Badpuppy Gay Today |
Monday, 15 December 1997 |
In the pantheon of anti-gay AIDS diatribes, syndicated columnist Leonard Larsen's December 7 column, "Gays Still Mostly Responsible for Ongoing AIDS Epidemic," will earn its own plaque on the wall with its specious reasoning, outdated statistics and blame-laying. Larsen's column, which was written in response to World AIDS Day, maintains that "gay activists" have hidden the "real" culprits behind HIV (i.e.-gay people) by pushing pictures of women and children to the forefront. The columnist goes on to point to a Washington, DC ceremony where President Clinton delivered a message to young people encouraging them to "keep yourself safe," and to a HIV-positive six-year-old girl who read a statement which said, in part, "AIDS can affect everyone, but so can ignorance." Larsen sees these as examples of deflecting blame from the gay community, whose "ceaseless gay-bar hopping and orgies of anonymous gay sex...helped launch the epidemic." He goes on to say that "gay activists seem to have successfully sold [the idea] that AIDS is a no-fault epidemic, not associated with any segment of society or sexual conduct [...]," and that with the cooperation of the media and politicians, "leery of offending a loud, affluent and demanding constituency," assist the gay community in "erasing evidence." In his closing sentence, Larsen makes explicit what he only hinting at prior to that: "the responsibility--the blame--for the ongoing epidemic is still theirs [gay activists]." Larsen's scapegoating of the gay community for the HIV epidemic is nothing new. His ignorance of the changing face of AIDS is nothing new either: Those who are simply looking for an excuse to hate the community have a ready excuse in a virus which, obviously unknown to the writer, has become the fourth leading cause of death for women between the ages of 25 to 44; has been diagnosed in 7,902 children under the age of 13 as of June 30, 1997; has now become more prevalent in communities of color than in white communities; and is primarily transmitted heterosexually in other regions of the world. Larsen's willingness to put aside reality in his quest to pillory the lesbian and gay community detracts from the very real issues facing people with AIDS: access to health care, treatment and research initiatives, a vaccine and the continuing societal ostracization of those with HIV. It's also incredibly insulting to those women and children who are living with HIV-Larsen paints them as patsies of "homosexual activists," unwittingly used to further an agenda which exists only in Larsen's head. Please write to Leonard Larsen, and Scripps Howard News Service, and tell them that this hateful rhetoric harms many people, and serves only to make Larsen's intense (and poorly reasoned) bigotry obvious to fair-minded people who know the truth about AIDS, and about the gay community as well. Contact: Marvin West, Managing Editor,
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