“Stop homosexuals, or they’ll infect us all,” screamed the headline of an opinion piece by a Baptist minister, Greg Dixon, in USA Today on June 22, 1983. Americans must “smash the homosexual movement” or it would destroy American civilization, Dixon maintained. His plea wasn’t logical, but it did reflect the fear and hatred felt by many people.
Over the years that fear – that AIDS would “break out” of the gay community and infect “the rest of us” – was always just beneath the surface. “Is AIDS really spreading among heterosexuals?” asked an editorial in a medical magazine in 1989. They cited figures to show that it was, never mind that most were intravenous drug users. And, in a Point/Counterpoint in a medical newspaper in 1996, primatologist and AIDS researcher Max Essex answered “Yes” to the question, “Is the U.S. vulnerable to a new wave of heterosexual HIV transmission?” He argued by extrapolation from the situations in Africa and India, where HIV is passed heterosexually.
During this AIDS conference, a Canadian columnist, Margaret Wente, writing in The Globe and Mail on August 15, noted that HIV infection rates among sub-Saharan African immigrants are “far higher than among the general population.” Wente complained about HIV-positive immigrants adding cost to the system, but I wonder if underlying this are worries that ‘disease-ridden blacks’ might “infect us all.”
Enter Michael Fumento, a policy fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute who wrote “The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS” in 1990. In a commentary in the National Post on Thursday, Fumento argued against the notion that heterosexuals are at risk for HIV. But he is not motivated by a desire to correct the record. Fumento minimizes the threat posed by HIV, arguing that figures for the epidemic in Africa are “grossly exaggerated”. He seems to think that treatment of 1.3 million Africans with AIDS (out of almost 5 million) is sufficient and that spending on the epidemic is for the benefit of “the AIDS industry”. This is just another version of classifying those with HIV infection as “the Other” — it’s all right if they have it as long as we don’t get it.
With these attitudes, it’s surprising to me that progress continues to be made against the epidemic, particularly the beginnings of treatment in Africa. It’s a good thing that most folks don’t draw the line between “us” and “them” so closely.
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