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gay peoples CHRONICLE

Gay Peoples Chronicle

Publisher

Cleveland Gay Peoples Press Associates

AIDS, S&M, MDS, AND OTHERS

The Mohican State Park Conference of gay political and health leaders marks a tentative step toward advising all gay men to take the HTLV-3 test (although only at Alternative Test Sites, which guarantee confidentiality). The rest of its message is familiar to gay men: We are all vulnerable to AIDS, a disease that is fatal, and lacks any known cure. Our only possible response is to practice safe sex and avoid anything that might depress our immune systems.

The government showed real concern with AIDS only when it perceived the disease as a threat to people who are not gay, first acting to safeguard the supply of blood, and now increasing research funds out of fear that the general public may become vuluerable.

While these shifts offer us some hope, they also pose new dangers for gay people. The same homophobes who blocket funding for AIDS are now leading the movement to define gay people as a menace to puLIS health, as well as morals and the American family. And lesbians, who are probably one of the least at-risk groups in the nation are being lumped together with gay men as a health menace.

The role of the media has been ambivalent, sometimes trying to quiet public hysteria but too often willing to feed it if a story is defined as having news value. The recent Plain Dealer series on AIDS highlighted an interview with a person clearly hysterical after discovering that her gay male housemate had AIDS. Was her hysteria worth featuring?

And so the gay community, which already has had to deal with a deadly disease--and in most respects, to do so by itself, with valuable help from responsible nongays-now has to fight off assaults from our traditional enemies, delighted to have a new weapon against us and ready to use this to its fullest.

In the end, we suspect, they will not be successful. Backlash comes in different varieties. This phenomenon now seems to be catching up with Jerry Falwell. And, in the long run, the Falwells, Camerons, and Dannemeyers may do us more good than harm as we benefit from their overkill.

But the blatant homophobes are not our only enemies, nor even necessarily those who are most dangerous. Even public hysteria can be manipulated in different directions and may rapidly dissipate once it becomes unfashionable and loses news value.

Right now our most pressing danger seems to lie in officials and public bodies, determined to safeguard the general public and save us from ourselves; and from the medical personnel advising them.

These may in the end destroy us. They will not destroy us as a people, any more than AIDS itself will. If every gay person in this country were to die overnight, we suspect the next generation of Americans would still be about 10 percent gay.

What

we are threatened with is destruction as a community, reducing us again to a group that hides in dark corners or resorts to fantasies while practicing a heterosexuality that does us great harm by denying our natures. We would again become invisible and powerless.

One manifestation of this danger is the forced closing of gay establishments. New York City has closed The Mineshaft. Was it coincidental that the bar first selected for official closing catered to an S&M clientele, or that the inspectors examining it for signs of dangerous sexual activity disapprovingly recorded evidence

some

of

forms of sexual behavior that by no stretch of the imagination are likely to

as

spread AIDS? Prejudice against S&M runs fairly high within the gay community, well as outside it, and some gay people are silently applauding a move directed at a minority within the minority rather than at the mainstream gay life style.

This may be a double mistake. Gay people who are into S&M boast that their segment of our community includes the highest proportion of Ph.D.'s. The other mistake is assuming that repression will be limited to those gay lifestyles of which we disapprove. Such movements have a tendency to

grow.

So that there is no misunderstanding, we emphasize again that the Chronicle urges gay men to practice safe sex. Any other behavior is suicidal for us. In some gay establishments men engage in sex that is not safe. Some of them will simply do so elsewhere if these establishments are closed, Others still do not understand that their behavior is dangerous and need to be instructed. The establishments they frequent may well be the best locations for educating them.

A further danger is that the medical profession may become not only the main authority on measures to prevent the spread of AIDS, but the arbiters of what should be done about gay people.

Medical persons have given us invaluable help in dealing with AIDS, and continue to do so. For instance, Dr. Janet Arno's column in last month's Chronicle was a poignant expression of sympathy for us and extraordinarily insightful about gay people.

But the medical profession as a whole has not been in the forefront of those trying to liberate gay people from their oppression by society. The World Health Organization still classes homosexuality as an illness. Even in a medical school as enlightened as Case Western Reserve's, we understand it is still possible for a lecturer to explain that homosexuality is not a sickness and then describe the number of homosexuals he has cured.

December 1985

Advisory Board Jerry Boxes

Charles Callender Rob Daroff, Bob Downing Karen Giffen, Mark Kroboth Joy Medley, Martha Pontoni Bob Reynolds

Advertising Manager Joy Medley

Business Manager Bob Reynolds

Circulation Manager Bob Downing

· Editor-in-Chief Charles Callender

Reporters

Charles Callender

Catherine Clark, Rob_Daroff Dora Forbes, Joanne Frustaci Mark Kroboth Casimir Kuczinski Sebastian Melmoth Martha Pontoni

Photographer and Cartoonist Rob Daroff

Columnists

Peter Beebe, Shana Blessing Larry Kölke, Jym Roe Julian Wilde

Production Staff

James Amerson, Rod Caldwell Charles Callender Rob Daroff, Joanne Frustaci Mark Kroboth

Circulation Staff Ray Davis, Bob Downing Jin Price, Nick Santone Youngstown: Bill Smith Columbus: News of the Columbus Gay & Lesbian Community

Publication of the name, picture, or other representation of an individual, or-

The Native reports that during the hearings before the New York City Council Health Commission, before it voted for a resolution to close the bathhouses, a Dr. Sigmund Friedman testified that a drop of blood from a person with Aids, falling in-ganization, or place of busto a salad, would give AIDS to anyone who ate the salad. He was speaking as a member of a militantly homophobic religious sect; but with the authority of an M.D. an M.D. degree does not necessarily change the prejudice against homosexuality has learned from one's society.

Having

one

Laurence Altman's recent series of articles in the New York Times about AIDS in Africa notes that African spokespersons contend homosexuality is rare there. He adds that "most scientsts from outside Africa tend to agree." These "scientists" are naively voicing ideology and folk beliefs, which too often take over when they discuss homosexuality.

Haiti was traditionallly descried as a society where homosexuality was very rare and highly disapproved of. This assumption that Haitians are very unlikely to be homosexual was a factor in the Center for Disease Control's defining Haitian immigrants as an at-risk group in the United States. When fear of contracting AIDS cut into the Haitian tourist industry, the government of that country and its medical establishment began announcing that homosexual behavior was not uncommon there. The ten percent may well be universal.

So what do we do? Resist all outside attempts to divide us; correct "scientific authority" whenever it misrepresents the facts; ånd try to ensure as much control as we can in any measures to regulate homosexual behavior.

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