Many years ago, a talented young editor asked me to write a story about AIDS. He wanted to get at the stigma and the fear surrounding the disease, its toll across humanity. So he suggested that I find a dozen or so people who had died of AIDS. "Honor their lives," he told me. "Show us who they were."
This was where things got a little rough. Few people wanted to talk to me about AIDS. Some refused to accept that their child or their father or their sister had even died of the disease, so why was I asking them about it? Some were furious. Others were frightened of public exposure or being shunned by family members or losing their jobs. Some were just in shock. They believed the lie they'd been told that AIDS was a "gay disease." I recall one middle-class woman whose husband had been a teacher. She had not known about his drug use until shortly before he wasted away. When he died his teenage daughter still didn't know what killed him.
Calling AIDS a gay disease not only made it easy for politicians like Ronald Reagan to dismiss it as a growing public health threat, but to cast it as a moral issue. At times the Christian Right seemed almost gleeful. All those homosexuals were dying because they were sinners. AIDS was their punishment.
That talented young editor I knew? He died of AIDS too. His conservative Catholic family never told a soul.
So many years later, AIDS is out of the closet. No one thinks anymore that you can get HIV by sitting on a toilet seat, or sharing saliva, or brushing against a doorknob. But with so many millions continuing to die or fall ill, we have yet to accept the epidemic for what it is: a disease like polio or cancer that people need to be educated about and treated for.
A disease people get but never deserve.
Which brings me to George W. Bush's latest lunacy on how to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS. Which is to avoid sex completely. He's aiming this dangerous nonsense at those who most need good solid health information: teenagers and young people. (I wonder what the Bush twins think of Daddy's plan?) We all know now how terrific those federally funded abstinence programs in public schools have worked. Teens are still having lots of sex--surprise, surprise--and yet because some want to pretend they're not, they're not using birth control. Or condoms. The lesson is obvious. Do we really need to go through another generation of denial and ignorance again on this? I would no more tell the 16-year-old that the only way he can avoid AIDS is not to have sex then I would tell him than it's OK to drive drunk. They're both lethal.
So is Bush's idea.