AIDS Crisis: The Sorrow of the City
Borden, Anthony
A gay man unflinchingly attends to his lover having seizures even though he knows that his own developing symptoms of AIDS may hold the same agony for him. A priest visits a homebound man with...
...These groups do not have the political cohesion that gays have shown, and, particularly for Latinos who have contracted the HIV (human immuno-deficiency virus) virus through sex, the disease can be a harsh stigma even within their own community...
...Although the sorrow of the city lies in its social tensions, it has an amazing cohesion all the same...
...In the arts that loss will be made up only in the smallest way by the morbid but intense inspiration the crisis has given to writers, painters, and others...
...each case of frank AIDS requires between $50,000 and $100,000...
...This inverted sense of priorities can only be deadly, since testing without counseling is useless, while education alone can save lives...
...Reported antigay violence doubled in 1986 over the 1985 level, much of it linked to the "AIDS backlash...
...For much of the argument over AIDS policy is a continuation of the ridiculous "debate" over morals and sexual behavior that the right has thrust on us...
...As the available educational materials often stress, AIDS does not discriminate...
...q FALL • 1987 • 563 564 • DISSENT...
...The Gay Men's Health Crisis, founded in 1981, lobbies, raises funds, and has assembled an army of 1,500 volunteers to provide support and home care for an equal number of people with AIDS...
...As the gay community has matured in the past few years, so the idea of sexual liberation may also mature, bringing with it a more truly open dialogue on sexuality at familial, social, and political levels...
...Bailey House, in the West Village, cares for homeless people with AIDS...
...With official policy drawing such lines in the sexual battleground, private-sector homophobia is nurtured...
...Although many religious groups from all denominations have taken a leading role in AIDS work, within the Catholic Church the ranks have closed...
...And a five-year city plan covering health care and education, to be administered by a central AIDS office, was seriously weakened during budget negotiations...
...At a time when the gay community is in shock, humbled, and endangered, it finds itself also under social siege...
...When will the public period of mourning begin...
...A priest visits a homebound man with AIDS-related dementia who, convinced there is a disembodied spirit inhabiting his house, leads the father to every room, to bless them...
...Thus this crisis only bears out society's discrimination...
...Still, the discretionary funds were substantially increased from last year, although wrongheadedly: while the allocation for voluntary testing and for tracking the infection tripled, that for education and counseling only doubled...
...Overall AIDSrelated spending for the current fiscal year will reach $115 million, but that figure is deceptive, since 85 percent of it is mandated spending, particularly for health care...
...Edward Koch seems not to realize his moral obligation to show the world how to deal with AIDS, but he misses a pragmatic consideration too...
...No one has understood this better than the numerous private groups in the city, whose efforts to educate the public and tend to people with AIDS have been the most organized and inspiring...
...By what mental arithmetic can one comprehend such a figure...
...It is only through such an openness that we will ever conquer AIDS...
...Official squeamishness and outright disdain for public education are also reflected in the few public-service announcements that have been posted...
...And the People With AIDS Coalition gives advice and friendship in a dark time...
...Rafael Tavares of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center believes that by 1991, when there will be up to 50,000 new cases in the country each year, 65 percent of those will be people of color...
...Governor Cuomo wants criminal penalties for anyone who knowingly passes on the HIV virus...
...And the quick, tireless response of many people in the city shows that humane coalitions can be formed...
...And a member of the People With AIDS Coalition—somehow apologetic— puts off an interview yet again because he is feeling too weak...
...Koch's grandstanding aside, the city has initiated a number of progressive programs...
...And with the intensified moralistic rhetoric comes an invigorated squadron of sex police always ready to keep us from confronting the disease...
...And medical science has only vague statistical impressions to suggest how many people might have AIDS-related complex (ARC) or how many of those might go on to develope AIDS...
...Is New York destined to be seen as the center for AIDS care or only for AIDS infection...
...And no medical breakthrough could ever redeem the shameful, tardy response...
...That number every year...
...How does a city express its grief...
...In response to a letter from Phyllis Schlafly, Jack Kemp and Bob Dole withdraw their sponsorship of a banquet honoring the surgeon general because his programs for AIDS education are too "soft" on homosexuality and sex generally...
...Nevertheless, the imaginative deficiency responsible for the delay persists...
...As the crisis has mounted, the percentage of minority cases has risen, up six points from a few years ago...
...What do we do then...
...In spite of the stakes, Koch blunders badly, often parroting the reigning political nonsense...
...At least there is a measure of public consciousness, thanks largely to the gay community, but an overwhelming ignorance remains...
...Most of the pious calls to check the spread of the disease before it reaches the "general population" are clear admissions that gays, people of color, drug users, are not generally considered part of "our" population...
...These are the sad and heroic stories of our city now...
...Encouraging conclusions are hard to come by when the best odds are for a vaccine in ten years or more and Senator John Danforth wonders publicly about the wisdom of wasting federal funds on the terminally ill "simply to make [them] feel better...
