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Karel seems to be bitter that "in 1982 they were arguing in San Francisco whether or not to close the bathhouses." At that time, his late husband was 16 years old and he asks, "what if they had closed the bathhouses? Quarantined those with HIV or at least those with clear symptoms of AIDS until they could figure this out?" I sympathize with his pain, but his remedies appear to be self-loathing and poorly thought out. Chills ran up and down my spine as I read Karel's piece because many of his opinions mimic those of the anti-gay groups he scorns. His opinions also mesh with the fashionable, but disingenuous, Bush-era "compassionate conservative" ideology, which overly worships "individual responsibility." As a careful reader of history and a part-time resident of San Francisco between 1978 and 1998, I feel qualified to question Karel's historical interpretations. I don't claim to know all of the historical truth, but I believe much of what he says is historically wrong. Karel's basic thesis is that SARS is being treated seriously as a disease, unlike how AIDS was treated, which he blames on gay men for turning AIDS into a "political and social condition." He scolds by asking what would have happened if "the gay community had shut their mouths" and had deferred to what "medical experts deemed best." Later he asserts, "The people in charge should have been the doctors, the virologists, the experts in the handling of a communicable infectious disease. What they said we should do, we should have done."
Karel's contention that "we made [AIDS] into a social condition, a political issue" is wrong. "We" gays do not have the power to unilaterally create these types of complicated social constructions. If "we" gays were really that powerful, "we" would have equal rights by now. The lack of response to AIDS had nothing to do with "gay power," which also happens to be the favorite bogeyman of anti-gay groups. Furthermore, it would have been disastrous if gay men had followed Karel's suggestion and had blindly deferred to medico-political authorities. History has proven that some of their solutions were harmfully wrong. Even Karel must recognize this danger because he said his husband died of what he alleged was "malpractice, not AIDS." I empathize with Karel's malpractice concern because I have also been nearly killed by iatrogenic harm. My response to medical mistakes has been to take "personal responsibility" for my own medical care. I independently scrutinize all medical advice before I follow it. Questioning authority is healthy. Except don't question President Bush's authority to detain you indefinitely, without a court hearing, for being an AIDS terrorist. Karel is correct that the stigma associated with homosexual behavior has influenced the response to AIDS. However, I believe that the belated response of government officials to AIDS was driven more by the politics of viral research program funding instead of public health concerns. For example, ten years ago, ACT-UP protesters took credit for forcing the government to speed up the introduction of AIDS drugs. But more recent historical accounts have shown that these decisions were driven primarily by politicians and government bureaucrats to justify their viral research funding. The demands of gays were only acknowledged when they conveniently coincided with the government's interests. Furthermore, the "demand" for speedier approval only gave us the drug AZT, which in some cases poisoned those who blindly deferred to dogmatic medical authorities. I had to wince when I read that Karel had based his historical insights on the HBO movie of Randy Shilts' book, And the Band Played On. The original book is an exceptional journalistic account, but the movie is widely criticized for being a romantic distortion of history. Furthermore, other first person historical accounts that have become available since this book was published in 1987 have confirmed that the author had biases against "free love" similar to those of Larry Kramer. Karel essentially embraces Shilts' viewpoint by condemning "our community, who screamed for our sexual freedom" for continuing to have sex "however we wanted." He goes even further and declares that bareback sex by the HIV positive is a "criminal act." He rhetorically asks, "If someone had smallpox and knowingly went around infecting people, they'd be treated like a criminal, right?" No, I don't think they would be treated like a criminal. Witness how many people have violated the "voluntary" SARS quarantines with impunity.
The few HIV "bug chasers" or "gift givers," which may exist, need mental health
counseling to modify their harmful behaviors more than they need moral condemnation.
Jesse Monteagudo's article Careless Love http://www.gaytoday.com/viewpoint/021703vp.asp
documents how an inaccurate Rolling Stone article on bug chasing
and bareback sex is being used to condemn gays.
Furthermore, HIV positive men can have bareback sex in a responsible manner. Calling them criminals for having bareback sex is excessive. Of course, this is barring any unforeseen problems with recombinant HIV strains and re-infection by either co-infection (exposure to a second virus around the same time of HIV infection) or super-infection (exposure to a second virus during the course of HIV infection). (Jost, Stephanie et al., "A Patient with HIV-1 Super-infection," New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 347, No. 10, Sept. 5, 2002. pp. 731-736, "HIV-1 Super-infection - A Word of Caution," pp. 756-758) Putting people in jail to stop new HIV infections would be as cruel and ineffective as the war on drug abusers has been. Humans have many self-destructive and unhealthy behaviors that require compassion, not punishment, to overcome. Only the rare individual who is intentionally using HIV as a deadly weapon should be put in jail. Karel is dead wrong that "no one except the lunatic right wing ever suggested gay men stop having sex." In fact, early in the AIDS crisis, many mainstream doctors saw gay sex as being an optional vice and they advised gay men to stop having sex. The fear of AIDS caused some gay men to voluntarily become celibate for many years. Instead of waiting for medical authorities, it was gay leaders who drove the idea of using condoms as the only reasonable alternative to not having any sex at all. It wasn't until 1988 that the Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, M.D. mailed to every household the official eight-page government brochure, Understanding AIDS, which finally recommended condoms for preventing AIDS on pages 3 and 4. Later on, unprotected oral sex became another alternative after laypeople observed many gay men having oral sex without getting infected. Apparently, the risk of HIV infection from oral sex is so small that no medical study has been able to acquire a large enough sample size to accurately calculate the probability. (For details, see the American Journal of Epidemiology 1999;150:306-11 and AIDS Weekly September 3, 2001 pp. 20-21) Very few gay men are waiting for medical authorities to approve of unprotected oral sex as an effective risk reduction strategy, despite people, such as author Andrew Sullivan, who insist they got infected via oral sex.
