HIV: Still Not Just a "Gay Thing"

By Amanda Marcotte, RH Reality Check. Posted December 14, 2008.

I hinted at this on my podcast, but it's worth noting that while Quinn probably doesn't seem to realize it, he appears to be rejecting the germ theory of disease, which does seem to be a natural next step if you already reject, say, evolutionary theory.   

But this incident doesn't seem like it's going to be a solitary one, since Dennis Prager, who has a knack for taking right wing ideas and mainstreaming them, grabbed the baton and ran with it, and not to mix metaphors, but he also dressed it up with some conspiracy theory-esque rhetoric.  

Even the natural sciences are increasingly subject to being rendered a means to a "progressive" end. There was the pseudo-threat of heterosexual AIDS in America -- science manipulated in order to de-stigmatize AIDS as primarily a gay man's disease and to increase funding for AIDS research. 

Unpacking that statement for its multiple layers of homophobia is a dark past time, but I'm willing, if not happy, to oblige.  The most obvious is that Prager seems nonchalant about the possibility of just letting a deadly disease run rampant through the gay community without doing anything to stop it and save lives.  But there's also the self-congratulatory note about it, as if being born straight instead of gay is some great moral advantage that protects you from this particular disease.  And of course, the paranoid belief that there's some great gay liberal conspiracy to "trick" people into seeing what should be obvious to non-bigots, that gay people are people, too.   

Jesse Taylor traces the myth that AIDS doesn't affect straight people to a Regenery-published bit of right wing paranoia written by Michael Fumento.  That this nonsense was professionally bound doesn't make it any smarter than a ranting email forward, but the unreality of it doesn't mean that members of the reality-based community should dismiss the impact of these myths.  The belief that heterosexuality builds an impenetrable wall of safety is an appealing one to many straight people, as it justifies both homophobia and their own risk-taking behavior.  It's been 17 years since Magic Johnson tore through many stereotypes, but the battle rages on.

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Amanda Marcotte co-writes the popular blog Pandagon. She is the author of It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments.

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