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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32276 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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((And any look back that includes pre-1986 also has the problem the other direction: a lot of the explosive transmission of HIV and YOLO-esque behavior came about during the Ryan White-era, where people believed that standing too close to or using the same bathroom as a gay man could transmit HIV. Despite the wikipedia summary, they believed that because a lot of mainstream experts were cautioning about it! The devil-may-care behavior regarding condoms during a lot of that time period makes more sense when people reasonably believed that would have little impact.))

No, this is the product of historical revisionism aimed at making homosexuals seem more sympathetic than they actually were and are. The scientists and experts who were at Ground Zero of the AIDS epidemic noted several times that many of their HIV-positive patients were intelligent, savvy men who understood the risks and transmissibility of HIV/AIDS as it was explained to them. They chose to continue spreading HIV anyway, because they simply did not care. See Marcus Conant:

I can recall about that same time seeing a patient who was a young Ph.D. scientist from the Peninsula [south of San Francisco], a very good-looking man with Kaposi's sarcoma who I was caring for. He had AIDS. He was sitting in my clinic on Parnassus. He was kind of impatient. I said, "I'm sorry I'm running late; I can tell you're impatient. What's wrong?" He said, "I wish you'd hurry up; I'm going to the bathhouses." My reaction was, "Wait a minute."

See, I was being a typical physician. We all in this society forget--and I think physicians are the worst--that when people are diagnosed with a fatal disease, all of the desires and longings and drives that they had the day before they were diagnosed are still there. Everybody believes that patients who are dying of AIDS are no longer sexual. I have patients that have sex the day before they die. I encourage them to do that. And people believe that women who have had breast cancer are no longer intimate or have longings to be intimate. We need to begin to relate to people and realize that those human, very human, desires don't go away because you have now had a label of "AIDS victim" stuck on you.

But being the typical doctor, it just never occurred to me that he was still out there having sex. He had Kaposi's sarcoma--AIDS, this horrible new, fatal disease. My line to him was, "Somebody must think you're smart, because they gave you a Ph.D. How come you're still going to the bathhouses?"

He said, "There's nothing wrong with that. I probably caught it there, and so my view is, it's there and I'm going to have sex." I said, "Are you telling the people that you're having sex with that you're HIV-positive"--it wasn't even called HIV then--"that you have AIDS?" He said, "No. I figure that they ought to be smart enough to understand that there's AIDS out here, and that they can catch it. It's their responsibility as much as mine." I think that that, more than any other single event, called into focus for me the notion that someone needs to speak out.

He said, "There's nothing wrong with that. I probably caught it there, and so my view is, it's there and I'm going to have sex." I said, "Are you telling the people that you're having sex with that you're HIV-positive"--it wasn't even called HIV then--"that you have AIDS?" He said, "No. I figure that they ought to be smart enough to understand that there's AIDS out here, and that they can catch it. It's their responsibility as much as mine."

I wonder how much of that was driven by fear and resentment - I have this new disease, it's going to kill me, somebody gave it to me because they didn't know or care they had it and they were too horny and stupid not to stop, so why should I care? Why should I be careful that some son-of-a-bitch will continue to be alive and healthy when I have to die, with all my life ahead of me? If I have to go, they can go too if they're too horny and stupid to live.

Your cite is from this discussion, discussing philosophy during 1983 by doctors, written in 1996 from interviews in 1992-1995. The same piece also describes out, from the exact same time period (though a different doctor):

Moss: I drew that line with a thick felt tip, and I thought: My house is inside the line. So what's going to happen? Are they going to put barbed wire around this line? Are they going to have a cordon sanitaire? See, at this point, we didn't know how infectious the disease was. And one thing that starts happening in 1983 is major infectious disease paranoia: Are we all going to get it? Is everybody going to get it?

Now, if it was as infectious as hepatitis B, then 5 to 10 percent of the medical staff would have died of AIDS, because that's the infection rate of hepatitis B. We didn't know it was only transmitted sexually and by blood. It could have been multiply transmitted. Everybody could have gotten it. For all we knew, the entire population of San Francisco could have been infected, or could have been threatened.

Now, if that had been true, then they would have put that fence around the Castro. They would have razed a six-block area around it, and left the gays inside it.

Hughes: In the late twentieth century, they would have done that?

Do you know about Ebola virus and Marburg virus? There are viruses that kill everybody. Now, suppose it [the infectious agent] is airborne, and you can get it by walking through the Castro. Now, how do you think people would have taken that?

Hughes: Well, there was a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association by Oleske on the casual household transmission of AIDS, which apparently caused a real ruckus.

Moss: Well, there were many ruckuses. There's a two-year period in 1983 and '84 when nobody knows what's happening, and the concern level has risen very high. And that's when this fear of stigmatization is going on. It makes everybody very paranoid indeed, because who knows who's getting it, and who knows what the political consequence will be? What if it really is like pneumatic plague, where you breathe on people and they get it? Or TB [tuberculosis]? We didn't know whether that was the case. Nobody knew that. And it was a reasonable speculation that it could be at least as infectious as hepatitis B, and that would have been really bad.

So paranoia was very high, and I'm drawing this line [around the Castro], and I'm having paranoid fantasies about what might happen as a result of this line. Pat Norman had the same reaction. She gets scapegoated for this, but lots of people were having the same reaction: Wait a minute. I don't want to hear this. I'm just going to quietly leave town now, before you publish it.

The interview references Oleske, but another certain famous asshole had outsized influence.

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