AIDS is a test of two human capacities at once, namely self-control and compassion. My view is that, across the globe, we have failed miserably on both accounts.
On the one hand, the religious right, such as Jerry Falwell, have said utterly abominable things such as AIDS is a punishment from God. On the other, the gay community has failed to act as responsibly as it should have acted. Wild and reckless—and often anonymous—sex was deemed, by gays, as one of the defining features of the gay culture.
I have never fathomed how anyone knows whether a disaster is God’s punishment or a mere happenstance. And I have never heard anyone draw that distinction with anything remotely resembling clarity. And that, in and of itself, is a more than sufficient reason to be quite about what God’s business. Then there was the absurd hysteria that had people all but thinking that one could catch the disease by standing in the presence of someone afflicted with it or, slightly less absurd, that one could catch the disease by touching anything that a person who had it had just touched.
On the other hand, many gays took an approach that can only be described as blatant denial: “It won’t happen to me”. And some two decades later, after Rock Hudson put, AIDS on the social map, many human beings are resorting to irresponsible sexual patterns, not the least of these is bareback sex with multiple partners. The only thing missing in this Russian roulette behavior is the gun itself.
In fact, many college students seem to think that the best way to have sex is to become utterly intoxicated first, thereby assuring that the will to assert reasonable barriers of self-protection has been completely destroyed.
But society has remained sufficiently homophobic that victims of AIDS have often not been the beneficiaries of the normal outpourings of compassion for someone suffering from a fatal disease.
Today this day, it remains the case that people are quick to assume that a person is gay for no other reason that she or he knows many gay people. A white person can have mostly black friends; and a black person can have mostly white friends. But a straight person who has mostly gay friends rather quickly invites suspicions—from both gay and straight people alike. Most human beings are simply not strong enough to endure such a level of suspicion. Perhaps understandably enough.
But if straight people have difficulty doing what is right and responsible in a homophobic society, how much more so does this hold for gay people.
Necessarily, disease needs a bodily host. With compassion and responsibility, AIDS could have been deprived of what it most needed in order to kill, namely a living body.
One of my graduate student Teaching Assistants had AIDS. He has since died. But I did visit him in New York; I held him in my arms. To his death, he reacted as if he had been visited by an angel. I likened that moment to being a soldier on the battlefield—not because I was so courageous or so reasonable, but because I knew that I would never have forgiven myself had I acted otherwise.
In Honor of World AIDS Day
1 December 2005
In memory of Glenn
