Asian Journal- The Filipino-American Community Newspaper

IN EVERY city, there’s another city that people rarely ever see.

That, in essence, is the message of the film The Other City, which is going to be screened at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City.

Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, formerly with The Washington Post, wrote and co-produced the film, based on various stories that he reported for the newspaper.

When Vargas moved to Washington, DC in the summer of 2003 as a reporting intern, it was all about the White House, the Capitol, the museums. Then there were the politicians, the lobbyists and the journalists.

Vargas, then 22 years old, grew to know a whole other Washington by riding the bus across town or by mere walking around the various neighborhoods.

"I grew to know a predominantly black city that does not have a vote in Congress. A city with a sizable gay population and a growing Latino community. A city with a high incarceration rate, with many residents thrown in and out of prison because of drugs," Vargas shared.

Growing up in the Philippines, Vargas said that he didn’t see any black people there so somehow, he got fascinated with black culture. He eventually realized that DC had a sizeable black population.

That was just one of many realizations that Vargas had.

"I discovered a disease that decade after decade—during the Reagan administration, through the Clinton and Bush years and now as the first African-American president resides in Washington—has kept on spreading, just a few miles from the White House," Vargas added.

It was actually in 1981 when the concept of the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (or what has become more popularly referred to as AIDS) began to be a major health issue. It was the year the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that "five young men, all active homosexuals," had shown up in Los Angeles hospitals with a rare infection. It was also the year when Vargas was born.

At The Washington Post, Vargas did not set out to write stories about HIV/AIDS though the disease intrigued him to no end. He wanted to write about societal issues that plagued the community like homelessness, lack of access to healthcare, illiteracy, incarceration, drug abuse, homophobia, racism and class system. To write about AIDS back then was to write about the corollary issues as well.

At least 3 percent of the capital city’s population is HIV-positive—far surpassing the 1 percent threshold that constitutes a "generalized and severe" epidemic, as determined by the United Nations Joint Program on HIV/AIDS and the US CDC.

That translates into 2,984 residents per every 100,000 over the age of 12—or 15,120 —according to the 2008 epidemiology report by the District’s HIV/AIDS office.