Various and Sundry
September 29th, 2007 — -Please visit Various and Sundry, where we’re having a fantastic discussion about the whole big mess.
Ta!
Please visit Various and Sundry, where we’re having a fantastic discussion about the whole big mess.
Ta!
October 1st, 2007 at 8:58 am
I’m reposting the conversation below:
Is the HIV/AIDS Paradigm a Bad Thing?
Liam said something recently that’s been rolling around in my mind. At first, I casually set it aside, maybe even dismissed it. But some thoughts and ideas have a way of breaking through mental filters and barriers.
He said something to the effect that “AIDS” may be necessary for gay men to keep the religious right at bay. Or, perhaps gay men continue to hold onto the AIDS belief system because letting go of it could create a mighty backlash from religious fundamentalists…who may have been mollified to a degree over these past twenty-some years in their happy belief that gay men are dying for their sins.
I’m still mulling over this. Not sure if I think such a backlash would occur or not.
There’s no doubt that the AIDS belief system serves a myriad of societal functions. So, does that make the HIV/AIDS paradigm inherently bad? Should we let go of something that serves so many functions, so many people’s needs?
Posted by
Dan at
9:17 AM
Manu said…
There is something that needs to be put into perspective when talking about certain aspect of the AIDS question and that is to draw a clear distinction between what is a global problem and a local one.
America is the most powerful nation in the world, however it is not the entire world. When you refer to the religious fundamentalist right wing reaction you must realise that it is a purely local phenomenon.
AIDS started off being an American problem and then went on to become a global problem. When people talk about the religious right and their reaction to aspects of AIDS, even when I do it, we are all really referring to an American problem, which has a huge repercussion on the way America handles and solves the problem, and the conclusions it reaches politically and even historically it usually standardises, packages and exports everywhere else and is adopted.
In Europe we do not have this problem because I believe we actually exported that problem to America in the XVI and XVII century because they were making life impossible for everyone over here.
In Europe we have the Vatican but no one really listens to what they say, only the Italians are saddled with them, and they at least bring in huge financial returns to the country; love them or hate them. Even if the AIDS scam were exposed the Vatican would only feel vindicated as they always maintained that condoms were a waste of time and that they were not going to stop AIDS if it were actually a sexually transmitted disease anyway.
The English French, Germans, Scandinavians, Spanish, Russians, Balkans and the Portuguese do not have this problem. Nor do they have this problem in Africa, South America or the Far East either.
One should also filter the needs AIDS is covering through this fact too and again you will see that for us the imported standardisation material on all level from America is something that everywhere else is accepted automatically. That’s why if the AIDS scam were exposed all eyes everywhere would automatically and mainly look over there, and all mouth would ask in unison: WTF?
In many ways this is entirely a local problem the consequences of which are felt globally, but more than anything it is local.
That’s why you can pose that question. It is a question that only applies and can be comprehended from an American perspective. To us here it would be inconceivable to contemplate and ever accept.
Does this make sense?
Liam Scheff said…
Well,
I have so much to say on this…
I’m beat dead tired, and need to soak knots out of my back… but here is a ramble…
It is an amazing paradigm, for all it wraps up in its old testament rubric of ’sex is bad (with and for non-members of the tribe)’.
It’s a prohibition, in an age where prohibitions have been thrown out.
We still need prohibitions to curb our behavior, to tell us what to think, a new 10 commandments, if you will.
But we can’t accept any religious authority. We’ve done away with it. It’s passe’, old hat, not to be mentioned…
But we’re human, and we create belief systems out of any fabric we have to weave…so we weave a new church out of the available artifacts of our culture..
And we make (and bow to) the church of now - the church of the golden microscope, the church of technology, the church of belief in a science that will end all pain, death and destruction, and leave us in a world of singing iPods and…well, not ‘world peace’ anymore… but at least, a world without the burden of ‘that old time religion’…
And now, sexual fear and prohibition is ‘like, responsible, maaan.’ (for the homos and dark-skinned). But the brain-dead pseudo-liberati do it in the college dorms without fear, and without dumdums, after the first few thrusts. And what’s to worry? There’s no ‘aids’ epidemic in white heterosexuals; in wealthy, well-fed kids anyway! (what a surprise! No need to test them! They’re not in the “risk group!”)
