This section of DiscoverTheNetworks examines how the radical leftist agendas of the gay lobby have prevented American society from taking steps that could have saved the lives of many thousands victims killed by AIDS. For example, in his 1998 piece, "A Radical Holocaust," David Horowitz writes:
Who would not have known in 1969, the year of “Gay Liberation,” … that promiscuous anal sex was unsanitary for individuals and a potential danger to public health? Yet, gay liberation was defined by its theorists as just that: promiscuous anal sex, a challenge to the repressive “sex-negative” culture of what queer theorists now call “heteronormativity,” i.e., the heterosexual and monogamous norm. In the radical view, existing sexual norms reflected nothing about humanity’s biological experience, but were merely a social construction to preserve the privileges of a dominant group.
Like black radicals before them, gay activists rejected the idea of integration into a normally functioning civil order. Gay liberation was identified with a sexual agenda that did not seek civic tolerance, respect, and integration into the public order of bourgeois life. It was defined instead as a defiant promiscuity, the overthrow of bourgeois morals and sexual restraints -- and, consequently, of bourgeois standards of public hygiene. No natural or moral barriers were recognized to the realization of the radical project.
The Gay Liberation Front issued a manifesto in 1970 which proclaimed: “We are a revolutionary homosexual group of men and women formed with the realization that complete liberation of all people cannot come about unless existing social institutions are abolished. We reject society’s attempt to impose sexual roles and definitions of our nature.”
The effect of this radical self-conception and agenda was immediate and unmistakable. In the three years previous --- the flowering of the sexual revolution --- the incidence of amoebiasis, a parasitic sexually transmitted disease increased fifty times in San Francisco because of promiscuous oral-anal sex among gays. Despite the consequences, a Toronto leftist paper defended the practice in an article titled “Rimming As A Revolutionary Act.” During the next decade, the tolerant American civil order made room for the sexual revolutionaries. Public officials licensed sexual gymnasiums called “bathhouses” and turned a blind eye towards homosexual activity in bookstore backrooms, bars and “glory hole” establishments, until a $100 million public sex industry flourished by decade’s end, as what activists described as a homosexual “liberated zone.” At the same time, natural forces asserted themselves with ever more devastating results.
As opportunistic but still treatable infections flourished in the petri dish of the liberated culture, gay radicals increased their defiance. Overloaded VD clinics became trysting places in the liberated culture. In his authoritative history of the AIDS epidemic, author Randy Shilts describes the atmosphere on the eve of its outbreak: “Gay men were being washed by tide after tide of increasingly serious infections. First it was syphilis and gonorrhea. Gay men made up about 80% of the 70,000 annual patient visits to [San Francisco’s] VD clinics. Easy treatment had imbued them with such a cavalier attitude toward venereal diseases that many gay men saved their waiting-line numbers, like little tokens of desirability, and the clinic was considered an easy place to pick up both a shot and a date.”
Far from causing radical activists to re-think their agenda, the burgeoning epidemics prompted them to escalate their assault. When Dr. Dan William, a gay specialist warned of the danger of continued promiscuity, he was publicly denounced as a “monogamist” in the gay press. When playwright Larry Kramer issued a similar warning, he was accused in the New York Native of “gay homophobia and anti-eroticism.” At a public meeting in the year preceding the first AIDS cases, Edmund White, co-author of The Joy of Gay Sex proposed that “gay men should wear their sexually transmitted diseases like red badges of courage in a war against a sex-negative society.” Michael Callen, a gay youth present at the meeting, had already had 3,000 sexual partners and was shortly to come down with AIDS. When he heard White’s triumphant defiance of nature’s law, he remembers thinking: “Every time I get the clap I’m striking a blow for the sexual revolution.”
Callen’s attitude was emblematic. The first clusters of AIDS victims were formed not by monogamous civil reformers who had come out of the closet to demand tolerance and respect, but by sexual revolutionaries who pushed their bodies’ immune envelopes to advance the new order. Callen, who later founded People With AIDS, reflected on this revolutionary path: “Unfortunately, as a function of a microbiological ... certainty, this level of sexual activity resulted in concurrent epidemics of syphilis, gonorrhea, hepatitis, amoebiasis, venereal warts and, we discovered too late, other pathogens. Unwittingly, and with the best of revolutionary intentions, a small subset of gay men managed to create disease settings equivalent to those of poor third-world nations in one of the richest nations on earth.”
The diseases were being transformed as well. As Shilts explains, the enteric diseases --- amoebiasis, Gay Bowel Syndrome, giardiasis and shigellosis ---were followed by an epidemic of hepatitis B “a disease that had transformed itself, via the popularity of anal intercourse, from a blood-borne scourge into a venereal disease.”
