I've taken part in a couple of debates in the past week that bring it home to me how far we have regressed in AIDS rights advocacy in the United States. We're almost back at the point we were before people literally gave their lives working to provide housing and protection from discrimination for people with AIDS. Actually, we're further back because now we know about how the virus is transmitted, and we know how to protect ourselves, so we are purely on a level of blaming the victims of HIV. Time was, that was a product of fear. Now it's just a product of elitism. That's much uglier.
In these debates, there were two major issues (lots of fringe stuff around them): Criminalizing transmission of the virus and affordable housing. The responses on both of these issues from the vast number of people on the blog where I was contributing was in favor of locking up people with HIV who had not divulged their status, and forcing people with HIV to move to areas of the country that were cheap to live in - regardless of where the individual's doctor and family and support system were located. "If they can't afford to live here on their own money, they should just move. We don't give a free ride to people with other diseases."
Ignorant bastards.
To take such a simplistic view of HIV transmission, to deny all culpability - all responsibility - of the "victim" who has unsafe sex and then wants to blame someone else for the virus; to be so flippin' naive as to think that the only thing that stands between people having unsafe sex is the threat of incarceration; to not anticipate the millions of people who will step forward to point a finger at whoever they happen to be mad at that day and blame them for their HIV infection (behaving as if they were asleep through the entire exchange themselves); to overlook the millions of people who won't get tested because, so long as they don't know they are positive they cannot be prosecuted; to not anticipate that the first step is criminalizing this kind of transmission and next is any HIV transmission and next is any sexual encounter between people with HIV followed by any sex between high risk groups followed by quarantines . . .I've there. . . I BEENknow how hysterical the public can get, particularly a public that sees themselves as somehow immune or above the dirty infected lowlife ... those kind of people that get AIDS . . . is to just spit on all the suffering and dying and trying and working and educating and demonstrating and lobbying and volunteering that my generation gave to make this world a better place. Furthermore, to be so contemptuous of people with the virus that one expects them to just move out of the way ... out of the city ... to make room for people who "deserve" to live. Holy shit! The arrogance!
This world is not better. This world is smug, self-satisfied, privileged, elitist, selfish, uncaring, vindictive and bigoted.
So this isn't a pretty blog entry. No fine work of literature here .... I am pissed. How in Hell did I go through almost 25 years of this crap just to have some snot-nose come along and start pointing fingers at these HIV people who are "to blame." Those little shits would have lasted about 10 seconds in the battle that my people went through. There were no drugs, there was no treatment, there wasn't even any kind of protection to make sure you didn't get fired or evicted or locked up. Now these punks wanna take away all of that that we worked for -- that some of my friends died working for. And these are people from within that gay community! People that most certainly should know better.