‘Oh, it must be ‘genetic’! Quick, someone give me a grant and five years to waste looking into that!’
But pity the ‘blecks’ in South Africa, and the homersecsuals world wide, who are just ‘victimized’ by the ‘virus’.
(that is, who are tested ad infirmity, while the rest of the wealthy world skates by - test and ‘risk group’ free).
And what a surprise, huh? White South Africans, absolutely CERTAIN that all the Blacks they used to imprison, starve, beat and kill (but who are now ‘free’)..
.. That these poor souls somehow, “tragically” now also have a deadly “sex” disease..that will kill them, unless we stop them from breeding (condoms, condoms!) and treat them like criminals for having sex, and wrap them (but not us) in prophylactics! And drug them (to death) them while sick and pregnant, in order to ’save their lives.’
What a surpise, huh? That heroic south african activists, want to make sure to drug the life out of poor Black South Africans.
What a shocker! What a …
…Predictable turn of events, if you’re familiar with a little bit of history.
But Aids is good for so much. It gives so many irredeemably servile lab jockeys an income, on which to pay for apartments near harvard and other (slave-built) institutes of repute, so that they can someday make a ‘vaccine’ to stop ‘aids’.
(Why not make a vaccine to stop poverty?)
It’s good for sooo much. It lets us undermine the authority of sovereign nations - throughout africa, asia, india. It lets us count (and try to limit) populations.
It lets us sell drugs to people who really, really, really need some clean water and food (and a government that won’t sell them for meat or kindling, to the western world).
It is good for sooo many things.
It protects the gay community here -from the hard right.
Take away the ‘aids’ paradigm, and no gay person would be safe in this country. If the gay community were to admit that the whole ’sex-virus’ definition of what was always a multitude of illnesses, of factors, of events, of non-events - but that it was a cock-up, the least likely explanation for what was going on, that was still seized upon and fomented into a religion -
if this were admited, no gay person would be safe from attack from the very hard right, which does not approve of homosexuality, and would now blame it for terrorizing the world with a fear of normative, healthy (and especially reproductive) sex, for 25 years;
for ruining the FDA, the pharma-medical business, and for much more.
The gay community cannot leg go of Aids safely. They cannot do it, not even examine the faults in it reasonably, without inviting so much hatred, that they simply would not be safe.
It’s a brutal, terrible, catch-22. It is between the hardest rock, and the hardest hard place, that I know. Between the ‘compassionate’ doctors of death (who tell you your viral load actually means something, and ‘really listens’ while you complain about your ‘crix belly’), and the hardest elements of the hard right, who’d just as soon see you hang as get married in a church.
It’s not easy, it’s not fair. It’s just brutal.
I tell so many ‘dissidents’ not to hold their breath. That Aids isn’t going away. It’s got years left in it. Maybe when all of Africa is used up for oil, minerals, fissionable material, etc… maybe then, no one will be told that deathly, wretchedly poor people die because they have sex… maybe.
But we’ve loved that line since Leviticus. We’ll love it after Aids is over.
It serves so many masters, this ‘aids’ crusade…
Dan said…
Liam,
still pondering the religious right backlash against gays if we let go of the paradigm…
Another fear we may have in letting go of the belief system, is that we may lose any cultural and legal “gains” we’ve made in the past twenty-some years.
I think that letting go of AIDS will be very clarifying. It will show us that many of the “gains” we supposedly made were in essence under false pretenses. Would we have made those gains if we weren’t perceived as the world’s ultimate victims? I don’t think so. Gay men have used victim status for political and cultural gain. I’ve asked many times…what will we do if we aren’t victims anymore?
So, should there be a backlash if we let go of the HIV/AIDS belief system, we will quickly see where we really stand.
Will the religious fundamentalists declare all out war on gays should we reject the paradigm? Will brain-dead liberals no longer love us when we aren’t victims and not having safe sex anymore or taking our “life-saving drugs”?
