LESBIAN GAY

Community Service Center

OF GREATER CLEVELAND

(Editor's Note: This space has been donated to the Center by the Chronicle. In no way does what appears in this space reflect the views of the Chronicle staff or management.)

by Bob Yun, Board Member

The Oct. 11 grand opening of the Lesbian/Gay Community Service O Center was a fantastic success!

With local television, newspaper and radio coverage of the ribbon-cutting, we are quickly developing a positive relationship with the mainstream Cleveland media. Such relationships are essential if we are to serve as a resource center for the entire community. More than 100 enthusiastic supporters jammed the Center for an evening open house.

The Center window display depicting lesbian and gay figures in history has been completed. Included in the display are Harold Washington, Audrey Lorde, George Washington Carver and others. As a symbol of our pride, the window will be lighted throughout the night.

LIVING WITH AIDS

by Joseph Interrante

Director of Education/ Health Issues Taskforce

Lesbians and gay men are certainly familiar with the power of naming how the words used to describe us convey a particular, politically loaded image of who we are. Queer, lezzie, fag, dyke, fairy, sissy, bulldagger, lesbian, gay none of these are neutral terms. And we know that. Why else insist on the power to name ourselves?

The same power of language operates in discussions about AIDS. Certain terms in widespread use construct a picture of AIDS that is medically misinformed, socially misleading and politically pernicious. That conservatives who clamor for quarantine use them should come as no surprise. But AIDS activists, the lesbian and gay press, and others who should know better use them with equal frequency.

These five terms connect like pieces of a puzzle to form a picture of AIDS that distorts and diminishes the experiences of people living with AIDS. Those people include not only people within the HIV spectrum, their loved ones, friends and families, but also entire communities captured within its distorted image. What are these words?

AIDS virus: The popular term for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the virus that can damage the immune system and cause a variety of illnesses, among them the infections and cancers known as AIDS. HIV infection is NOT the same as a diagnosis of AIDS. About 35 percent to 50 percent of people infected with HIV have, after nine years, gone on to develop AIDS. The current "worst case" estimate is that about 75 percent to 80 percent of those infected will develop some immune deficiency over 16 years. (Though one must add, who knows what will happen in research in 16 years?)

"AIDS virus" ignores these facts and collapses the distinction between HIV infection and AIDS. Many AIDS activists started using the term several years ago when HIV had several different names. To avoid the political conflicts over "who owns the virus," we adopted AIDS virus as a shorthand. But the term creates the wrong impression that someone with the virus has or will get AIDS. And use of "AIDS virus" slips easily into:

AIDS carrier: Talk of "AIDS carriers" conjures up images of contagion and plague. It confuses infectious viruses (like HIV) with contagious ones that can be transmitted casually. It portrays a person with AIDS surrounded by a

Part of the grand opening ceremonies included elections of board members and officers. The new board already is working hard to continue existing programs and add new ones.

Two positions remain vacant. If you are interested in a challenging yet rewarding experience, contact the Center at 522-1999.

"NEW current

November MEMBER" month. All members are encouraged to invite a friend to the Center to show them the benefits of membership. We extend a standing invitation for non-members to visit the Center or attend one of many regularly scheduled events.

As much of our operating expenses are paid by member contributions, your membership and volunteer efforts wil! help us greatly in continuing to provide the many services needed by our community.

The new member campaign will last through December. For msre information, call 522-1999.

Please keep the Center in mind when giving to the annual United Way campaign. We are a Community Shares organization. When you receive your payroll deduction pledge card, write in or check off "Community Shares The Center."

cloud of germs that threatens to "spread" into the "general" population, making the PWA a Typhoid Mary of AIDS. And, like that historical figure, it implies that PWAS are a threat to the "rest" of the population, willfully spreading disease. The truth is that people with AIDS are the ones threatened medically by infection from others, culturally by fear and stigma, and politically by discrimination and calls for quarantine.

Gay writers are guilty of helping to create this image. Randy Shilts is the most infamous, giving us the legacy of Gaetan Dugas, "Patient Zero," the quintessential narcissistic gay man willfully spreading HIV across the U.S. Of course, Dugas' status as the original "AIDS carrier" is pure scientific speculation by process of elimination, and Shilts' fictionalized treatment of Dugas is all secondhand. But no matter

Dugas makes for a bestseller (and according to rumor, a future miniseries), because he fulfills every homophobic cliche.