Where were public health officials, as these epidemics took their toll? Why didn’t they intervene, sound the alarm, close the bathhouses, undertake vigorous education campaigns among gays to warn potential victims of the danger in their path? The reason was the revolution itself. So successful was the campaign of the radical activists that it made traditional public health practices politically impossible, even when officials attempted to close the sexual bathhouses which were the epidemic’s breeding grounds but which were defended by gay political leaders as “symbols of gay liberation.” As Don Francis, the Center for Disease Control official in charge of fighting the hepatitis B epidemic told an interviewer: “We didn’t intervene because we felt that it would be interfering with an alternative lifestyle.”
In the early Eighties, the AIDS epidemic was still confined to three cities with large homosexual communities. Aggressive public health methods might have prevented the epidemic’s outward spread. But every effort to take normal precautionary measures was thwarted in turn by the political juggernaut the gay liberation movement had managed to create. Under intense pressure from gay activists, for example, the director of public health of the City of San Francisco refused to close bathhouses, maintaining that they were valuable centers of “education” about AIDS, even though their only purpose was to facilitate anonymous, promiscuous sex.
Not only were measures to prevent the geographical spread of AIDS thwarted by radical politics, but measures to prevent its spread into other communities were obstructed as well. Thus when officials tried to institute screening procedures for the nation’s blood banks and asked the gay community not to make donations while the epidemic persisted, gay political leaders opposed the procedures as infringing the “right” of homosexuals to give blood. The San Francisco Coordinating Committee of Gay and Lesbian Services, chaired by Pat Norman, a city official, issued a policy paper asserting that donor screening was “reminiscent of miscegenation blood laws that divided black blood from white” and “similar in concept to the World War II rounding up of Japanese-Americans in the western half of the country to minimize the possibility of espionage.”
The result of these revolutionary attitudes was to spread AIDS among hemophiliacs and drug-using heterosexuals. Similar campaigns against testing and contact tracing -- standard procedures in campaigns against other sexually transmitted diseases -- insured the metasticism of AIDS, specifically into the black and Hispanic communities, came to account for more than 50% of the known cases.
The war against civilization and nature, which is at the heart of the radical enterprise, inevitably produces monsters like AIDS. The epidemic has now taken a toll of 300,000 Americans with a million more infected. The implementation of real public health methods is nowhere in sight.
In his June 10, 2003 article, "Silent Slaughter," Horowitz, expanding upon the foregoing themes, writes:
Since 1981 more Americans have died from AIDS than died in the Second World War -- 468,000 to be exact. About 40,000 new AIDS cases are reported in the United States every year. About half of the victims are under 25 years of age.
Back in the 1980s, when most of the dead (about 350,000 of them) were still alive, I interviewed Don Francis, an immunologist and epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control, who was a generally recognized hero of the battle against AIDS. Francis had been the CDC official in charge of the battle against the Hepatitis B epidemic in the 1970s. I asked him how epidemics are fought. He said that there was really only one way to fight an epidemic, which was to identify the carriers of the infection and to separate them from those in their path. How to manage this separation, he said -- whether by quarantine, education or other methods -- was a political question.
I then asked him whether testing was important in this process. He said it depends on whether the symptoms manifest themselves on the body’s surface, particularly the face of the victim immediately, or whether they are they are latent and difficult to detect when the infection is present. With the HIV virus a person can be a carrier for a decade without symptoms. It seemed obvious that mandatory testing would be a hugely important factor in any effort to contain the AIDS epidemic, yet at the time there was no testing and in fact the opposition to it was fierce.
Opponents of testing, which included the entire leadership of the gay community and the Democratic Party, maintained that tests could not be kept confidential and that AIDS carriers would thus become the targets of persecution. I asked Francis if this were a reasonable fear. He said, “We have been studying gay diseases since before Stonewall [the demonstration that launched the gay liberation movement] and I don’t know of a single case of breach of confidentiality.”
I asked him when there would be mandatory testing in the United States. He answered, “when enough people are dead.”
Apparently, 468,000 dead are not enough.
There are still no federal laws requiring testing for the AIDS virus or reporting of AIDS infections. There is no move to close public infection sites like bathhouses and sex clubs. The state of California, which has the second most cumulative AIDS infections in the country (124,000), publishes a “Brief Guide to California’s HIV/AIDS Laws, 2002,” which is posted on the Internet.” The very first section of the Guide is titled, “Voluntary HIV Testing.” It begins: “For most individuals outside the criminal justice system, the decision to test for HIV is a voluntary one.”
