The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, by Michael Fumento
Munson, Steven C.
A few years ago AIDS produced an outburst of national hysteria quite unlike anything in recent memory. Today it has been relegated to the status of a national piety. It remains, of course, of acute...
...What makes it authoritative is that Fumento, unlike most journalists and commentators, has taken the trouble to locate the handful of medical experts who actually know what they're talking about when it comes to AIDS...
...As Michael Fumento writes in his exhaustive account of America's reaction to the disease, "other than fairly spectacular rare occurrences, such as shark attacks and maulings by wild animals, it is difficult to name any broad category of death that will take fewer lives than heterosexually transmitted AIDS...
...Murder, fire, fatal falls, accidental poisonings, gun accidents, suffocation, drowning—each will claim far more heterosexual lives this year than AIDS...
...and unlike syphilis, gonorrhea, and other sexually transmitted diseases, it cannot be spread by mere genital contact...
...and Anastasia Lekatsas, the city's formerchief investigator of AIDS cases...
...Since few of those responsible for interviewing AIDS patients were as skeptical and persistent—and as careful about drawing conclusions—as Anna Lekatsas, the claim that AIDS was being spread heterosexually by prostitutes gained ready acceptance...
...The widely trumpeted notion that heterosexual promiscuity would be the vehicle of a full-scale national epidemic was, as Fumento conclusively demonstrates, a perfect inversion of reality...
...He has combed through books, technical medical journals, popular magazines, newspapers, and television programs...
...Both the government, in the preeminent form of the Surgeon General, and the media chose to ignore the specialists who were developing a true picture of the disease and to follow the path of sensationalism, declaring, on the basis of nothing more substantial than reshuffled statistics, that the AIDS virus could be transmitted just as easily through heterosexual (vaginal) sex as through homosexual (anal) sex...
...In his effort to trace the development of this idea, Fumento seems to have read just about everything ever written about AIDS...
...So we kept investigating, and eventually we found out that he was homosexual...
...Her job, in essence, was to resolve cases that at first seemed mysterious: There was a young guy from the Navy, and his doctor reported that he was a heterosexual...
...THE MYTH OF HETEROSEXUAL AIDS Michael Fumento/Basic Books-A New Republic Book/411 pp...
...or if you are someone who receives blood from a contaminated supply, which is how hemophiliacs were infected before sophisticated blood screening was introduced...
...or if you are a drug addict who shares a needle that contains traces of blood drawn from an infected user...
...As Fumento shows, this claim played a decisive role in transforming AIDS in the public mind from a disease primarily afflicting homosexuals and intravenous drug abusers (who were overwhelmingly black or Hispanic, urban, and poor) into a disease that posed an equally serious threat to white, suburban, middle-class heterosexuals...
...Rand Stoneburner, director of AIDS Research at the New York City Department of Health...
...In fact, the average American heterosexual has a greater chance of being struck by lightning than of getting AIDS—and only about 360 direct lightning strikes are recorded in the U.S...
...The AIDS virus is blood-borne...
...Alexander Langmuir, a founder of modern epidemiology (the study of epidemics...
...Here, the long-predicted "breakout" of AIDS into the general population never materialized for the simple reason that, by itself, normal heterosexual sex—even between men and women who are considered promiscuous—is a highly inefficient means of transmitting the AIDS virus...
...Like this sailor, more than a few of the men who got AIDS were ashamed to tell the truth about themselves (this appears to have been the case with infected Haitians, one of the three risk groups identified early on...
...By the time the campaign of hype and fear had peaked, some people were prepared to believe that AIDS was as transmissible as the common cold...
...Harold Jaffe, until recently the chief epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control...
...His book is undoubtedly the most complete and reliable guide to AIDS currently available...
...He has also done extensive interviewing and reporting on his own...
...There was a question, "What percentage of the time during sex did you or your partner insert a fist in the rectum...
...That is, it can be spread through blood-to-blood contact or through contact of some other bodily fluid—e.g., semen—with the blood of a recipient...
...But for most of us, AIDS is simply the latest institutionalized fad: something we think we should be interested in or concerned about but to Steven C Munson, a frequent contributor, has also written for Commentary and the National Interest...
...They include Dr...
...He answered, "Fifty percent...
...You can get it, for example, if you are a homosexual who engages in receptive anal intercourse, a practice that can cause ruptures that give semen from an infected partner direct access to your blood vessels...
...So we sent a worker over, and the guy said no to the questions about homosexuality or bisexuality, and the worker kept going through the forms...
...While it is no longer portrayed as another Black Death, the idea that it is some kind of baffling menace capable of striking at random remains intact...
...Unlike colds, measles, influenza, and pneumonic plague, it cannot be spread by coughing or sneezing...
...It remains, of course, of acute interest to its victims, their families, and friends, as well as to medical researchers, public health officials, lobbies of one sort or another, and the politicians they seek to influence...
...unlike malaria and bubonic plague, it cannot be spread by insect bites...
...which we are actually thoroughly indifferent...
...Often they resorted to the lie that they must have contracted the disease from a prostitute...
...Lekatsas's work, in particular, was critical since it was on the basis of her investigations that a determination would be made as to how a particular person acquired AIDS...
...For a variety of reasons, including ignorance, political expediency, and deference to the notion that homosexuality is a natural alternative to heterosexuality, AIDS was systematically misrepresented by those to whom the public looked for guidance...
...Making such pronouncements on the basis of invalid research, or in some cases no research at all, doctors, public health officials, and journalists differed little in their behavior from the tabloids, talk shows, and sex experts...
...The prevalence of other sexually transmitted diseases is, in fact, one of the factors—along with widespread (though publicly denied) bisexuality, unusual sexual customs, and backward medical care (including the practice of re-using syringes and a lack of blood screening)—that has contributed to the spread of AIDS among heterosexuals in Africa, where the disease has taken an altogether different course from that in the U.S...
...You can also get it if you are a woman suffering from genital ulcers who has sex with an infected man...
...For reminding us of this unpleasant truth, Michael Fumento deserves a large measure of our gratitude...
...Notwithstanding this reality, AIDS continues to be discussed in terms that suggest that anyone can get it...
...The reason for this seems plain enough: AIDS is not, and has never been, a threat to the health of the vast majority of Americans...
...In fact, it was the unparalleled promiscuity of homosexuals—of men who engaged in repeated acts of anal intercourse with literally thousands of other men—that led to the outbreak of AIDS and assured its spread, first throughout the homosexual community and later on to others...
...I n truth, of course, AIDS is extremely difficult to transmit...
...22.95 Steven C. Munson 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1990...
...indeed, the irresponsibility of one only seemed to reinforce that of another...
...I think he didn't realize that heterosexuals don't do that...
...each year...
Vol. 23 • June 1990 • No. 6