September 29, 2007 12:06 AM
Liam Scheff said…
Yes, would the brain-dead,Will and Grace, Grey’s Anatomy-watching ‘liberals’ still love homosexuals if they didn’t have to feel sorry for them? If gay men weren’t ‘cursed’ by “hiv” (but not by God!)…
Would the Oprah-matons feel a thing for people starving in Africa if they couldn’t obsess over the non-Christian sex lives of the Africans?
If they couldn’t give them a ‘proper moral education?’
It’s an old story. I’ll be posting some of the Papal Bulls (Decrees/Legislation) from the 15th Century on my site soon, with some notes.
The story was the same - these Godless people can be taken as property, or converted to a ‘proper’ way of being, (and we’ll take their land and possessions while we’re there, just because we’re doing such noble work).
It’s the Aids crusade, the ongoing belief that some people are cursed, (the poor, and brown, and certainly the ‘deviants’) and some are blessed (the wealthy).
Old stuff, but it never goes away.
But, as I said before, if Delaney and the rest of the Aids mafia came out tomorrow, and said, “WHOOPS! Wasn’t the SEX after all! Sorry!” You’d see the gay parades cut short on main street, by a lot of very, very angry people.
So you see the rabid, putsch-like, fascistic tactics used by the aidsmafia (see aidstruth on the web). They might as well say “kill the ‘denialists!’ for how reasonable they are.
They do say, “Don’t debate with ‘denialists’. Don’t talk to them. Denialism kills!’
They attack individuals, but refuse debate or even discussion. They libel and blame and condemn, but they tell us they have the moral high ground,and so are to be trusted, even as they wish for the total destruction of science, of debate, of open research - and of individuals who have dared oppose them.
There is such a fever in these people, it’s so subconscious, I doubt they could even be made aware of how hateful and terrified they are.
You just want to say, ‘calm down, relax. Christ, nobody wants to hurt you! We just want to figure out why we’re doing such remarkably shitty science and medicine here!’
But it’s all too much for them. I mean, go look at the site, it’s so hateful, so bitter, so bilious. It’s terrifying in a way, that they don’t see how much they have crossed the line into pure fascist rhetoric. But they don’t see it, and have declared that they will not entertain any discussion.
It is for them, the Lords of Aids, to instruct everyone in what is correct and how to think.
You can look at the transcript of the ‘aids’ conference for last year, when they cooked up this notion - Debate is Not Allowed!
You can see the S.African group forward that. It’s pure fascist rhetoric, and the white South Africans know all about it.
Anyway, it’s such a fantastical conundrum. I doubt it will ever be totally sorted out - or at least, only about as well as the European Crusades into the near east. We still are reaping the fruits of that adventure.
Hope you’re well. Like your blog!
Liam
Dan said…
Liam,
it seems that you are in agreement that the HIV/AIDS paradigm serves many functions. Many of those functions are historical and deeply rooted in our most basic fears and anxieties.
This leads me to some questions.
With so many people’s needs being served, are there any benefits in letting go of the paradigm? What in the world will fill the many voids created when there is no longer “HIV/AIDS”? Or is it not about letting go of the paradigm, but more about a jarring paradigm shift?
From the gay perspective, I don’t think we’re anywhere near being ready to let go of our victim status. That’s a hell of a huge void to fill…and with what?!
What about Africa? What will Africans do without “HIV/AIDS”? You mention South Africa. Seems like all sorts of buried racial tension would come to the surface. Is South Africa ready for more turmoil? What about Bono!? We can’t let go of this thing…Bono will end up looking stupid. Can’t have that.
September 30, 2007 7:38 AM
Anonymous said…
Liam,
I’m a big fan of yours, despite that we don’t see eye-to-eye on your hatred of individual property rights.
I am a gay man and am fascinated by the psychological and religious aspects of AIDS. You raise a very interesting point, one that I had never considered: AIDS protects gay people from the wrath of fundamentalist Christians, who are content to leave gays alone knowing that they’ll eventually be justly killed off by all that gay sex they have. If AIDS is psychological/iatrogenic/drug-caused, then will they, psycologically, have to “fill the void” in the abuse that gays so richly deserve? I can see them feeling that way, myself knowing the depth and bitterness of their animus. But what have you read that would indicate such a thing? I’m wondering if you have demonstrable evidence as opposed to justified suspicion.
