The numbers are especially bleak for black men who engage in gay sex, or, in the parlance of the CDC, "men who have sex with men." Though critics charge that the sample examined in the study was too small at 400 to yield accurate results, the numbers are still startling. Fourteen percent of all black men surveyed were HIV positive, with particularly high infection rates among the young. Thirty percent of those ages 23 to 29 were HIV positive, which is more than twice the rate for Hispanic men and more than four times the rate for white men of the same age.

According to activists and black leaders in Congress, the CDC deserves blame for failing to adequately fund grass-roots minority organizations that could more effectively warn about the dangers of unprotected sex than traditional organizations.

At a hearing co-sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus last week, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., went so far as to blame what she characterized as white-led gay groups, which she claims unfairly received most of the approximately $250 million in federal funds that Congress designated last year to help fight AIDS in minority communities. "They're giving the money to the same people they've been giving it to all along," Waters said. "They still don't trust people in our community."

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But others say there is plenty of blame to be found in the African-American community.

A relatively high number of black men identify themselves as heterosexual even though they have sex with other men, shunning labels such as "gay" or "bisexual." A CDC report issued last year showed that one-quarter of black men who were infected with HIV through sex with another man identified themselves as heterosexual, compared with just 6 percent of white men who were infected in the same manner.

There are numerous reasons why black men might choose not to identify themselves as gay or bisexual. "Your family may disown you, people in your neighborhood may taunt you," says Anthony Morris, executive director of AIDS in Minorities, an Alabama HIV education and treatment group. "An array of antagonisms will come from the community for men who self-identify as gay who are perceived as gay," he says.

David Bositis, a senior policy analyst at the Joint Center for Political Studies who charts demographic and political trends in black America, believes that the reticence about adopting a gay identity could stem from regional differences. The majority of African-Americans -- 60 percent -- live in Southern states, where gays experience relatively more bias, and an even greater number draw their cultural attitudes from that region.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., a professor of African-American studies and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University, has written that hostility toward gays in black society developed historically from the politics of black empowerment. In his foreword to the essay collection "The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities," Gates suggests that many civil rights leaders were angered by gay activists who equated homophobia with racism, explaining that "gays on the average seem privileged relative to blacks" and that attitudes hardened as the civil rights movement came to a close. "Disapproval of homosexuality has been a characteristic of much of the black-nationalist ideology that has reappeared in the aftermath of the civil rights era," Gates asserts, because many black nationalists equated homosexuality with "European decadence."

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