...Our crisis of health may become a crisis of democracy...
...In a city so recently famous for incidents of racially motivated violence, the terror spreads another way: up to 55 percent of all cases of AIDS here have struck blacks and Latinos, predominantly through intravenous drug use, passing from there to mothers and children (ninety percent of all children with AIDS are black or Latino...
...Fifty thousand...
...The president has finally, feebly spoken out on AIDS...
...Yet where we have the divisions white/black, rich/poor, male/female, the AIDS crisis has added one more destabilizing split: HIV negative/HIV positive...
...As much as any public official, Koch has contributed to this sideshow by subscribing to the false dichotomy between medical imperatives and civil rights...
...These proposals are not supported by medical authorities and only detract from—and even undermine—the real work of education, health care, and research...
...The answer to this question will determine whether the city can remain a home for so many kinds of people...
...Fear is used the way exaggerated claims of national security are: to justify inhumane public policy...
...Particularly for politicians, but also for many straight people and for the mainstream (and even left) press, there is an inability to see AIDS as our illness...
...Early efforts focused on straight women, while a more recent campaign has preached sexual abstinence to teenagers...
...A playwright details with excruciating immediacy how a man with AIDS becomes profoundly isolated though he is not left to die alone, reminding us that so many others surely are...
...Make the infected wear a yellow star...
...Conditions are extreme, but professional prescription calls for the opposite of such proposals...
...Most will never realize the extent of AIDS fear and discrimination, but already a vast number of people in the city have lost friends, colleagues...
...What greater absurdity will he have put forward in the time it takes for this article to go to press...
...The rights of those infected—from health care to housing to an untagged, unstigmatized life—must be pursued with as much vigor as the scientific research...
...But such figures should serve to remind officials that money held back now will in a few years be needed many times over, for far less hopeful purposes...
...When Koch reaches for the profound with 562 • DISSENT CONFLICTS AND CONSTITUENCIES his statement, "The only safe sex is no sex," he only sounds profoundly out of touch...
...AIDS is indeed a badge, not of deviancy, but of inequality...
...By June 30 the city had recorded 10,601 cases— the highest by far in the country—and an estimated 500,000 were infected with the virus, including perhaps half the gay community...
...Proposals to make syringes available over the counter so that addicts will not have to share needles have been blocked at the state level...
...And New York City is at last considering the conversion of a hospital into an AIDS center (though it is unlikely to be available soon...
...John J. McNeill, a Jesuit, has been ousted from his order because of his outspoken support of gays...
...The existence of these groups allows for the hope that a social and sexual retrenchment is not inevitable...
...And every week, up to 100 of them come to a close...
...The death of so many young men and women in particular will have a devastating effect on the city's professional corps...
...This reasoning allows Koch to imply that unappealing proposals are forced on us by extreme conditions...
...And Koch, capping a streak of unhelpful proposals, suggested testing all foreigners entering the city—for pleasure or business—regardless of how long they plan to stay...
...The number of American dead in the entire Vietnam War...
...Can it continue to provide opportunity and social liberation, or will it become instead a place to fear...
...That is, literally, not the half of it...
...But these aesthetic memorials, or the more private, personal ones, may not be sufficient to purge the tremendous weight of sadness that builds day by day...
...Koch is in touch with a politics that sees the crisis as the end of the sexual/social liberation efforts of the past two decades...
...the fine line between communal and confrontational impulses gives New York its real edge...
...The Reagan administration is fixated on mandatory testing...
...A priest who visits people with AIDS tried to convene a workshop at a meeting of clerics and found that no one would attend...
...Under pressure from conservative religious forces, Koch follows with his abstinence campaign...
...Intolerance has become even more generally acceptable...
...As one gay man in the city told me, "I'm afraid of dying of AIDS, but I'm also afraid of surviving...
...The course of AIDS from first infection to development of frank symptoms to death can be up to fifteen years...
...Although New York's response to AIDS has been leagues ahead of Washington's, the city has not proposed as comprehensive a plan as San Francisco...
...a lawyer asked, referring to mandatory testing...
...There is an AIDS antidiscrimination unit in the Commission on Human Rights, and over the next year the Health Department will distribute one million condoms in bars, massage parlors, and porn theaters...
...The number of fans who pack Yankee Stadium for an important game...
...This political and civic danger threatens New FALL • 1987 561 CONFLICTS AND CONSTITUENCIES York as much as anywhere...
...It is true that this crisis could bankrupt any public coffer...
...The Bishop of Brooklyn rescinded permission for the gay Catholic group Dignity to hold mass in a church in the diocese...
...But bureaucratic lethargy and the politicians' rhetoric of the Other have led to murderous results...
...The costs in public welfare and social services are incalculable...
...These messages might complement a broadly directed educational strategy, but they appear in a context of severe neglect of the groups most at risk...
Vol. 34 • September 1987 • No. 4
