By Matthew Bigg

ATLANTA, May 14 (Reuters Life!) - AIDS in the United States is viewed by many as a disease that affects primarily gay white men but statistics show that blacks are the main sufferers.

A new book explores one of the reasons why the disease which affects African Americans doesn't have a higher profile -- the black community's own ambivalence to the virus.

"Not In My Family", a collection of essays edited by Gil Robertson, aims to represent the debate among blacks over HIV and AIDS and challenge the view that there is a lack of forthright dialogue within the black community on the subject.

Its title mocks a head-in-the-sand response to the threat HIV poses to black communities -- it may be happening in society at large, but not close to home.

"There was silence. A lot of that was due to misinformation, lack of access and folks buying into a lot of myths and rumors," said Robertson. "There's a lot of shame associated with this disease, which has kept people in the closet and not willing to talk about it."

"This book demonstrates that black Americans care about their own and want to take the necessary steps to address this problem," he said in an interview.

"Not In My Family" contains essays by civil rights leaders Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, soul singer Patti Labelle and dozens of other professional and ordinary people including an actor, a comedian, a porn star and a teenager.

An essay by Josiah Kibira, a native of Tanzania, draws a connection between AIDS in Africa and among African Americans. Another by entertainment lawyer Ivory Brown recounts her friendship with a friend who died of AIDS.

"You feel a heart pain because you know somebody who has died. All of us have had somebody who is affected by the disease," said Brown in an interview.

RESPONSIBILITY

African Americans are 10 times more likely to contract HIV and AIDS than white Americans and more than twice as likely as Hispanics, Robertson said, quoting figures from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Among people aged 13-24, 65 percent of new HIV diagnoses are black American. Black men who have sex with men represent a 37 percent slice of all HIV cases in the United States since the epidemic began.

Calvin Butts, pastor of the large Abyssinian Baptist Church of New York, rejected the idea that the black community had been slow to wake up to AIDS or that any stigma surrounding the disease had prevented action.

His own congregation had been wrestling with the issue for 20 years since church members began contracting the disease.

"Much of the limited response has to do with the resources. We don't in the African American community have all the resources," said Butts, who wrote one of the book's essays.

Blacks and particularly black churches have taken responsibility for social issues within the black community since the days of slavery, he said.

"Alot of things we had to do with ourselves. We have always lifted ourselves by our bootstraps because nobody else would do it for us," he said.

"While it took us a long time to understand the nature of the disease and the fact that it was very present in the (black) community...we have come to grips with it, we have taken huge responsibility," he said.