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News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyMarch 18th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
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TODAY IN HISTORY:
William F. Buckley, Jr. Proposes Tattooing “All AIDS Carriers”: 1986. Two op-eds appeared in The New York Times’s editorial page under the heading, “Critical Steps in Combatting the AIDS Epidemic.” One was written by Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, and the other by conservative pundit William F. Buckley, Jr. Dershowitz’s column, in keeping with the general hysteria of the day, was not without its alarmist elements. He repeated the belief that “AIDS may, in fact, be transmissible by tears, saliva, bodily fluids and mosquito bites” — a contention that was quickly refuted by those more familiar with the disease. But he also pleaded that “the flow of solid data should not be polluted by personal moralism. … We have a right to know the hard facts about AIDS, unvarnished by moralistic prejudgements.”
That recommendation contrasted sharply with Buckley’s op-ed that appeared on the same page. Buckley acknowledged that many who see homosexuality as morally wrong also saw AIDS as a “special curse of the homosexual, transmitted through anal sex between males.” But that didn’t stop him from trying to claim that those who “tend to disapprove forcefully of homosexuality … (tend) to approach the problem of AIDS empirically.” And how did Buckley “empirically” approach the AIDS crisis?
We face a utilitarian imperative, and the requires absolutely nothing less than the identifaction of the million-odd people who, the doctors estimate, are carriers.
How?
Well, the military has taken the first concrete step. Two million soldiers will be given the blood test, and those who have AIDS will be discreetly discharged. …The next logical step would be to require of anyone who seeks a marriage license that he present himself not only with a Wassermann test but also an AIDS test.
But if he has AIDS, should he then be free to marry?
Only after the intended spouse is advised that her intended husband has AIDS, and agrees to sterilization. We know already of children born with the disease, transmitted by the mother, who contracted it from the father.
…The next logical enforcer is the insurance company. Blue Cross, for instance, can reasonably require of those who wish to join it a physical examination that requires tests. Almost every American, making his way from infancy to maturity, needs to pass by one or another institutional turnstile. Here the lady will spring out, her right hand on a needle, her left on a computer, to capture a blood specimen.
Is it then proposed …that AIDS carriers should be publicly identified as such?
The evidence is not completely in as to the communicability of the disease. But while much has been said that is reassuring, the moment has not yet come when men and women of science are unanimously agreed that AIDS cannot be casually communicated. Let us be patient on that score, pending any tilt in the evidence: If the news is progressively reassuring, public identification would not be necessary. If it turns in the other direction and AIDS develops among, say, children who have merely roughhoused with other children who suffer from AIDS, then more drastic segregation measures would be called for.
But if the time has not come, and may never come, for public identification, what then of private identification?
Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.
That was in 1986, which might seem like ancient history. But in 2005 when the news media would initiate a new round of hysteria over an imaginary AIDS “superbug,” Buckley was there again, saying that “murderers need to be stopped”:
The objective is to identify the carrier, and to warn his victim. Someone, 20 years ago, suggested a discreet tattoo the site of which would alert the prospective partner to the danger of proceeding as had been planned. But the author of the idea was treated as though he had been schooled in Buchenwald, and the idea was not widely considered, but maybe it is up now for reconsideration.
The so-called “superbug” was a phantom; but Buckley’s Buchenwaldist proposal was, apparently, serious — serious enough for him to raise again unapologetically 20 years later.
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Palmer
March 18th, 2012
I remember this so-called “superbug” and the hysteria it engendered. Even Law &Order got into the act with the gay-on-gay murder of a carrier. I honestly think GLAAD would do well to ask that Dick Wolf Prod. remove that rather hateful episode from play in syndication.
DN
March 18th, 2012
When Buckley died, I told my boyfriend I was happy that he was dead. He was disgusted that I was happy about someone’s death.
I treat people in death the way they treated people in life. Buckley, Falwell, Thurmond, Helms, and Robertson (when he goes) will never be thought of well by me.
I just don’t get that thinking that goes, “well he was miserable to those around them and made life harder for people he’d never even met, but I’m going to wish him sweet thoughts in the afterlife.”
These men didn’t ask to be thought of sweetly. I plan to continue to celebrate their deathdays.
