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I’d like to reflect on these and these relatively recent comments by @Walterodim and @HonoriaWinchester on the official response to the initial AIDS epidemic in the US and California in particular (I guess).
Not being an American I only have a vague idea about this entire subject. As far as I can tell, the standard Blue Tribe narrative in the context of the culture war on this is that the bigoted and evil Reagan administration, politically captured by Christian fundamentalists and pandering to Southern racists, callously refused to even consider the idea of formulating a federal response to a dangerous epidemic, and missed a good opportunity to contain the spread thereof by allocating federal funds to research and preventive measures.
Fair enough. But let’s assume for a moment that the administration had actually tried doing all those things earnestly, for real. What are the realistic chances that whatever measures they’d have come up with were bound to include the decisions to publicly call upon homosexual men to refrain from a) having unprotected sex with strangers altogether b) donating blood?
The "donating blood" bit is probably unavoidable-- but also I suspect it's just not very salient, even for leftists fighting the culture war. My dad didn't give blood for a long time because there was a mad cow disease outbreak in the region he lived and at some point he was told not to. And honestly, he just didn't really care. Giving blood is an act of charity. People get more mad about the idea that their community doesn't care about them than the idea that the community doesn't need as much of their help.
I'll concede that the "no unprotected sex" thing would probably be looked at unfavorably no matter what, but at least hypothetically reagan could have pissed off different people. Imagine if instead of saying, "no sex," he'd said, "instead of penetrating each other, why not try out these bizarre fetishes?" and subsequently promoted, for example, full-body latex condoms, humping in fursuits, teledildonics, tying up people in chairs and verbally abusing them while they pleasured themselves, etcetera. In a degenerate alternate universe reagan could have enraged the conservatives instead of the liberals by trying to convince America that penetrative sex was for boring straight people.
Yeah, after I visited China was I banned from donating for a period of time because when I went to Xi'an it was technically in a malaria zone. Didn't seem like a big deal.
When I as in middleschool, there was a kid with Hemophilia. Had a rough time of things. Felt like every few weeks he'd be on crutches cause he got a bruise on his leg or something. I remember in 7th grade science class when we were learning about the AIDs epidemic in the anodyne way it might be taught about it effecting everyone and everyone needing to be careful, he flew into a rage. Kept yelling over the teacher that it was those damned gays that spread it absolutely fucking everywhere with their promiscuous lifestyles.
Of course, he was a hemophiliac child in the 80's when HIV positive gays were contaminating the blood supply. I never put two and two together then, but I always wondered if he was personally effected by that, or merely righteously angry that he was put in harms way.
I mean, even just a year or two ago when Monkeypox was spreading, the humble suggestion that gays stop having giant unprotected orgies with multiple strangers was viewed as a demand that "gays stop having sex". There seems to exist a certain vocal segment that gets their way that any insistence that gays use protection or practice monogamy is akin to trying to get them to stop being gay.
My interpretation of it was more that, if you decouple 'advice given to gay people' from 'advice given to straight people', those who harbour animus against gay people could then tell gay people to abstain from any sex, even in a monogamous marriage, while placing no burdens on straight people, and there would be little to no motivation to ever lift that injunction. One could avoid this by imposing the same interventions on straight people, and not lifting them on straight people until one lifts them on gay people.
"Do not participate in massive unprotected orgies" is an intervention that can be equally applied to both straights and gays. And in fact, straight people were already de facto banned from participating in massive unprotected orgies based on the many, many restrictions placed on gatherings. And yet my recollection is that gays thumbed their noses at the rules, and were allowed to, even when it was causing a mini-pandemic within the pandemic.
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