Editorial

Tom Murray

Our City Responds

ast week Sentinel USA publisher and AIDS patient Charles Roberts Jr. had a visitor. San Francisco mayor Dianne Feinstein stopped by his home for an hour to chat. Her visit was preceded by the arrival of a large plant and followed by the delivery of four popular novels she chose to keep Charles company.

Mayor Feinstein's acts of kindness reflect the spirit of our city in caring for people with AIDS. San Francisco has approximately 1200 cases diagnosed as of June 30. New York has 3600. There is no comparison between the two cities in terms of funding or services provided to these people. San Francisco leads the nation, budgeting 8.8 million dollars for fiscal year 1985-86.

Funds will be allocated to such places as San Francisco General Hospital, the Shanti Project, the AIDS Foundation, Hospice of San Francisco, Gardner Sullivan Hospital, the AIDS Health Project, Operation Concern, and the Haight/Ashbury Clinic. Obviously, more can always be done; realistically we can be proud of the efforts underway. Patients at San Francisco General's Ward 5B receive excellent care from highly skilled, caring professionals. Walkin patients at Ward 86 also discover a cheerful, positive atmosphere where they are treated as individuals, not casualties or statistics.

The mood is much the same at the AIDS Foundation. Volunteers staff the Food Bank, and each AIDS patient is entitled to one bag of groceries per week. Most of the food is donated, and more is always needed, yet the facility manages to provide juices, canned goods and paper products to many people on a regular basis. The Foundation's staff networks with other agencies to facilitate each patient's trip through the bureaucratic red tape involved in applying for disability or social security benefits..

Recently the Shanti Project completed its largest training session for volunteer counselors. Eighty people spent two exhausting weekends preparing to offer support to people with AIDS, their friends and families. Those of us who have Shanti counselors find that they become close, valued friends. Shanti also offers practical support volunteers who cook meals, wash clothing, and assist people with AIDS with everyday chores.

Shanti provides housing for those who have nowhere to go and are limited by social security/disability income. Several houses are operating throughout the City.

Other agencies such as Hospice of San Francisco, Operation Concern and the Haight/Ashbury Clinic are also turning City funds into human services. The funds are greatly supplemented by thousands of hours of time volunteered by San Francisco's citizens.

Perhaps we are known to some as a place where Tony Bennett mellowly left his heart a generation ago.

Perhaps to others we are known as a haven for hippies, guppies and non-conformists.

Now let the nation see that San Francisco is a home, a place where people are committeed to caring for one another as family, where the bonds that unite us are deeper than blood and rooted in love.

Sentinel USA

EDITOR.

Tom Murray

COLUMNISTS

Robert Cole, Robert Cromey, Bill Huck, Joseph Kramer, Mike Mascioli, Tom McLoughlin, Gary Menger.

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VOICE OF THE NEW GENERATION

8 Sentinel USA. August 1, 1985

Commentary

The Phallic Fallacy and Medicine:

Why We Don't Have to Wait for a Cure for AIDS

by Keith D. Barton, M.D.

1985 Keith D. Barton, M.D.

recent issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association was devoted to new developments in AIDS research. The lead editorial, entitled, "Not There Yet, But on Our Way," made this observation:

Another 10,000... will be stricken [with AIDS] this year. ...So physicians faced with caring for this growing number of patients cannot simply announce that the medical armamentarium is empty. Strictly speaking, of course, it is not empty; it's just that so far no treatment has been found consistently efficacious. ... Scientists believe that the only real hope of success lies in attacking and destroying the virus itself (emphasis added).

This is a revealing statement in two ways. First it is about as honest an assessment of AIDS treatment as I have seen in a medical journal. What it basically says is that there is no treatment for AIDS with any "consistent efficacy" i.e., any likelihood of success. This in itself is not new information. It merely makes explicit what is common knowledge.

Secondly, this editorial pinpoints the object-of scientific research, which is to understand the virus and to destroy it. This attitude epitomizes technological Western

medicine as what I would call the battlefield model of medi-cine. Its focus is to destroy an enemy from without, but it does little to strengthen the body from within.