Charles
March 18th, 2012
Having people tattooed was in hindsight over the top. I remember the hysteria. I also remember that everyone was concerned about how the virus was transmitted. I also remember that a member of the B-52s, one of the more famous rock groups of the time, lost a member to AIDS was ostracized by their fellow artists. Yes, the liberal music industry turned their back on the B-52s. It was a very, very difficult time. Everyone was at a loss of what to do. We have to remember that the manners of transmission were not totally known at the time. What the disease did do is bring a lot of gay men out of the closet who became infected who never would have disclosed their sexual orientation and making everyone talk about the homosexual community on a regular basis.
Timothy Kincaid
March 19th, 2012
I remember 1986. I was barely out. It was a peculiar time – one which many here didn’t experience and will hardly fathom.
We knew so little, but we knew that HIV was detectable, that it was spreadable through sex, and that some people were liars.
Tattooing seems horrific from this perspective … But in 1986 we were not of one mind. Those proposing the idea were not friends of the gay community and those opposing it were gay. So we were told what we had to believe. And we did – in public.
But if you were a gay kid who was HIV negative you had to ask who we were protecting. And the reality is (and this will infuriate many who read it) that the gay community spent far more time and resources protecting HIV positive people. Those who were negative were an afterthought and a far secondary consideration.
I remember those who stopped protecting themselves in part because negative guys were ignored and – in some ways – regarded as not really important and , in some circumstances, not ‘really gay’. Once positive they belonged.
I remember the fatalism. I remember going to a funeral trying to do the math of whether the tests covered the right time period for this particular hot boy. I remember the sense that “risky behavior” was soundly condemned until the moment you converted at which time all was forgiven and you switched from being a fool to being a martyr.
Buckley was wrong. I dont think tattooing would have been beneficial because it would have reduced testing, which was voluntary. But it certainly was considered as “evil” far more by those who were poz than it was by those who, despite being told to protest, on the inside secretly wished that there was a way to know if you were being told the truth by the hot guy you met in the bar.
And all these years later – decades after activism in opposition to tattooing (yes I joined our official stance) – I still resent that in our concern for the dying (yes I lost people I loved) that we didn’t always care for the living. And that we saw any effort to distinguish between the two as “hate”. I think if we had been willing to see negative people as being as worthy as positive people, we would have lost fewer.
Jay Jonson
March 19th, 2012
Buckley was simply an American fascist. No surprise that he would propose tatooing people with AIDS.
Soren456
March 19th, 2012
@Kincaid: I was born in 1988, so I wasn’t there. But I can read history as it emerges, and you have written a statement so far-fetched in places as surely to be unique to you.
Negative guys quit protecting themselves so they could become part of a positive “in crowd”? Really?
Positive results of your own foolish behavior made you a martyr? (To what?)
And strangest of all: if the community hadn’t cared so much for the dying, there’d have been fewer dying because it wouldn’t have been so . . . attractive? Or something.
In hindsight, there’s plenty of blame to share within the gay community for resistance to emerging fact (at the time), and fatalism, and indifference to protective measures.
And in 1986, if I read reports correctly, the gay community was the ONLY community caring for the dying — the dying who were simply abandoned by medicine, politics, family, the whole world. The care extended was neither wrong nor overdone, and certainly not fraught with the unexpected consequence of making death by AIDS attractive.
Timothy Kincaid
March 19th, 2012
Soren,
Yes, you can read history. I encourage you to do so.
And though you may not see it, reports from those who were there – including those voices, like mine, who do not say things you want to hear – are part of the telling of history.
[This comment was originally deleted promptly after posting. I felt it best not to debate Soren in the threads. It has been returned so that his comments have context]
Soren456
March 19th, 2012
@Kincaid 2: Thanks for the condescension. And for the pat on the head. Your generation is filled with Great Men, such as yourself, and I know that it is cheeky to ask you questions, and even more so to expect a relevant response. Consider me chastised.
But don’t consider me satisfied. You wrote nothing that I don’t “want to hear” (really, where do you see that?), but you did write things that I think are far-fetched — which is another term for barely believable, strained, unlikely.
Specifically, you wrote that the gay community, in its caring response to members dying of AIDS, made the travail of AIDS in some way so appealing that non-infected persons (“ignored” and “not really important” because they weren’t sick) sought belonging through their own new infections — and this to such an extent that deaths actually increased. And you wrote that persons whose reckless behavior drew condemnation were, once sick, automatically martyrs — all forgiven, no lessons to be learned.