The very next section is titled “Prohibitions Against Mandatory Testing,” and informs citizens that the “Health and Safety Code Section 120980 prohibits HIV testing to determine suitability for employment … and …insurance.” State laws also prevent doctors and medical workers who perform the voluntary tests from reporting the names of individuals to public health authorities. There is thus no contact tracing to inform sexual partners of the person infected that they may have contracted the virus as well. In other words the AIDS virus is protected by law so that it can pursue its silent course through the body of the nation affecting tens of thousands of individuals who do not know they have it (by some estimates half of those infected) and who are putting others in danger through contact.
On June 4, the Seattle Times reported that new AIDS cases had nearly doubled in the last year and are expected to increase by another 60% this year. “It’s the most dramatic increase since the beginning of the epidemic,” the Times quoted Dr. Bob Wood, director of AIDS Control for the Public Health Department in Seattle’s King County. “One of the most important things you can do in HIV prevention is make sure people know if they are positive or negative,” Wood said. “Studies show that people make major changes in behavior when they learn their status.”
Well, yes.
How did this state of affairs come to pass? How have 463,000 young Americans been allowed to die without being protected by public health authorities? Without the government intervening to deploy the most basic measure that could save them? How have both political parties remained silent or collusive in this dereliction of duty? How can the media have ignored -- as they have -- a policy decision that has meant serious illness and death for so many people? How can reporters have ignored a story about the needless suffering and deaths of hundreds of thousands of people whom proven and established health methods might have saved? Why has there been no interrogation of the special interests responsible for derailing the health system, specifically AIDS groups who have benefited by receiving most of the government AIDS funds -- billions upon billions of dollars, allocated to “fight” the epidemic but in fact consumed in ministering to its hapless victims?
The answer is, on the one hand, that Democrats had so surrendered to the ideology of victimization that they were unable to withstand the pressures of the AIDS activists whose self-destructive political correctness won the day. It was convenient for the Democrats not to insist on hard choices for the stricken community but instead to allow AIDS activists to blame Ronald Reagan and Republican “homophobia” for the epidemic. It was good politics to ignore the reality -- the epidemic was fed by a determination to disregard public health risks once the virus was discovered and to continue sexual practices that were (and are) reckless in the circumstances.
Republicans understood the policy issue but were too cowardly to confront it. One of the sources of the cowardice is a continuing affliction of the party, which is its lack of clarity on the issue of homosexuality itself. If Republicans were clear that their task as a political party is not to manage private morality, they could have responded to the crisis of a vulnerable community whose leaders have betrayed it. Compassion for the victims of the epidemic, whose government has failed to protect them, should have inspired Republicans to support the public health measures that have been discarded. But so far it hasn’t.
Republicans and Democrats alike should consider the implications of what has happened. The very activists who assaulted and undermined the public health system are currently mounting new assaults on traditional institutions that are vital to the health of America’s communities. Holding them to account for the damage they have already done would be a first step in stopping them from doing more.
|
Major Introductory Resources:
A Radical Holocaust
By David Horowitz
1998
Silent Slaughter
By David Horowitz
June 10, 2003
Additional Key Resources:
Okay for People with HIV and AIDS to Be Barbers, Cosmetologists, Home Health Care Aides
By CNSNews.com
July 20, 2009
The Secret History of the Stonewall Riot
By Steve Sailer
June 28, 2009
Information Campaign
By The NRO Editors
July 3, 2008
25 Years of AIDS: Have We Learned Anything Yet?
By George Will
June 5, 2006
AIDS Mutation: Changing Behavior Is Key
By Cal Thomas
February 17, 2005
The Unfolding AIDS Scandal at the UN
By Carey Roberts
November 30, 2004
Twenty Years Late, but Better Late Than Never
By David Horowitz
December 8, 2003
And the Band Played on II
By Michelangelo Signorile
December 11, 2001
Unnecessary Deaths from AIDS
By David Horowitz
August 21, 2001
The 20th Anniversary of an American Killing Field
By David Horowitz
June 11, 2001
The Boys in the Bathhouses
By David Horowitz
November 3, 1997
A Troubling Double Standard
By Michelangelo Signorile
August 16, 1997
The AIDS Epidemic Is Just Beginning
By David Horowitz
June 14, 1997
Other Resources:
Obama Could End Abstinence Education in Fight against AIDS
By Fred Lucas
December 2, 2008
Religious Leaders: Churches Should Be ‘Nonjudgmental’ about Behavior that Transmits HIV
By Pete Winn
November 26, 2008
Facing the Truth about AIDS
By David Horowitz and Brit Hume
June 14, 2001
|
|