For example, a short article by the gay activist and scholar Eric Rofes, "Making Friends, How free love got lost," (pp. 61-62, "XY Survival Guide 2") noted that many younger gay men, presumably due to the AIDS crisis, are ignorant of the 1970's "gay liberation" concept of "free love" as opposed to the current norm of "same-sex marriage." Rofes says that the "prissy 1990's interpretations" of the 1970's, which blame "the excesses of those years" for bringing "AIDS onto the community," are "responsible for leaving young gay men heirs to a stark wasteland bounded on all sides by sexual guilt, moralizing and dread of disease." Eric Rofes has also been spearheading the "Gay Men's Health Summit" http://www.gaytoday.com/health/051903he.asp that aims to move beyond focusing only on HIV. Rofes said, "Punitive approaches to gay men often get us what we don't want. So I wouldn't advocate closing down those [gift giver/bug chaser] web sites, and I wouldn't advocate discouraging people from advocating those practices. I would, if I believed discouraging the most-at-risk gay men would make them not do it, but I don't believe it works that way." Jack Nichols' books and essays on men's liberation touch on these types of moral codes. For example, he has recalled how the non-penetrative term "balling" was adopted, instead of "screwing," to better align with the ideas of liberated free love. (See "Must romance & love end in marriage?" http://gaytoday.com/garchive/viewpoint/041497vi.htm and "I've been talking about you, Walt Whitman," http://gaytoday.com/garchive/viewpoint/051997vi.htm ) Other references in the XY Survival Guide 2 to young gay men's moral concerns about "free love" are as follows: Page 6: "My permission," by Peter Ian Cummings, "This is to certify that (insert your name) hereby has permission to: move where he likes; have sex; and enjoy life." Page 44: "Respecting 1970's gay teens," by Anonymous, "It is fashionable to blame AIDS on 'the promiscuity of 1970's gay men.' It is also wrong." Page 52: "Sexual Squealing: Why you should lose your shame," by Jerwin Maximo, "Don't be judgmental of those who are sexually liberal in order to gain privileges and social acceptance for yourself. If you are not into sex clubs, then don't go to sex clubs. But if you disparage, or worse, rat out those who enjoy such places, you are no better than all the homophobes on page 44." Page 61: "Are one-night stands okay?" page 61, XY reader poll, 41% no, 59% yes. Would more gay youth in the 1970's have answered yes?
Page 77: "BCSD. Demystifying the dick size complex," by Eriq Chang, talks about people who immediately ask you how big your dick is or send you picture of their dick: "I don't think this is liberated. I think it only shows how nasty gay life has become." This "simply marks the sender as someone who's [a] mean and [b] a pervert. Those are two types of people who I [and most decent and caring people] simply try to avoid." Page 131: "How to not look for a boyfriend: Remember to love yourself first," by Kevin Alonzo, "People say that men aren't meant to be monogamous and that young gay males are always horny, hence, young gay couples always cheat on each other. That's B.S." Page 143: "Why society controls sex: Taking liberties," by Mike Glatze, "If we ever want to have free sex, free love, and free expression, we must first understand why it isn't free." (Mike Glatze also runs http://www.younggayamerica.com with Benjie Nycum) Page 153-154: "How to escape the class system and make the world your oyster," by Sean-Christian Beougher, argues that a class system exists in America, but Americans are in denial about it. Pages 155-156: "Why do they fear gay love? When straight men are bottoms," by Sean Beougher, recalls a college class discussion where he told the group that he "found sexy the idea of a heterosexual man being anally penetrated by his girlfriend [with the aid of a strap-on dildo]." He observed that his "words were producing an actual physical response: they were twisting about in their seats." He came to a conclusion that "because this 'straight' cabal of bullies is terrified of becoming a bunch of what they think are sissy bottoms, they force all to fear sex, feel nauseated by it and ashamed of it." Coincidentally, the sex advice columnist Dan Savage credits his readers for coining the term pegging to refer to fucking your boyfriend with a strap-on dildo. (Bill, Ashton, Rick, by Dan Savage, 3/15/03 http://www.thestranger.com/2003-05-15/savage.html ) In a manner similar to the expression of anxiety over "free love" by young gay men in the XY Survival Guide 2, Karel sarcastically asks "We behaved so badly - still do, when it comes to AIDS. Our sexual freedom was worth all those lives, right?" Once again, his use of "we" and "badly" is overly cynical because I believe most gay men do act responsibly to prevent the spread of HIV. In fact, "free love" with caring fuck buddies is probably safer than sex with anonymous partners or a supposedly "monogamous" husband. Secondly, even if some gay men are acting irresponsibly, this is not a reason to abandon all of our sexual freedoms, as the Bible thumpers and anti-gay crusaders demand "we" do. Karel's complaint that we do not treat HIV as we do other diseases is based largely on unique restrictions such as anonymous testing, the lack of partner notification, etc. He even blames gays for preventing doctors, if they are stuck with a needle, from being able to demand a test for HIV