This is not stuff I don’t “want to hear,” it is stuff that I think is utterly foolish. You’re free to have your thesis, but I’m free to ask questions about it and to seek expansion of the idea. Which is what I did. If I’ve mis-read you or misstated you, correct me. So far, you haven’t made an honest response.
Soren456
March 19th, 2012
Kincaid: Is there a reason that your first sneering response to my post — to which I have just replied — has now been deleted?
Donny D.
March 19th, 2012
Charles wrote,
Unless you’re talking about a VERY short period of time, no, the problem was not that manners of transmission weren’t well enough known, but that a lot of people chose to disbelieve that HIV couldn’t be transmitted through the air, via saliva, or by contact with dead AIDS sufferers. So we had mortuaries being unwilling to handle the bodies of AIDS patients, people being supposedly unwilling to buy a house where someone had died of AIDS, homophobic friends and relatives insisting that gay men eat with them on paper plates or not all all, as well as doing amazingly intelligent, efficacious things like holding their breath when riding San Francisco light rail cars that were stopped at the Castro station. Those people seemed always to be straight when their sexual orientation was known, and where attitudes were known, seemed never to be ones who had a close or positive relationship with gay people.
And some people in and working with the federal government were willing to lie about how easy it was for HIV to be transmitted in order to push for even worse proposals than Buckley’s though along the same lines, “a Star of David concept” in the words of one these proponents.
So no, it was mostly bigotry and willful ignorance with a little malicious lying mixed in, not legitimate confusion over genuinely insufficient or unclear information on methods of transmission. I remember all too well.
Donny D.
March 19th, 2012
A gay man named Walt Odets who had been working in the San Francisco gay community as a medical or psychological professional during the years that Timothy is talking about published a book in the ’90s that I think agreed with some of the things Timothy has said. I lived in San Francisco at the time, too, but other than following the gay media, cruising and a little non-mainstream pro-gay activism, I didn’t have much close contact to the gay community, so though I didn’t perceive any of the things Timothy talks about in his comment, the book seemed to offer corroboration of some of them, as hard to believe as much of what Timothy wrote might be to believe.
I do remember there was some fatalism among some of us. As well as some irrational, oddly compulsive sexuality that seemed intimately linked to the intense fear so many of us felt at the time. But mostly that it was just hard for many us to adjust to THINKING DIFFERENTLY when we were about to have sex, which is what it took to be safe. As well as being consistent about preparing beforehand. (“I’m about to go out, do I have condoms on me? Lube?”)
It was the stuff about the difference between how the community then was treating positive versus negative guys that seems so unbelievable but that Odets said was really happening then (and still was happening to an extent in the ’90s).
I never felt stigmatized for wanting to have sex during that time by the community, but I understand that some did.
But I didn’t know ANYbody who told me publicly or privately that they thought Buckley’s idea or anything like it was a good idea. Everyone I knew was clear that our enemies were the ones who wanted this.
Soren456
March 20th, 2012
For what it’s worth: Mr. Kincaid has altered the record in this thread. He posted a dismissive, patronizing reply to my first post that questions his statements.
While I wrote my response to him, he apparently returned to delete his post. I discovered this only after I submitted my post and found that it hangs there, disconnected and strange.
Kincaid lacks the ethical horsepower to admit this, or to fix it by returning his post, or to respond honestly to aspects I doubted in his very doubtful recollection.
A man who cannot be questioned is a very impressive figure, indeed.
A note to his editor has gone unanswered.
[TK: yes I posted a response and, deciding it best not to debate in the thread, promptly removed my comment. I’ve now restored it so that Soren’s comments contain context.]
Timothy Kincaid
March 20th, 2012
Donny D,
Thanks for the confirmation. I don’t claim that what I wrote was the sole thought – or even the sole thought for any individual one of us – but it is one that is seldom included in “official” recalling.
I believe that Armistead Maupin discussed the idea in one of his novels – perhaps the semi-autobiographical Night Listener, but I’m not sure which.
I don’t recall anyone agreeing with Buckley’s call for tattooing on the arm or buttocks… but I do recall some of us wishing that there really was something that would tell us.
Interestingly, there is now a subset of HIV positive people who have the biohazard symbol tattooed. However, as best I can tell, it seems to be a matter of solidarity or identity. (I also met a boy who chose the recycle symbol as a ironic response to the biohazard trend.) Here’s an article that discusses the biohazard tattoos with reference to Buckley.
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