Regards,
Jimmy
October 1, 2007 7:13 AM
Liam Scheff said…
Hi Jimmy,
Individual property rights? Tell me what I said. I’m not opposed, I’m no communist.
If you mean, cars, and the fact that I pretty much hate them, well, you’ve got me. I like trains. And someday, when oil runs low and nuclear runs too hot, we’ll all like trains.(Maybe. Maybe not, maybe not soon!)
Though I did read in the W.S.Journal about a Texas town put to the screws by its working citizens about additional bus routes. Seems gas was too expensive to drive the vanogan to work!
As to the question - what do I have besides personal suspicion? I listen to the spectrum of radio shows. I’ve spent time crippling my mind,listening to the careful mind-warp that is N.P.R. (Neural Prosthetic Radio, in my view).
You can think you’re learning, while you’re being turned into a soft-sold Clintonista, a vague, relativistic new-world-order-ish brainslug: “Save Africa, maaaan… stop global warming, duude…fight aids in africa, brooother, (give them cheap (deadly? did someone say deadly) drugs. It’s, like, only Faiiirrr, man.”
Then there’s Fox and its affiliates, copycats, and the rest. The right moves from the heinous to the very interesting, sometimes in short, short steps.
You have though, on the Left, the constant association with ‘Black’ and ‘Gay’ “RIGHTS”, with Aids drugs, with ‘hiv testing,’ with ’safe sex’ and ‘unsafe sex.’
This language occurs in the popular lexicon, and mind, in reference to these two groups the most.
You have on the right, no talk of this - except when Aids comes up. That is, there is a clearly identified trend in the conservative talk and populist political publishing (Savage, Coulter, Fumento, for example), a strong referencing of the US statistics - which make homosexuality and strong (illegal) drug use - but not heterosexual sex - the most important correlative factor in ‘hiv’.
The ‘Rightists’ never get beyond this correlation. They never get to the bottom of it - to ‘hiv testing.’ They don’t have to. The point serves their biases.
The correlation is there because these groups are ‘considered to be at risk’ for a deadly sex disease, and so are tested more, and regularly. They also ALLOW an infiltration of their communities, schools and lives by the aidsmafia.
I mean, what handsome son or daughter of Park Avenue, or Beverly Hills, will be targeted like this - “You may have a deadly sex disease (because your sex is clearly irregular!)”
Daddy’s lawyers would make short work of anyone who approached the lovely Persian girls who rule Beverly Hills and West LA, with a test that tests for ’sexual sin.’
The Right media doesn’t look into the mechanism of testing. It is enough for them to note that ‘it’ “occurs” in homosexuals in the US.
That fits with the presupposition of irregularity well enough.
In Coulter’s newer book, Godless, you see this spelled out very clearly. She blames the Left - correctly - for inflaming the public’s fear of normative, reproductive, (and heterosexual) sex, because gay men get ‘hiv’.
She is correct, by the numbers, and by the tactic of the aidsmafia - Delaney, TAC, etc. This is the strategy - I think it’s a bit of payback from the gay community to their punishers -
‘If sex is going to be a sin for us, it’s never going to feel so free for you again, either.’
There are all kinds of unconscious deals being made by people who buy into the aids paradigm, at the level of a real participant.
A gay man in San Francisco only has to give blood once, to have a great deal of his apartment, parking and grocery, as well as all medical insurance, paid for, for the rest of his life. However long or short he allows it to be.
It’s a terrible quid pro quo, terribly tempting, I’m sure, in its own morbid way.
The Left embraces the homosexual lobby at the distance of ‘hiv testing.’
The Right leaves the homosexual lobby alone for its Biblical (cultural) ’sin’, at that same distance.
The gay community can not free itself of ‘hiv testing’ or the aids paradigm, without owing the world a blood debt, essentially. The community would, once again, be on the hard Right’s most hated list, without the protection that the medicalization of their sin affords them.
Remember, what ‘hiv testing’ in the gay communities achieves is the partitioning of the group from the standard, central culture.
You can be gay in Hollywood, (and inflict your views on the world through television), you can be gay in San Francisco (and be a slave to the fascist fashionistas and ‘hiv’ test clinics and advertisements throughout your little world).
