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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32279 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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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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