If knowledge is power, what happens when you've learned the wrong things? This was the question that was asked to my fourth grade teacher that stumped her. The subject? AIDS. Anything I ever heard of AIDS before leaving Alabama was that it was a disease for "faggots and junkies". And that was the more conservative approach. Reverends would hammer the message of AIDS into their congregation's heads by saying that it was God's way of punishing man for homosexuality and drug usage. For the longest time, I only knew of one side of AIDS. To have the disease meant to not have hope. First you got AIDS, then you died. And while you're about to die, you're subjected to continuous agony, lesions of Kaposi's sarcoma, then withering away into nothing. You're subjected to character assassination, refused drugs which can help the situation…you keep hearing these things long enough and you start to believe them. That was until my uncle James died when I was eleven.

No one really talked about Uncle James much. He was the next to the youngest of Sperm Donor's brothers — five in total. I knew he was picked on a lot by his older brothers and ended up spending most of life alone and away from others. The few times when he was around his family, he would get insanely drunk and do God knows what — mostly just fighting and mixing it up with the locals.

By the time I found out that he had AIDS, he was already dead. My father's side of the family decided to put him up in a house by himself so he could die alone. Granted, he could have been put in a convalescent home, but so few people down there knew anything about the disease, but the information they had was that AIDS could be spread through being in close proximity of the person, sharing a water fountain with them, or even by just being related to them. So they figured that by isolating him, they could dissolve any chance of AIDS contaminating them. Heaven forbid they should console a family member in their last hours. He died on December 1st.

As I'm typing this, I realize it probably isn't the flowery, awe-inspiring post about AIDS that you will find on most blogs. Nor is it about the spread of the disease and its growth to gargantuan proportions. I'm talking about the side of the AIDS that you might not find in most books or media representations. This is about deliberate misinformation and its repercussions. Fighting discrimination, stigma and human rights abuses, and providing accurate information are critical components of an effective response to HIV and AIDS.

It's not God's way of punishing anyone. It's not a gay disease, nor is it a straight one. It's not specific to ethnic minorities, either. It can't be spread through casual contact, yet people are being forced out of homes and jobs, being shunned and isolated, refused medical treatment, and being stripped of their basic human rights. That people already suffering should be subjected to such treatment is intolerable and even more so when it occurs in health care institutions by health care professionals who should know better.

And in the end, I guess that means knowledge is power after all.