How AIDS Changed America (from Newsweek's cover story)

Jeanne White-Ginder sits at home, assembling a scrapbook about her son, Ryan. She pastes in newspaper stories about his fight to return to the Indiana middle school that barred him in 1985 for having AIDS. She sorts through photos of Ryan with Elton John, Greg Louganis and others who championed his cause. She organizes mementos from his PBS special, "I Have AIDS: A Teenager's Story." "I just got done with his funeral. Eight pages. That was very hard," says White-Ginder, who buried her 18-year-old son in 1991, seven years after he was diagnosed with the disease, which he contracted through a blood product used to treat hemophiliacs. The scrapbook, along with Ryan's bedroom, the way his mother left it when he died, will be part of an exhibit at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis on three children who changed history: Anne Frank. Ruby Bridges. And Ryan White. "He put a face to the epidemic, so people could care about people with AIDS," his mother says.

At a time when the mere threat of avian flu or SARS can set off a coast-to-coast panic—and prompt the federal government to draw up contingency plans and stockpile medicines—it's hard to imagine that the national response to the emergence of AIDS ranged from indifference to hostility. But that's exactly what happened when gay men in 1981 began dying of a strange array of opportunistic infections. President Ronald Reagan didn't discuss AIDS in a public forum until a press conference four years into the epidemic, by which time more than 12,000 Americans had already died. (He didn't publicly utter the term "AIDS" until 1987.) People with the disease were routinely evicted from their homes, fired from jobs and denied health insurance. Gays were demonized by the extreme right wing: Reagan adviser Pat Buchanan editorialized in 1983, "The poor homosexuals—they have declared war against nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution." In much of the rest of the culture, AIDS was simply treated as the punch line to a tasteless joke: "I just heard the Statue of Liberty has AIDS," Bob Hope quipped during the rededication ceremony of the statue in 1986. "Nobody knows if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Fairy." Across the river in Manhattan, a generation of young adults was attending more funerals than weddings.

As AIDS made its death march across the nation, killing more Americans than every conflict from World War II through Iraq, it left an indelible mark on our history and culture. It changed so many things in so many ways, from how the media portray homosexuality to how cancer patients deal with their disease. At the same time, AIDS itself changed, from a disease that killed gay men and drug addicts to a global scourge that has decimated the African continent, cut a large swath through black America and infected almost as many women as men worldwide. The death toll to date: 25 million and counting. Through the crucible of AIDS, America was forced to face its fears and prejudices—fears that denied Ryan White a seat in school for a year and a half, prejudices that had customers boycotting restaurants with gay chefs. "At first, a ton of people said that whoever gets AIDS deserves to have AIDS, deserves to literally suffer all the physical pain that the virus carries with it," says Tom Hanks, who won an Oscar for playing a gay lawyer dying of the disease in 1993's "Philadelphia." "But that didn't hold." Watching a generation of gay men wither and die, the nation came to acknowledge the humanity of a community it had mostly ignored and reviled. "AIDS was the great unifier," says Craig Thompson, executive director of AIDS Project Los Angeles and HIV-positive for 25 years.

Without AIDS, and the activism and consciousness-raising that accompanied it, would gay marriage even be up for debate today? Would we be welcoming "Will & Grace" into our living rooms or weeping over "Brokeback Mountain"? Without red ribbons, first worn in 1991 to promote AIDS awareness, would we be donning rubber yellow bracelets to show our support for cancer research? And without the experience of battling AIDS, would scientists have the strategies and technologies to develop the antiviral drugs we'll need to battle microbial killers yet to emerge?

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12663345/site/newsweek/

it would have been something else.

but for gay folk -- it did give us a measure of self worth that can't be measured by any standard.

Congress did not reauthorize the Ryan White Act last year?

This article does not tell the whole story about AIDS. It is Newsweek after all. A corporate mag.
HIV & AIDS - Ian Young Talks About the Psychic Origins of AIDS - http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/data/iyinterview.htm -

The existence of AIDS and its link to gay culture is a poorly understood phenomenon. How and why this plague initially ravaged the gay community (and eventually other minority and oppressed factions of the world's population) in the last fifteen years remains somewhat inexplicable for most. Insofar as AIDS and its origins have been narrowly researched by the medical establishment and sensationally publicized in mainstream media, public perception fails to realize the crucial role gay history plays in the understanding of the disease.

It takes more than knowledge of historical fact, however, to comprehend the subtle ways in which gay men have to some degree participated in their own destruction. With his poet's eye, Ian Young recently embarked on an adventurous undertaking, exploring the psychic life of gay men from the Whitman era to the AIDS crisis, as well as delving into anti-establishment AIDS research. As a result, the poet examined the self-images, motivations, behaviors, and belief systems that have shaped the evolution of gays in this century. The fruits of these efforts have taken form in tow outstanding books: "The AIDS Dissidents" and "The Stonewall Experiment." The former is a bibliography of published and unpublished materials that represent an anti-established medical view of AIDS and the wide range of unfairly discouraged alternative treatments for PWAs.

