That is a totally different view from the mid-'80s through the early-mid-'90s, when it was new and frightening. Could you catch it from a public toilet seat? What about if some kid with AIDS went to your school and you shook his hand? And what if...? I still recall my schoolmates in fourth grade singing "Let's Talk About Sex" by Salt N Pepa, which tried to shock the straight listeners into taking safe sex seriously -- you don't want to be claimed by the AIDS epidemic, do you?
Over this same time, straight people have come to view AIDS as not a real threat to gays, and have therefore abandoned any duty to contain gay deviance ("oh puh-leeeease, what's the worst that could happen?"). This is just one of the many ways in which people have lost their former awareness of how messed up gay life is.
That seems strange -- shouldn't they have come to see AIDS as a uniquely gay threat? I think what's going on is that straight people are using themselves as a reference point or baseline to which they compare the danger to gays, and react accordingly to contain gay sexual behavior, give it the go-ahead, or shrug in puzzlement.
Here is a table of how straights react based on their beliefs along two key dimensions:
If straights perceive AIDS as a danger to themselves, it doesn't matter whether they think gays are just like us or are more deviant -- AIDS is at least as much of a danger to them, perhaps more. In either case, at least the same level of alarm will be sounded about gay behavior as about straight behavior (and recall that was quite an alarm in the '80s). Obviously the impulse to contain gays will be even greater if they are seen as even more deviant than straights, but that's more a difference of degree.
However, if straights perceive AIDS as not a problem for themselves, and also believe that gays are just like us, then they give the green light to gays to act however they want. If it's not wrecking us, why would it wreck them?
Even if they believe gays are more deviant, they don't have a good intuitive feel for just how much more deviant they are -- a little, somewhat, a lot, a whole big lot? All they sense is that AIDS is a bigger threat to gays than to us. But is that threat enough to warrant a policy of containment? Some will say it is and others that it isn't, squabbling over how dangerous is sufficiently dangerous.
Over the past 15-20 years, our society has moved farther down and to the right in that table. Still, it seems like the main cause of our turning a blind eye to gay self-destruction, and waving it on eagerly from the sidelines, was our more sanguine view of the threat that AIDS posed to us. When we ourselves were freaked out about it, that provided a powerful mental "anchor" that automatically made us see gay behavior as worrisome (if they're just like us) or downright frightening (if they're more deviant).
Unfortunately this suggests that the surest way to get back on track of keeping gays from destroying themselves and polluting the broader society is to send a good scare into straights about AIDS or some other STD, and that arguing over whether gays are just like us or are deviants might not prove very effective. Note that the panic among straights would not have to result from lying about the prevalence of AIDS among straights -- you can imagine two fairly similar groups reading over the same prevalence estimates, and one freaking out while the other shrugged its shoulders. It's the perception of the objective data that matters.
Since straight people have turned off the alarm as they figured out what the prevalence truly was among us, I doubt that we could be scared back to where we were 20-25 years ago. Sadly, I think it will take something like the successor to AIDS to break out among gays, just as the original was new and terrifying even to straights in the 1980s and early '90s. And who knows, we may have more than an unfounded fear the next time around -- no two pathogens are alike, so maybe AIDS v.2.0 really can be caught from public toilet seats or bathroom door handles.
Do we have any data on changes in STD rates among gays over the discussed time period?
ReplyDeleteDon't know off the top of my head.
ReplyDeleteThere is still a huge % of gay men who become infected with HIV.
ReplyDeleteIn addition, w/in the last month or two, I've read several online articles about the first wave of successful survivors who were treated with anti-retrovirals, and the picture ain't pretty.
The articles detailed the health problems of these men, the result of the antiretrovirals. I suspect many of these stories will hit the airwaves and put the lie to the cavalier notion that people with HIV can live as if the virus and the drugs used to treat it don't have serious consequences.
I just read there's a new gonorrhea superbug--it's in Japan and likely to spread quickly.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-antibiotic-resistant-gonorrhea-07112011,0,4176960.story
Will be interesting in seeing which population gets hit hardest.
Assuming that AIDS does not pose a threat to straight people, what exactly is the problem with gays? Is it the cost of their medical treatment for AIDS that is paid for by the system? If not, then why are gays even considered a "problem"? I don't get it at all.
ReplyDeleteOver the years you have posted many times data that suggests that the recognized metrics of social decay are all improving. Such metrics include criminality, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and promiscuity (both straights and gays). If all of these metrics are actually improving over the long-term, which is what you argue, does this not suggests that society is not collapsing but is actually getting better? If so, it seems to me that social conservatism as a political movement is completely superfluous.
In a related point, all of these metrics seem to be improving even though believe in organized religion seems to be declining. If behavior in general is improving despite a decline in belief in conventional religion, does that suggest that organized religious belief is also superfluous from a societal standpoint?
You know, I've always considered the dangers raised by the left (global warming, peak oil) to be a load of bull. I'm coming to the view that the dangers raised by the social conservatives (societal decay, Islamism) are also a load of bull as well.
The only threat I see on the horizon is the huge amount of government regulation of the economy along with the rapidly growing debt. These are issues that mostly libertarians (Ron Paul, etc.) talk mostly about.
It appears that the only problems we face are those mentioned by libertarians.