Monday, 5 January 1998 AIDS support group helps heterosexuals David Sanders, The Arizona Daily Star Denise Aitken, 44, has been HIV-positive for nearly 15 years. SUPPORT GROUP The support group for heterosexuals with HIV or AIDS meets every Friday from 10:30 to noon at the Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation, 151 S. Tucson Blvd. For further information, call 322-6226. Aim is to make them feel safer, secure By Alisa Wabnik The Arizona Daily Star They hide in darkened offices, live in fear and talk only anonymously over the Internet. Ten years ago, gay men who contracted AIDS or HIV - the human immuno-deficiency virus that is often a precursor to the deadly disease - might have described their lives that way. Today, those who work with the HIV-positive population say medical advances and a changing societal landscape have enabled many to put aside their fears and push the illness out into the open. But there is a new population taking its place behind closed doors: heterosexuals. That's the population the Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation is now trying to reach with a new support group. ``I think heterosexuals living with AIDS today are almost exactly where gay men were at the beginning of the epidemic,'' said Eric Cuestas-Thompson, a therapist at the St. Mary's Hospital HIV clinic and graduate student in the Arizona State University School of Social Work's Tucson campus. ``They say, `I couldn't tell anybody. I was afraid I was going to lose my job or housing,' '' he said of his heterosexual clients. ``That sounds almost like a joke in this day and age, although heterosexuals are living with it.'' Cuestas-Thompson and his graduate school colleague, Nancy Stanton, started the AIDS Foundation support group last month as part of a class assignment to find something in the community that needed changing. ``People need to know that there is a place that they can go where they can feel safe and secure,'' Stanton said. Though the foundation has eight support groups serving its 600 to 700 clients, the challenges facing the heterosexual group are different, said Gretchen Funk, director of client services. ``The gay population was more heavily hit, proportionately,'' Funk said. ``In the gay community, you may know a bunch of other people who are infected. . . . So I think isolation is an issue for people who are heterosexual.'' Funk estimated that about 65 percent to 70 percent of its HIV-positive clients are either homosexual or bisexual. Statewide, at least 74 percent of the 5,278 reported AIDS cases as of Nov. 1 were known to be gay men, according to the Arizona Department of Health Services. But it's not just the numbers that make HIV-positive heterosexuals unlike their gay counterparts, Stanton said. ``Their issues are totally different,'' she said. ``If a gay man goes to a bar, he almost assumes that the gay man he's talking to at the bar is HIV positive. That's how prevalent it is in this community,'' Stanton said. For heterosexuals, ``how and when do you disclose that you have HIV?'' Denise Aitken, a 44-year-old heterosexual woman who has been HIV-positive for nearly 15 years, said she contracted the illness through a blood transfusion in the mid-1980s. The transfusion occurred during surgery aimed at correcting another health problem: fibrous tumors in her breasts that ultimately led to a double mastectomy, she said. Aitken said she and her husband separated several years ago because of stresses related to her illness. So she went to one of the AIDS foundation's first heterosexual support group meetings to talk about dating. ``I talked about how it's really scary, because you go out with somebody and for me, it's first I have to tell them, `Oh, those boobs aren't mine, 'cause I wear prosthetics.' And then, once they get over that, I have to tell them, `Well, I'm HIV positive,' '' Aitken said. ``It's like, why bother?'' Aitken said she tried several other support groups and found them helpful, but ``going to this hetero group is just wonderful, because then we can talk about what's relevant to us.'' She also ``chats'' regularly on the Internet with other heterosexual AIDS patients, a method she said most people prefer over support groups because of its anonymity. ``I can understand that - for some reason, the hetero community hides,'' Aitken said. ``The thing I don't understand is, a lot of times they want to keep their anonymity, but we all in that (support group) room have the same thing to risk. We all know what that risk is, and we would never give them away any more than we would want them to give us away. ``I know there's a certain stage where you go through your denial and stuff, but at some stage you need to come out of that,'' she said. ``At some point, you're not dying from this disease, you're living with it.'' AidSupport Online is a worldwide online support group for HIV/AIDS patients, family, and friends.