I won't be voting for Mike Huckabee. Sure, he affable, humorous, a likeable guy. But he belongs to a party of criminals, war mongers and religious zealots, so I'm opting out. But many gays and lesbians will be angry at him for the resurgence of his 1992 comments about AIDS. At the time he called homosexuality a public health risk and thought that AIDS patients should be quarantined.
Huckabee told Fox Noise, ahem, Fox News, that he would say it a little differently today, and that given what he now knows about transmission may not feel the same, but he is not going to back off the statement. "I had simply made the point -- and I still believe this today -- that in the late '80s and early '90s, when we didn't know as much as we do now about AIDS, we were acting more out of political correctness than we were about the normal public health protocols that we would have acted," Huckabee told Fox News on Sunday December 9th 2007.
Now I would like to go on a rant denouncing him. The problem? The title of my book on Alyson Press is You Can't Say That! It's called that because of two specific editorials that I had written for the gay press that were banned by the publishers because in them I said that we should have treated AIDS like any other public health menace with mandatory partner notification and, at first, quarantine. But because of political correctness, it was treated as a social disease and not a medical one. So I guess I'm as homophobic as Huckabee is now being painted.
It is a different time now in the disease, but at the holiday time, I am forced to remember the generation of friends that would be with me right now celebrating, perhaps even my late husband Andrew Howard, if AIDS had been treated more aggressively like a medical condition, a communicable disease running rampant amongst a community. Reagan did nothing, the CDC was too busy competing with Gallo to name and find the damned virus, and gay men in metropolises like San Francisco were too busy defending their right to have indiscriminate sex at bath houses to really notice what was going on. AZT was the only drug after some time, and it was (and still is in some cases) as toxic and useless to many and did nothing but slow the end, not prevent it. Yes, it was dark times.
There's an entire generation of gay men today that have grown up in the age of AIDS, manageable AIDS, AIDS as a chronic illness instead of a death sentence. They have no idea how terribly dark it was in the early 1980s all the way through to basically the late 1990s with the advent of Protease Inhibitors. All they've ever seen are drug ads with healthy men in them saying "Live the life you want.." "Be all you can..." "Don't let the virus run your life..." "Live longer..." Gone are the images of the emaciated gay man, gone are the days when you would walk in to a club or gathering and see friends with purple lesions on their faces or body, only to have the person be gone in a few weeks or months. I contend that gay men have NEVER taken the time as a community to grieve the fact that much like Africa, we lost a generation of gay men. Young, beautiful, fabulously talented gay men before there was some sanity to the disease.
And recently a report from the CDC reported on in The Wall Street Journal and Washington Post reports that not only are new infections higher than expected, about 55,000 instead of the 40,000 previously thought, but also 33 U.S. states have shown a 13 percent climb in HIV infections among homosexual men from 2001 to 2005. An increase?
Why isn't there zero transmission in the gay community? We've been surrounded by this plague for almost 30 years, so why? Is it those ads I mentioned, where are the face of AIDS is alive and healthy? Is it AIDS fatigue. where people are sick of hearing about it? Is it that the disease is seen as manageable and not deadly? Or are we just plain stupid or drunk or high or all of it?
When I hear about the 13 percent increase in my community, I can't despise Mike Huckabee for what he said. After all, our way doesn't seem to be working. We have never gotten to zero transmission and should have years ago. It's an easy virus to prevent. Trust me, my late husband was HIV positive, I was (and am) HIV negative and we had great sex all the time. I always joked about us being the safe sex poster children.
But truly, how do we expect non-gays to see a rise in AIDS in our community after all these years and not talk quarantine, not talk public health risk? It's our fault if Huckabee is making such ridiculous statements. We have not proven we can handle this disease in our ranks, so, he's thinking outside help is needed. Well, Castro quarantined AIDS patients and in the general population in Cuba there is very little transmission. According to the Caribbean AIDS Action Committee the predominant route of HIV transmission in the Caribbean is heterosexual contact. Much of this transmission is associated with commercial sex, but the virus is also spreading in the general population, especially in Haiti. Cultural and behavioural patterns (such as early initiation of sexual acts, and taboos related to sex and sexuality), gender inequalities, lack of confidentiality, stigmatization and economic need are some of the factors influencing vulnerability to HIV and AIDS in the Caribbean. In Cuba the official estimate in 2005 of those living with AIDS was 4,800 which is .01 percent of the population and less than 500 deaths from AIDS. Granted, those numbers are a bit "iffy" because of the political nature of Cuba, but you get the point.
But that was then, Mr. Huckabee and this is now and luckily we're not Cuba. Now, we have this plague on our hands and it is too late to go back and say what "should" have happened. It's about what is going to happen now. And as a candidate your statements, however well intentioned or non-homophobic you may think, are as antiquated as the medicine they were steeped in.
It's not up to Mike Huckabee or any other President to stop AIDS transmissions, particularly in the gay community. That's up to us, and we can't seem to get that right yet. AIDS is still a fatal illness. Sorry, but true. Yes, it's more manageable now, and yes the mortality rate has dropped dramatically, but believe me, having it is no picnic. Ask anyone with it. What we as a community need to do is show the United States and the world that the gay men in America can lead the way in the fight, can get new infections down to less than one percent, and can lead the campaign to educate others since we are the veterans of this war. If we can't then Huckabee is right but for the wrong reasons. We should be quarantined, at least those with new infections, not because of HIV but because of rampant stupidity. Yes, you heard me. If you contract HIV in 2007 or 2008 and are a gay man and don't get it through rape, infected blood products or some other non-consensual way, you are an idiot that is a danger to yourself and your community. Now, we still love our idiots and care for them, but it's time we start saying the facts. Maybe if stronger language came from our community, Huckabee's quotes would sound tame. Maybe if we stepped up and said yes, mistakes were made, the disease was treated wrongly, but now look, we're on the ball, we've got the goods, we're leading the way for a cure and for zero transmission and we are talking turkey with our own community and not letting people off the hook when it comes to personal responsibility.
But that would require us acting like part of a whole instead of an isolated little group. We've already isolated and quarantined ourselves in gay ghettos across America.
Huckabee's message is the wrong one for this time. But we do need a new message because what we're doing isn't working. 55,000 new infections annually instead of 40,000 as previously thought and a 13 percent rise amongst gay men is not a success, it's a failure. We can't blame Republicans for that, unless you vote Democrat and sleep Republican since they seem to be freaks behind closed doors or bathroom stalls.
No, the virus was treated wrong back then. And today, something is still going wrong with the message and the attitude in the gay community. We need to fix that, not politically, but socially. Until we do, they'll always be somebody out there saying we're a danger to public health, because, well, some of us are.
He may have been right then, but let's try and prove him wrong now, shall we? Use condoms, realize promiscuity isn't a character trait of which to be proud in a time of sexual diseases and more importantly, get the message to our young in terms they'll understand, and yes, put a little fear in them so they won't run out and attend a bareback party or get drunk and figure one time won't hurt.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over the same way and expecting different results. Let's prove we're sane about AIDS, and lead the way. Let's make a resolution for 2008: Less than one percent new infections in the gay community. We can do it. Then the only people that will need to be quarantined are dinosaurs that think like Huckabee, put in a zoo for misguided conservatives. Wait, there is one -- it's called Washington, D.C.
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