You can be gay in NY, Boston, etc, the same way, with the Fenway “health clinic” there to attend to your every cough or itch, with an ‘hiv test.’
But you can not be free, anywhere in the world, to be ‘gay,’ unless you accept the testing scheme.
You may be able to be ‘homosexual’, living with your sexual interests as Part of your life, but not the entirety of it.
This is something Dan and others have described to me, the difference between the ‘gay lifestyle’ and that of a person who happens to be homosexual.
I’ll let him elaborate, if he chooses to. The bottom line though, is that the Right leaves the gay ‘community’ alone (as much as it does at present), because the ‘community’ has effectively quarantined itself.
I think that’s what I’m describing, and what I’ve seen in the culture.
I call it the Morbid Quid Pro Quo.
That ought to do for now… except one thing - Up with Private Property!
Viva La Liberte!
October 1st, 2007 at 4:27 pm
More comments at Various and Sundry (get yerselves over there!)
Anonymous said…
Liam,
Thank you for your long response. I have always enjoyed your writing, and you are clearly one of the most interesting and incisive writers and journalists I’ve come across.
(On a non-AIDS note, I love cars! I can run ad hoc, random-access errands that reliance upon trains would never allow me do. I can hop in my car and drive to California on a dime if I choose to. Yay, individual liberty! But I hate traffic. That’s a big problem with no easy solution.)
You bring up many things in your post that are worth responding to. Sadly, the one thing that I was looking for is missing, and that is hard evidence that AIDS liberates religious fundamentalists from the duty of heaping abuse on gays. I suppose I was looking for something along the lines of a Savage or a Coulter saying, “Thanks to AIDS, we don’t have to have sodomy laws.” I suppose that was a tall order, since I doubt that even the most die-hard anti-gay would be so direct in their sentiments, but your theory must remain little more than an interesting theory despite the fact that I see no reason to doubt the venomous hostility with which you impugn the fundamentalists. No one doubts that they love AIDS for what it does to their hated enemies. Whether they would feel the need to “take up the slack” were AIDS to die is what remains in question.
You also bring up an important question in which AIDS plays a huge, but not central, role. This question is: What does it mean to be “gay”? I have had some people (Leftists, naturally) who have called my “gayness” into question because I do not reflexively vote Democrat. And I have received pure, vile hate from other gays because I despise “gay culture” — drag queens, obnoxious violation of gender roles, AIDS advocacy, youth obsession, drug abuse, superficiality, gym addiction, and, worst of all, the ridiculous and revolting “pride parade” in which every single sexual fetish gets its own float. Am I truly “gay” if I don’t buy into all of that culture? The answer to that question depends upon whom you ask. Whether or not I have a partner of more than a decade (I do) and adoptive children (I do) is of no import to some people. They’ll call me “suburban housewife” and “conservative” and “Stepford gay”. In all honesty, screw gay community. A shared interest in same-gender fellatio does NOT a community make, obviously.
As you might imagine, my refusal to worship Death at the altar of the High Church of AIDS has piqued some people beyond degree, but I think it is but one of many articles of faith in gay culture. It may very well be the most important one and certainly the most sensitive one (given that people have “died from AIDS”), but the notion of a “separate but equal” lifestyle afforded to gay people for the past few decades precedes the advent of AIDS, so I don’t buy the notion that it is the AIDS test which forces gay people to live in their urban zoological preserves. Rather, I think they self-segregate because gay culture is a far-too-polite term for hedonism, and lifestyle hedonists don’t fit in well with the rest of us.
If that sounds critical, then I’m guilty as charged. After all, I think that the rampant abuse of drugs in pursuit of non-stop sex and drug-induced highs is what caused GRID and killed a great many gay men. I understand why that fact would upset some gay men: to them, the “gay lifestyle” was sex, drugs, youth, 24×7. That’s what “being gay” was. If you told them that it was killing them, then that criticism was, inherently, anti-gay. That’s one reason why “AIDS is caused by a virus” was so seductive to gay men: it excused them from the effects of their hedonism. That sounds like something you wrote, but it might have also been John Lauritsen who wrote it.
