In 1985, when general HIV testing was first licensed in the United States, AIDS was largely considered a homosexual disease. Although the advent of testing services represented a significant step for those at risk, it also immediately raised issues of confidentiality, according to Mann, who worked at the World Health Organization in the mid-1980s.

HIV-infected people were kicked out of their houses and jobs, they were denied the ability to travel and to marry, Mann says.

"AIDS carries a stigma, so people would not go for testing if it's confidential," says Joshua D. Bloodworth '97, who organized the conference on AIDS among young blacks and Latinos being held today at Sever Hall and the Science Center.

From the perspective of the World Health Organization, "discrimination is undermining public health," Mann says.

In an effort to fight discrimination and encourage those at risk to be tested, Oregon became the first state to move its testing services from confidential to anonymous, Mann says.

But while anonymous testing works to make HIV testing more accessible by alleviating fears of discrimination, it does not actively reduce the incidence of HIV- and AIDS-related discrimination, he says.

"One thing we've learned is that most of it is not AIDS discrimination," Mann says. "People are using AIDS as an excuse toward underlying discrimination. For many people, the big force is not AIDS, it's homo-sexuality."

The Rev. Carol Johnson, a third-year student at the Divinity School, helps people prepare to deal with AIDS in ministry. She says she finds that dialogues about HIV- and AIDS-related discrimination "continually end up negotiating the stigma" among groups already struggling to overcome society's prejudices.

"Even as AIDS has evolved [and changed its concentration from specific demographic populations], the groups that it affects now have added to them the burden of AIDS-related discrimination," Mann says.

Still, HIV- and AIDS-related discrimination remains a problem in and of itself because of persisting fears about issues such as living with an HIV-infected person, Johnson says.

Despite students' knowledge about how HIV is transmitted, they may still feel discomfort when they imagine sharing bathroom space in the dorms with a person infected with HIV, says Johnson, who founded Harvard's annual GospelFest for AIDS, being held tomorrow in Memorial Church.

"I don't think it will go unstigmatized until there's a cure for it," Bloodworth says. "I don't think testing -- anonymous or confidential -- will change the stigma."

Mann says that in addition to improving treatments and education, "one of the [most important] factors of increased tolerance is knowing someone who is infected -- dealing with a person you know and not an abstraction," he says.

Founded in 1992, GospelFest devotes a portion of its program to inviting audience members and others in the room to share a moment of remembrance for loved ones who have died of AIDS by calling out their first names.

Johnson says that the first year, an audience of several hundred took five minutes to call out the names. The second year, the audience spent 15 minutes calling out names. And last year, the audience called out names for 25 minutes.