If there was ever a group to be fighting and pushing for greater awareness, attention and equality it would be many of the leaders in that room overlooking downtown Denver.

Rep. Todd had worked with the HIV/AIDS community in the South, but when pressed about what can be done to reduce stigma for people living with HIV in the South, she mustered a platitude: “more funding.”

The issue of HIV wasn’t addressed until someone brought it up.

You would think that things would be different by now.

Sixteen years ago, Bob Hattoy was the first HIV positive person many Americans had ever seen.

He had been working for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign for a few months when he was diagnosed. Two months later, he had a prime time speech assailing George H.W. Bush for not researching how, exactly, AIDS kills. He died of AIDS in 2007.

“Listen, I don’t want to die,” Hattoy said in his four-minute address, trying to keep his composure. “But I don’t want to live in an America where the president sees me as the enemy. I can face dying because of a disease. But not because of politics.”

These days, politics isn’t killing American HIV-positive people, so much as a glaring lack of leadership on and attention on the American AIDS epidemic as it exists today. If black America were its own nation, it would have the 16th highest HIV/AIDS rate in the world. The South is home to 40 percent of new infections.  Latinos are 14 percent of the U.S. population, but were 22 percent of new HIV/AIDS infections in 2006.  And in 2006 there were more than 56,000 new HIV infections, and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention had been underestimating the number by 40 percent annually since the late ’90s. Gay and bisexual men remain the majority of new infections, but middle-aged white women and African American men and women are among the most vulnerable groups. Disease does not discriminate.

HIV/AIDS has evolved into an international issue since George W. Bush took office. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) has distributed millions upon millions to treat, prevent, and reduce stigma for positive people in Africa. It is one of, if not the most successful and lasting hallmark of Bush’s Compassionate Conservatism, which we saw far too little of.

AIDS medications, nicknamed cocktails because of the mixology involved, are more effective and affordable than ever, before but there are still many people left behind, either too poor or-even worse-ignorant of their HIV status and infecting others. America needs a PEPFAR of its own.

All these years later, and and it’s still the disease that dare not speak its name.

“We have some really conservative pockets in Alabama that they don’t really want to talk about AIDS,” Rep. Todd said. “We know how to prevent [HIV transmissions] but we don’t have enough money to prevent it, especially in states like Alabama.”

Some saw the lack of leadership as a case of misplaced priorities.

The gay and lesbian leadership is “pushing things like gay marriage, and civil unions,” said Sandy Nelson, a 66-year-old Hillary Clinton delegate from rural Missouri. “What the hell is civil unions going to do if you’re dead?”