AIDS test: The logical outcome of a belief in "AIDS carriers" spreading the "AIDS virus" is use of an "AIDS test" in order to contain the disease. The AIDS test is actually a test for the antibody produced in response to exposure to HIV. Most researchers believe positive test means HIV infection. But "AIDS test" reinforces the conflation of virus infection and AIDS. The consequences of this causal linkage between infection and illness are laws requiring "routine AIDS testing" of prisoners, prostitutes, immigrants, military recruits, Job Corps and marriage applicants, hospital patients and workers, insurance applicants and goddess knows who else. Implicit in the whole drive toward testing is the prejudiced notion of protecting the socalled "general population" from the "spread" of AIDS. This notion gains tremendous power from discussions about:

the

Risk groups: This is nothing more than an epidemiological term used to describe a group where high-risk behaviors (unsafe sex, sharing needles and the like) are or have been prevalent. Public health authorities use it in tracing the history of epidemic diseases like AIDS. It's worth noting that the government's use of risk groups has always had problems: until July 1986, any gay/bisexual man with AIDS was automatically put into the "gay" risk group even if he was an IV drug user or a hemophiliac; and "gay" meant a single homosexual encounter in his lifetime. Beyond these problems with defining and counting risk groups, the term, as popularly used, slips into the notion that merely being a member

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of a "risk group" that is, being gayputs one at increased risk for HIV infection and AIDS. Hence the silly questions about gay waiters, and suggestions to quarantine all gay men (in New Jersey of all places).

Nor are lesbians immune from the homophobia flamed by the concept of risk group. As late as 1987, the Sonoma County (Calif.) Red Cross turned down a proposal for a blood drive during a women's motorcycle run at the Russian River. The images of sexual threat posed by lesbians and gay men make no distinction according to gender. Indeed, the fears of lesbians poisoning the nation's blood supply draw upon a very old image of the lesbian vampire (which appears in The Hunger of 1983).

It must be stressed that there is no such thing as a risk group, there are only risk behaviors. There are, of course, groups who have been disproportionately affected by AIDS: gay men, Blacks and Hispanics, hemophiliacs. But the image of "risk group" encourages the fantasy that one can solve AIDS (read: protect the "general population") by rounding up lesbians and gay men, IV drug users, prostitutes and sex workers and, in international terms, by keeping Black Central Africans and Caribbeans out of

the country. This fantasy rarely extends to transfusion cases, but that is due to a distinction between "innocent" and "guilty" PWAS. This leads to the final piece of the puzzle.

AIDS victim: This term routinely appears in the media, and is used even by people who consider themselves sympathetic to people with AIDS. Literally, "victim" means someone who suffers as a result of incident or accident. It, therefore, seems neutral or sympathetic. But it also connotes passivity, fatalism and negativism. Indeed, the idea that "AIDS victim" suggests innocence is contradicted by the equally frequent use of the term "innocent victim." This may seem redundant usage until one realizes that the term always refers to children, hemophiliacs or transfusion recipients. This implies that other "victims" gay men and IV drug users are less innocent if not downright guilty. With reference to those "guilty victims," the term both makes people with AIDS passive and powerless and then blames them for that assigned powerlessness.

As used in this column, the proper terms are "person (or people) with AIDS," often shortened to PWA. At the second AIDS Forum in Denver in 1983, a group of men and women with AIDS chose this name when they formed their own autonomous national organization. As their statement read,

"We condemn attempts to label us `victims,' which implies defeat, and we are only occasionally `patients,' which implies passivity, helplessness, and dependence on the care of others." At the March on Washington in 1987, PWAS from around the country expanded the name to "people living with AIDS."

If we wish to honor all those who have died from and are living with AIDS and other HIV-related conditions, then we must actively challenge at every opportunity this linguistic web of lies and half-truths. We must weave our own meanings of AIDS, with all the experience and knowledge we have gained, into a language which legitimizes and empowers the lives of everyone of us who lives with the reality of AIDS. ▼

Pride cont.

Continued from Page 3.

together. "Cleveland's 'Invisible Community' needs to become more visible."

Jerry has been so involved with so many organizations that it will take several people to fill his shoes. He has done so much for this city that he will be sorely missed. He hopes that in the future, the gay community will become stronger, more unified and more open.

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