Out of Young's research for this book grew "The Stonewall experiment," a groundbreaking psychohistory which examines the results of gay men's liberation at Stonewall in light of certain historical, emotional and psychological patterns that have pervaded this particular population. According to Cassell publications, "The Stonewall Experiment," among other things, "reconsiders the works of Wilde,Carpenter, Heard, Burroughs, Rechy, Kramer, Whitmore and others in a new light as prophetic texts."

Such innovative research efforts are not new for Young. As editor of "The Male Muse" (1973), the first published anthology of gay-male poets, Young made accessible an underappreciated form of gay artistic expression.

He covered uncharted territory again in 1982 with "The Male Homosexual in Literature: a bibliography." Nonetheless, it is with the publication of his two recent books on AIDS that Young has synthesized his skills as a poet, ethnographer, historian and critic. If "The AIDS Dissidents" avoids listing AIDS materials that reflect prevailing medical and political orthodoxies,"The Stonewall Experiment" exposes the oppressive manipulations of the medical establishment. In a recent interview, Young patiently explained his views about AIDS and the implications involved in his vision.

What compelled you to write "The AIDS Dissidents" and "The Stonewall Experiment?"

I was really dissatisfied with the "official" line on AIDS, so I started looking around for alternative voices on the subject. I also saw what was happening to my friends. The HIV theory available seemed incredibly simplistic; the more research I did the more I just could not believe the paradigm for understanding AIDS, which the gay community has bought into. It's not scientific at all. It's been very bad science from the first. The medical establishment has failed to produce an adequate theory on AIDS, let alone a feasible treatment option. Could you outline this "incredibly simplistic paradigm" that gays have bought into?

The official line is that AIDS is caused by one retrovirus and that this retrovirus just came out of nowhere. And if it came from anywhere, it came from the African Jungle in the form of the African Green Monkey.

Ridiculous! That HIV was supposed to have come from nowhere, that it supposedly bore absolutely no relationship to what was going on in the gay community before it surfaced clearly ignores the historical processes that led up to it. Scientifically, the theory of the one retrovirus has been totally disproven, even by those who were originally espousing it. Now the theory is experiencing a shift or is abandoned altogether. However, politically it's still very much alive in the media and with physicians and service providers dealing with the gay community. The reason I think this highly unsatisfactory theory is till being supported by the medical establishment is that there is a tremendous amount of money invested in keeping it alive in institutions-not to mention the reputations of researchers and physicians who publicly supported the theory.

Gays have bought into the theory because it lets everyone off the hook: we don't have to look at what was done to us; anyone can believe a sort of freak accident. We readily believe in the AIDS virus because it's convenient. But I insist that the AIDS crisis is a result of over a century of oppression and repression. If we go back into our gay history and look at what was happening, our writers and thinkers were telling us and warning us that the archetypal message regarding gays was a sense of doom leading to the inevitable death wish.

Is the suggestion here that there is a conspiracy of some sort behind the HIV/AIDS paradigm? If so, what is the underlying agenda, and who are the actors involved? Please explain. Thanks.

that the cells that HIV attacks in order to reproduce, CD4 cells, wasn't even discovered until the 1970's. And from what we know about the history of HIV, the virus has been infecting people since the 1950's, possibly as early as the 1930's.

This reminds me of the racists myths about AIDS like it started in Africa from eating moneky brains... The HIV virus is a media creation and the science behind it is very weak to say the least.

HIV was electron-micrographed by 1984. The evidence that HIV is the cause of AIDS is extremely convincing:
http://www.niaid.nih.gov/Factsheets/evidhiv.htm

wow, I've fallen into a alternative reality...

Why is it irresponsible??? I see it as an alternative veiw to the one veiw the corpate media use all the time. That the whole AIDS industry only has the good of all in mind and there is no corruption and big pharma interests running the thing. There is so much deception and corruption in the AIDS industry it blow your mind. If your open to it. I would not even know where to start. I dont by into "conspircies" and being silenced because it is not " irresponsible" to question the AIDS authrodox. Questiong the AIDS industrial complex is vital to democracy at this time.

"But I insist that the AIDS crisis is a result of over a century of oppression and repression. If we go back into our gay history and look at what was happening, our writers and thinkers were telling us and warning us that the archetypal message regarding gays was a sense of doom leading to the inevitable death wish."


...that gay men created this virus out of reaction to cultural oppression over time?

Damn, even Louise Hay backed off of her new age bullshit on that one.

It did give us a unifying cause around which to rally and made obvious the need for political rights but it also made us spend a great deal of our energy fighting for mere survival instead of higher order political rights.

The Queer community used AIDS to further their victim role/status but now its time to look at this and other issues with more insights into how corporations play into shapibng our reality...The gay movement is still pretty young.

did what? did who?

jesus...I can't believe what I am reading here...