Discrimination and misconceptions about human immunodeficiency virus among gay and bisexual men.

Abstract

Objective: Despite improvements in structural and biomedical interventions to stop the spread of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), gay and bisexual men continue to be disproportionately impacted by HIV. One potential barrier to the uptake of HIV health care services is misconception about HIV prevention. Given high levels of societal stigma related to HIV and homophobia, we grounded the current study in the Health Stigma and Discrimination Framework and proposed that experiences of everyday discrimination would be associated with the endorsement of stigmatizing misconceptions about HIV prevention among gay and bisexual men. We also examined whether comfort with health care providers would mediate such association and whether differences by race and ethnicity existed.

Method: Gay and bisexual men in New York (N = 293) completed a survey between 2017 and 2018 assessing everyday experiences of discrimination, comfort with health care providers, misconceptions about HIV prevention, and demographics.

Results: Controlling for relevant covariates, regression analyses showed that more experiences of discrimination were associated with greater misconceptions about HIV, b = 0.23, t(284) = 6.240, p = .002. Next, although discrimination was negatively associated with comfort with health care providers, the overall mediation was not significant. Finally, moderation analyses revealed that the relationship between discrimination and misconceptions only held for non-Latine men (p = .002). Latine men had overall greater levels of misconceptions about HIV prevention regardless of discrimination experiences.

Conclusions: Given the pervasiveness of discrimination, stigma-reduction interventions will be pivotal in redressing the HIV epidemic and should be implemented alongside other culturally sensitive HIV reduction strategies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).