in the other person's blood. The medico-political health authorities, not gays, have implemented all of these restrictions for sound reasons. Some have been found to be unnecessary and they have been quietly eliminated. Others that have been retained, such as blood donation restrictions, unjustly discriminate against gays. I agree that no restriction should allow any injustice to occur. However, the existence of unjust restrictions should not be a reason to abandon all of our established medical privacy rights as Karel's solution suggests. Privacy is important for all diseases, not just AIDS. I am sympathetic to Karel's anger over how SARS is being dealt with so quickly whereas AIDS was ignored "because just queers were dying." But unlike Karel, I believe government scientists and bureaucrats are exploiting SARS just as AIDS was exploited decades ago. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization are highly political organizations. The CDC acquired significant funding and power during the polio scare of the 1950's. Epidemics that killed millions of people were common prior to World War II. But the invention of antibiotics and vaccines lulled both heterosexuals and homosexuals into a false sense of security that everything was curable or preventable. This along with the availability of the contraceptive pill to prevent pregnancy fueled the 1960's sexual revolution. The CDC bureaucrats had to find something new to do after polio vaccines and antibiotics reduced the need for government involvement. During the Nixon administration the CDC moved funding from polio to a popular "war on cancer." A decade later during the Regan administration the CDC was threatened with budget cuts because they had been unable to find a cure for cancer. They desperately needed something new to justify their funding. Either fortuitously or intentionally, depending on whether you are a conspiracy theorist or not, the AIDS scare came along and the CDC exploited it to grow their funding well into the 1990's. After it became clear that a heterosexual epidemic was unlikely in the U.S., homosexual AIDS research fell out of fashion and AIDS in Africa became, and continues to be, a major area of funding in the Bush administration. Except for the occasional bio-terrorism and weapons of mass destruction scares, the CDC is exploiting primarily the SARS scare to obtain additional funding and power just as they did with AIDS. There are many examples of how the CDC is treating SARS identically to AIDS. For example, as even Karel points out, the SARS "statements from the CDC and WHO could easily have been confused for statements about HIV 20 years: We don't know the exact cause yet, but it is believed; We're not 100 percent sure of the way it is transmitted, but it appears to be; We know the disease can be fatal; This virus appears to spread rapidly, and we don't know very much about the epidemiology." It is human nature to blame a villain for being the source of a disease. The villain was "patient zero" in Randy Shilts' book. Europeans traditionally blame other countries for being the source of disease according to the 2000 book "Virus" by Luc Montagnier, the French scientist who first discovered HIV. Notice how SARS is being blamed on those communistic Chinese and those non-Bush supporting French-Canadian Toronto residents. In a manner reminiscent of what happened with AIDS, Toronto politicians are denying that they have a SARS problem and are accusing the WHO of dirty politics. Chinese politicians are also being accused of cover-ups. The best example of SARS exploitation, so far, came when a famous AIDS researcher, David Ho, announced his plans to shift his career to SARS research. I suspect that many other career-minded scientists will also see the handwriting on the wall and shift to SARS research when the CDC changes their funding priorities. After having dealt with HIV for many years and nearly acquiring a Ph.D. level of knowledge about virology, I fully understand the weaknesses of viral research and the potential for abuse by politicians and scientists alike. Robert Gallo, who claimed credit with Luc Montagnier for the discovery of HIV, became rich from licensing his patents for use in HIV blood tests. The discoverer of the SARS virus will probably receive a similar windfall because there will be an instant demand for testing the blood supply. I find this shameful given that the inventor of the polio vaccine donated his work to the world for free. I do not deny that AIDS and SARS may kill many people, but I believe SARS will be no different than the many other epidemics that mankind has faced. I'm optimistic that the human race will survive these disorders. However, the blame games that people like Karel love to do and governmental exploitation will hinder progress toward discovering treatments for these disorders. |
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Right-wingers are forwarding a homophobic notion that AIDS is treated differently than SARS 
Larry Kramer has been active in the social battle against AIDS since the 1980s 
Karel's prudishness echoes a phenomenon afflicting younger gay men that blames
AIDS on the older generation's "promiscuity" in the 1970's. This trend is
discussed on no fewer than eleven pages in the latest edition of the XY
Survival Guide 2: Everything you need to know about being young and
gay, which was published in March 2003 as XY magazine issue #39.
(Available at 
XY Survival Guide 2