If the "cause" of AIDS is simply a virus, then why are most of the people exposed to and infected with the virus asymptomatic? Why have only about two percent developed AIDS, and only 20% to 30% developed an AIDS-related condition such as fever, night sweats and lymph node enlargement? There must be other factors intrinsic to the body which Western medicine overlooks. If we can find ways to strengthen the body so that it can control this virus the way most gay men are able to do, then perhaps there will be greater success in treating AIDS.

Western medicine, with its battlefield bias, is adverse to recommending or even considering measures that will strengthen the body's own ability to handle infections. The remainder of this essay is basically an exploration of this exclusionary attitude on the part of

A Matter of Size

Western medicine an attitude which is shared by many people with AIDS. If we can understand and get beyond the blind spots created by the cultural assumptions which underlie technological Western medicine, then a more "consistently efficacious" treat-. ment for AIDS may already be available.

In order to understand this carefully, it is necessary to go rather far afield and examine some of the history and philosophy that underlies modern technological medicine. To summarize this exploration from the outset, I contend that 1) medical science is part and parcel of our competitive technological culture, 2) this technological culture is itself a product of male sexual imagery that is sublimated into technological and/or militaristic conquest, 3) the gay subculture, likewise, is part and parcel of this male-dominated culture and is similarly enamored by. sexual imagery which is acted out directly in terms of sexual conquest forget the sublimation, and 4) this male-oriented cultural pattern is a dead-end street that results in nuclear oblivion in the case of straight culture, and in AIDS or alcoholism or any number of sexually-transmitted diseases in the case of the gay culture.

This is not a pretty picture, and I would not blame a person for not looking at it, but here we are and it is looking at us. So what to do now? Well, I think the answer is pretty obvious. You start by balancing the aggressive, technological, sexually-charged, "yang" elements of Western culture with nurturing, natural, replenishing, "yin" elements and attempt to achieve a new synthesis or gender-blend, to borrow a phrase from Kosmic Ladye. I believe this new gender blend needs to happen in the dominant technological culture, in the system of medicine/healing, in the gay subculture, and in the approach to treating AIDS if we are to survive into the 21st Century with either a gay identity or a civilization.

That was an overview. Let's go back and examine the pieces of this argument. Let's first look at the connection between technology, sexual imagery, and competition within culture. Western culture, at least from the time of classical Greece, has been male-dominated, militarily aggressive, theologically and ideologically authoritarian, technologically astute, and sexually domineering.

All of these recurrent attributes of Western culture revolve around one theme: mine is bigger. Actually the Greeks felt that small is beautiful. Nevertheless, the phallic focus of this theme is explicit in the case of ancient Greece (see The Reign of the Phallus by Eva Keuls) and in contemporary gay culture. It is relatively sublimated in most of the intervening cultures, though it is never far from the surface. It is but a series of steps to replace phallus with spear, cross-bow, scepter, battering ram, cannon, or computerized missile. The theme is still the same: my power, ideology, technology, or virility is better than yours. This attitude is aptly conveyed by the epithet, fuck you.

Even non-military technology becomes imbued with this adolescent, swagger. Take medical technology as an example. First on a vernacular level, modern medicine is replete with military and phallic images: fighting disease, medical armamentarium, the big guns (slang for dangerous drugs), the chain of command, and gunning for exams. The medical uniform is also suitably evocative, consisting of a white trench coat, neck tie and stethoscope (two phallic symbols). These accoutrements and phrases reflect deeply ingrained cultural beliefs about the nature of disease as something to be subdued.

To take this analysis beyond the symbols of medicine, it is necessary to explore some of the history of medicine. At the risk of oversimplification, it could be said that modern medicine has its roots in two sources. Its intellectual roots come from the philosophy of Descartes, and its practical experience was gained from the surgery of the battlefield.

Prior to Descartes, the body was considered to be the temple of the spirit holy spirit in some cases, demonic in others but in any case, the body. was thought to be subservient to spirit.

Descartes reversed this. He separated body and spirit and declared that spirit could be ignored in dealing with the body. He reduced the body to the level of a machine and proposed that by dissecting this machine into its component parts, one could learn how it operated and how to repair it. This was the beginning of what is now called scientific reductionism. Western medicine has made undeniable strides in using reductionism to understand and