I’m not sure what to make of your statement, “But you can not be free, anywhere in the world, to be ‘gay,’ unless you accept the testing scheme.” After all, I live in the conservative suburbs and send my son to a government school where I’m certain most parents are Christians of some flavor. It’s not like they’re beating down my door demanding that we be tested regularly for “HIV”. If you’re saying that I’m not accepted by “gay culture”, then you’re probably right, but who wants to hang out with those losers, anyway? I have plenty of friends who love me and their affectional orientation is of no moral import to any of us.
I am, however, very concerned that a physician will one day mandate that I consent to an “HIV test” if I am to receive treatment. Worse yet, I fear that he may give me an “HIV test” without my consent, after which my name will be added to a federal spook list if my results are interpreted poorly. But I think that is a separate problem from the problem of gay culture and what it means to be gay.
Regards,
Jimmy
Liam Scheff said…
Jimmy,
Interesting, in a dozen dozen ways, but right to the disagreement.
I think the hard right (neo-con pundits, talk-show personalities) do consider, to this day, “aids” to be a visitation on ‘gays’ for their behaviour. The CDC numbers (U.S.) give to this bias everything it needs to feel satisfied in its correctness.
I think you don’t need Michael Savage saying, “if it turns out that Aids isn’t a heterosexual ‘viral’ problem, but was sold that way by the aidsmafia, then we’re really going to show them boys!”
He says it anyway, without doubting (or questioning) the paradigm to its core. He goes about 1/5th of the way (which is about 500 times what the Left does).
He already talks about the ‘aids mafia’. No need to deeply question ‘hiv tests.’
(For the record, I originally heard the term, ‘aids mafia’, from my mentor in about 1991 or 92, he being a macrobiotic cook who survived ‘grid’ or early ‘aids’, and who understood it to be a very, clearly multifactorial problem.)
But Savage uses the term now, to describe what goes on with the ‘pink hand’, as he calls it, in pressuring everyone to kowtow to issues relating to the red ribbon brigade, gay marriage, cheap drugs, medicare/state-funded drugs for ‘positives’, and all the rest that comes on that bandwagon - the parades, and all that you describe as not wanting to be part of in your life.
I will assume that you represent a majority of homosexual men in this country, and in the world. We don’t hear about you, though, because we can’t feel sorry for you; you don’t want to be professionally victimized. You just want to live your life.
What to do with you, then, on parade day? Can’t make a float out of you, can’t shed a tear for you, can’t ‘fight for your right to cheap aids drugs.’
Because you don’t want them. You also don’t want to be tested, but you have to be more concerned for it than I do. You are in a CDC ‘risk group.’ I’m not.
That’s the brutality of the thing.
You say:
Sadly, the one thing that I was looking for is missing, and that is hard evidence that AIDS liberates religious fundamentalists from the duty of heaping abuse on gays. I suppose I was looking for something along the lines of a Savage or a Coulter saying, “Thanks to AIDS, we don’t have to have sodomy laws.”
That’s not where I would go with that - I mean that the Left has picked up the crucible, the defense of the ‘gay community’, by internalizing the SAME Discomfort (dislike/hate) that the Right feels toward homosexuals. The Left has allowed it to be ‘validated’ through a pseudo-scientific mechanism - ‘hiv testing’ and the ‘aids’ paradigm.
The Right still simply sees it as a sin of homosexuality (and then, of whatever is wrong with Africans).
The ‘gay community’ (a term you explore in your post), survives with such public prestige and power because they accept the inversion, the inverted, recapitulated ’sin’, redressed in technological garb.
It’s not that Coulter and Savage will go for a striking down of sodomy laws in general - and that would be a sign of the ‘benefit’ of the aids paradigm. It’s that they deflect or inflect their frank disgust with ‘homosexuality as an aberation’, through the lens their afforded by the ‘aids’ mock-up.
They are free to bash gays for their ‘dangerous’ conduct. (And like you said, the gym-bunny, raver lifestyle is well-defined by its shallow, narcissistic, hedonistic expressions, more than other).
The challenge I have goes to this observation: The gay community, such as it is, is permitted to exist in its current state of relative openness and promiscuity (in a cultural sense) Because they have accepted the techno-babble, pseudo-scientific (but culturally acceptable) version of the old Biblical (Levitical) prohibition and stigmatization of homosexuality.
