This reminds me of something I have tried not to think about for a long time because it made me so angry.
Gay people of course got a lot of the same message, and by the time they finally started pushing back they acquired a lot of practice at resisting negative messages about gay sex. Promiscuity became the gay birthright, our offering t…
This reminds me of something I have tried not to think about for a long time because it made me so angry.
Gay people of course got a lot of the same message, and by the time they finally started pushing back they acquired a lot of practice at resisting negative messages about gay sex. Promiscuity became the gay birthright, our offering to the repressed heterosexual world.
Then came AIDS.
While a lot of people changed their behavior and many worked hard getting out the message of safe sex and responsible behavior, a significant number went the other way, becoming aggressively promiscuous and even seeing HIV seroconversion as some sort of rite of passage. They refused condoms, they all but moved into the bathhouses, and they didn't care how many they infected nor how many died. Die they did, by the hundreds of thousands.
We're seeing something of a repeat of that with the politicizing of COVID, the insanity of the antivaxxers, though COVID is not the death sentence that AIDS was.
When I moved back to Seattle after caring for my mother and her cancer as long as I could and looked up my good friend Michael Taylor, who by the way was black, I learned that he had died only a few weeks before, of AIDS. And I wondered if the person who had infected him knew that he was a carrier.
As you know, I am often a harsh critic of partisan politics. I have friends and acquaintances ranging from didn't want to leave their house, even to see their doctor (Might be people with COVID in there) to anti-vax, where can I shop without wearing a muzzle? I'm no fan of politicians making medical decisions for me, but my wife and I have been jabbed four times for COVID since we are in our 70s with "issues".
Having said that, after putting it off during the early days of the pandemic we did the get together with family thing (I see socialization as a significant health issue). As you might predict, the whole extended family had the same symptoms with some testing positive (one healthy young unvaccinated man hospitalized) and others testing negative. I don't think that the tests are all that reliable, but that's just my lay opinion. We took a risk, but we didn't get all those jabs to stay home and live in fear.
Your description of the evolution of reaction to AIDS in the gay community is tragic.
AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease, which means that by definition it is one of the hardest to transmit. COVID is the opposite, aerosol droplets, you can be infected in an empty hallway.
By 1982 we knew all we needed to know to stop HIV from infecting a single new individual. Nothing could have been easier.
This reminds me of something I have tried not to think about for a long time because it made me so angry.
Gay people of course got a lot of the same message, and by the time they finally started pushing back they acquired a lot of practice at resisting negative messages about gay sex. Promiscuity became the gay birthright, our offering to the repressed heterosexual world.
Then came AIDS.
While a lot of people changed their behavior and many worked hard getting out the message of safe sex and responsible behavior, a significant number went the other way, becoming aggressively promiscuous and even seeing HIV seroconversion as some sort of rite of passage. They refused condoms, they all but moved into the bathhouses, and they didn't care how many they infected nor how many died. Die they did, by the hundreds of thousands.
We're seeing something of a repeat of that with the politicizing of COVID, the insanity of the antivaxxers, though COVID is not the death sentence that AIDS was.
When I moved back to Seattle after caring for my mother and her cancer as long as I could and looked up my good friend Michael Taylor, who by the way was black, I learned that he had died only a few weeks before, of AIDS. And I wondered if the person who had infected him knew that he was a carrier.
As you know, I am often a harsh critic of partisan politics. I have friends and acquaintances ranging from didn't want to leave their house, even to see their doctor (Might be people with COVID in there) to anti-vax, where can I shop without wearing a muzzle? I'm no fan of politicians making medical decisions for me, but my wife and I have been jabbed four times for COVID since we are in our 70s with "issues".
Having said that, after putting it off during the early days of the pandemic we did the get together with family thing (I see socialization as a significant health issue). As you might predict, the whole extended family had the same symptoms with some testing positive (one healthy young unvaccinated man hospitalized) and others testing negative. I don't think that the tests are all that reliable, but that's just my lay opinion. We took a risk, but we didn't get all those jabs to stay home and live in fear.
Your description of the evolution of reaction to AIDS in the gay community is tragic.
AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease, which means that by definition it is one of the hardest to transmit. COVID is the opposite, aerosol droplets, you can be infected in an empty hallway.
By 1982 we knew all we needed to know to stop HIV from infecting a single new individual. Nothing could have been easier.