HIV per capita than that of West Africa.
At the height of the AIDS crisis, Washington was a majority black city. The black share of the population has since dipped below 50 percent, but black residents are still disproportionately affected by HIV today: Recent data from the D.C. Department of Health showed that eight out of 10 young residents diagnosed with HIV are black. This sobering statistic reflects a broader trend when it comes to racial disparities in HIV diagnoses in the United States. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, black people, who comprise about 13 percent of the population, accounted for 43 percent of HIV diagnoses in 2017. Hispanic and Latino people accounted for 26 percent of new diagnoses, while making up 18 percent of the population.