You say no:
As you might imagine, my refusal to worship Death at the altar of the High Church of AIDS has piqued some people beyond degree, but I think it is but one of many articles of faith in gay culture. It may very well be the most important one and certainly the most sensitive one (given that people have “died from AIDS”), but the notion of a “separate but equal” lifestyle afforded to gay people for the past few decades precedes the advent of AIDS, so I don’t buy the notion that it is the AIDS test which forces gay people to live in their urban zoological preserves. Rather, I think they self-segregate because gay culture is a far-too-polite term for hedonism, and lifestyle hedonists don’t fit in well with the rest of us.
I suppose the question goes to - who ‘battles’ for ‘gay rights?’
The perception is, that it’s the paraders, the gaudy, the flamboyant. That they, by their very presence, force the issue into the mind (and talk) of the culture.
After all, you’re not likely to be the subject of a Bill O’Reilly rant against circuit parties.
He did this a couple years ago, talking about how ‘irresponsible’ it was, because of the spread of aids. He might have talked about the problems with so much drug use, too. I’m not sure. If he did, that puts him ahead of the liberati, who can’t be bothered to talk about anything but ‘free drugs’ for the Blacks in Africa (and the gays here).
But we (who have written about this logically, openly, critically), have been up against this wall, trying to ask what we considered reasonable ‘liberal’ media to examine the problems with testing, and the brand-name quality of the ‘aids’ label (it sticks where you want it to). To no avail. They won’t touch it, because ‘aids’ is a liberal issue, because it is a ‘gay’ issue.
The aidsmafia IS the gay lobby. The gay lobby IS half of the democratic platform. It IS ‘aids drugs for Africa. It is the engine for the hysteria surrounding the idea of ‘hiv spread’ and ‘hiv estimates.’
It IS the bulwark for the broken practice of ‘hiv testing.’
And if you are subjected to a test, it will be because the gay community will not raise their heads in a large enough number to say, “What the fuck (’scuse me) are these things testing for anyway? Because they sure seem to be full of shit, in practice. And we’re not really interested in being the butt end of this joke anymore.”
They won’t say it, because….
because…
because…
And that’s the topic of this thread. And I’ve shared my ‘why’s’.
They’re stuck between a culture that will let them (the most prominent, flamboyant, theatrical, public) live (with medication, and testing); and a culture that won’t, as you said, lift ’sodomy’ laws, because it might encourage that ol’ deviant behavior.
Anyway, back to you.
And you never told me where I said I was against private property -
“hatred of private property” you said.
Put it out there James!
Finally, Thanks for the good note. Lots of interest in your post. I’m going to re-read it at length later.
Thanks,
Liam
October 1, 2007 4:10 PM
Liam Scheff said…
Or more to the point:
If you, Jimmy, presented yourself as a ‘gay man’ in a conservative neighborhood, and were applying for a … job.. health insurance… government position… teacher… instructor… cub scout den leader, etc…
and you were refused for some reason, Any reason… You could have the streets of San Francisco filled with a parade in your defense and honor, pies thrown in the faces of officials, letters sent, heart-felt speeches made, Hollywood actors on the podium, singing a hymn to your civil rights.
If you presented yourself as an ‘hiv positive gay man’ doing the same, you could get the same, even one better, because now you’re ‘touched by the mighty hand of God (er, ‘the virus’)', and all sympathy must be wiht you (unless you’re straight, tested ‘positive’, and had sex with a single girl; then you can hang).
But. But! But, if you presented yourself as a ‘gay man’, who wanted a job of some sort, got hired - on the condition that, as a gay many you undergo ‘routine hiv testing’… and you refused…
You could expect no parade, no praise, no hymn, no defense. Only angry, bitter reactive rants from kowtows like Dan Savage (who refuses to answer a single question to me about testing, when I post in his threads on his Stranger blogs), and condemnations from every single ‘defender’ of gay rights on the Left. You might find a libertarian friend or two in the media, but you could kiss your job goodbye.
Now, why in the world would that be, if the gay community weren’t benefiting, in some morbid, terrible, terrifying way, from the exactions and benefits of the ‘hiv testing’ and ‘aids’ paradigm?