Reflections
Kochis, Bruce
REFLECTIONS Bruce Kochis AIDS and the Mythmakers AIDS may be the most serious health crisis of the Twentieth Century, but the medical and insurance industries and the various levels of government...
...Freewheeling" sex as a symbol of liberation has more to do with Playboy and Madison Avenue: partners as consumed objects...
...AIDS becomes a terrorist, as military metaphors take over...
...The libertine experiment that began in the cauldron of the 1960s rebellion has failed, they say...
...it "crept up on the world surreptitiously...
...Time asked in one of its screeching headlines...
...Gays aren't viewed as the first group unfortunate enough to contract the virus...
...Numbers of partners and frequency of orgasm are irrelevant to a revolution that seeks to liberate sex and sexuality from the oppressive constraints of patriarchy, homophobia, consumerism, religion, and governmental control...
...The implication, of course, is that AIDS is homosexuality...
...baffle scientists...
...One counselor of AIDS patients refers to any group not addressing the issue as "being in the Korean war and not talking about the bullets...
...Because AIDS is a mysterious virus with catastrophic consequences, it naturally summons the myth-makers...
...The images they conjure up oppress not only gays, but society as a whole...
...it is on "an intercontinental killing spree...
...We cheer, associating death with evil...
...Illness or handicap become signs of deeper psychological corruption: Melville's one-legged Ahab, Tolstoy's cancerous Ivan Ilyich, Darth Va-dar's faceless visage...
...AIDS becomes a legitimate public health concern only when it jeopardizes the straight community...
...If only Rambo were a T-cell...
...According to media myth, the sexual revolution is committing suicide by lethal infection...
...Victim-blaming has long been a hallmark of our culture...
...Understanding how AIDS fits into our culture may be a first step in rehu-manizing the society...
...The two become one...
...What's a white, rich, Godfearing, good American mother and father to do...
...The media portray AIDS as possessing a mind and a demented will...
...To put sex into the privacy of the bedroom, and take it out of advertising, the confessional, the workplace, and the patriarchal marriage contract was and is the goal of the sexual revolution...
...Newsweek describes the virus as "shifty" and expresses the hope that it can be stopped in its "devious tracks...
...With astonishing ease, they have absorbed AIDS into the existing panoply of myths, whose main characters are guilt, shame, victim-blaming, homophobia, an obsessive fear of death, and a reflexive faith in the status quo...
...The virus "invades" and "attacks...
...People are poor and unemployed because they don't want to work...
...in the immune system, it "destroys its home...
...The sexual revolution has always meant tolerance and the realization of equality across lines of gender and sexual orientation...
...Indeed, our whole culture—from religion to Miami Vice—requires that the villain must die for his sins...
...The hype for the television movie An Early Frost dramatized the "real" seriousness of AIDS by having it strike a yuppie...
...Treating a person as more than just a body to be used (for work, sex, status, power) is the direct threat to a society structured on dominance and alienation...
...But the myths also have wider consequences, for they conspire to roll back the sexual revolution and its liberating potential...
...Time's lurid cartoon graphics depicts HTLV-III using guerilla tactics to enter T-cells which become "virus factories" and then are destroyed so the AIDS virus can "roam free...
...This is especially true with AIDS...
...To "contain" the crisis, the society calls upon powerful psychological and cultural features that have often warded off threats before...
...they are both diseases, they are the same disease...
...If only God will give me a break...
...War becomes the only legitimate form of human activity, or, at least, the best symbol of good fighting evil ("War on Poverty," "Conquest of Space," "War on Drugs...
...The virus is said to Bruce Kochis is a writer and editor for Northwest Passage, in which this article appeared in somewhat different form...
...But "freewheeling" sex has little, if anything, to do with sexual revolution...
...Like ancient civilizations, ours also attributes human qualities to diseases...
...As if other victims should be blamed...
...Time magazine quotes one AIDS patient: "I lived in the fast lane...
...rather, gays get AIDS because they are gay...
...The reasons for this negligence go well beyond the standard pitfalls of profit and cost-effectiveness, for AIDS exposes personal and social psychologies that are becoming less and less human...
...Newsweek's version was a caption to a photo of two children who acquired AIDS through blood transfusions: "The most blameless victims...
...Throughout history, diseases have been described as punishments for social or personal wrongdoing: People, individually and collectively, "earn" diseases as penalties for their misbehavior...
...women get raped because they ask for it...
...REFLECTIONS Bruce Kochis AIDS and the Mythmakers AIDS may be the most serious health crisis of the Twentieth Century, but the medical and insurance industries and the various levels of government are failing to meet the challenge with innovative and comprehensive programs...
...Herpes, chlamydia, and now AIDS are stopping "freewheeling" sex...
...The myths surrounding AIDS inflict harm, and we should be aware of them as we come into contact with people affected by the disease...
...But the mythmakers are using AIDS to repoliticize sex, to restore inequality, to revive intolerance...
...Now that the disease has come out of the closet, how far will it spread...
...It has meant the depoliticizing of sex...
...Because of the cultural conditioning, real victims of natural diseases compound their pain with guilt and shame...
...We are harvesting our wild oats...
...The "threat to heterosexuals appeared to be growing," Time warned...
...Myth has always played a central role in American culture, providing satisfying explanations for injustices in the society and tidy rationales for violent actions by the Government...
...Time headlines an AIDS feature, In the Middle of a War...
Vol. 50 • September 1986 • No. 9
