The Names Project AIDS quilt, Washington D.C., 1996guybabineau.com
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Terrorist attacks evoke AIDS experience by Guy Babineau
A number of people in Canada and the U.S., most of them news anchors, are saying that the world has changed. What they really mean – but can't see because there are too many flags and teddy bears in the way – is that for them, life in North America suddenly feels different. Most of the rest of the world has been keeping an eye over its shoulder for quite some time, including here. My Canada, my America, changed irreversibly almost twenty years ago. What happened on September 11 shocked me but it didn’t surprise me; nothing much does any more. It made me sad but not depressed. I have lived in a state of emergency ever since 1982 when AIDS went from being a so-called gay cancer that barely made the back pages to an indiscriminate killer targeting “innocent” victims, and making headline news...until the novelty and ratings wore off. Since the dust settled at ground zero, I've had the sinking feeling that I've been through all of this before, as someone who has been on the front line in the battle against AIDS. From conspiracy theories to unhelpful comments about God to back-tracking politicians, it all seems so familiar. It was only a matter of time before journalists found juicy new ways to describe terrorism in other than war terms, and what better analogy than a virus? Margaret Wente trotted it out in last weekend's Globe and Mail. In the current New Yorker, Herbert Hertzberg, one of several clearheaded writers commenting on the crisis, says that the terrorists “...rode the world's aerial circulatory system like lethal viruses.” Among the other voices in the magazine is some brave commentary by an impatient Susan Sontag. In 1988 Sontag published AIDS and its Metaphors. She argued, and this is grossly simplifying her thesis, that war references in this context obfuscate the real issues and are counterproductive, that metaphors cloud reason and stand in the way of solutions. Or you can make the metaphor real. Last year the Clinton Administration signed into law a declaration making AIDS a national security threat. The CIA was empowered to deploy surveillance. Surveillance of what is rather unclear and one wonders why, for the first time in U.S. history, an American intelligence agency has been made responsible for a health issue. Then again, we're talking about the Mother of all Viruses. Not just metaphors but all the language being used in reference to the new awareness of terrorism echoes the AIDS experience. So does the way the media are handling the situation. Profiling. It was bad enough that religious fundamentalists said AIDS was God's retribution for the immorality of homosexuals and that Western governments did precious little for years because it was a “gay” disease, but things weren’t so hot within the gay community either. Gay men spent the ‘80s clutching their lymph nodes. For the first few years of the epidemic, a subtle suspicion accompanied any new encounter with a stranger. Many gay men showed each other their papers, doctor's notes to prove that they weren't HIV positive. When I had my first HIV test, everyone said not to worry because I wasn't the kind of person to get AIDS, ostensibly because I was white, middle class, cleancut-looking and well-mannered. You know, like Timothy McVeigh. In the melodramatic 1987 bestseller And the Band Played On, author Randy Shilts comforted America by making up someone to blame for bringing the virus into the country and spreading it around. On a plane. From Canada. He called him Patient Zero, usurping the military term Ground Zero, the epicentre of a nuclear detonation, which has also been dusted off to describe the WTC site. Recognizing that a good war story needs to have one identifiable bad guy to pin everything on, Shilts made Vancouver-based flight attendant Gaetan Dugas the Osama bin Laden of AIDS. There is no such thing as Patient Zero. AIDS, like terrorism, has multiple “operatives”. But where would Star Wars be without Darth Vader? Shilts didn’t stop there. He even gave the disease a “safe house” and the gay batthouses in San Francisco and New York were shut down. This had no affect on the HIV rate of course because AIDS, like terrorism, is nomadic. National Security. The U.S. is the only Western nation to prohibit known non-nationals with HIV from entering the country. (Canada refuses residency status to people who test sero-positive.) I have several Canadian friends and acquaintances who are barred from America for life. Despite the sealed border, an estimated 900,000 U.S. citizens have HIV/AIDS (compared to Canada's 49,000) and America has by a wide margin the highest rate of HIV/AIDS in the developed world. What about people with HIV who live there? What about American nationals traveling abroad? What about people who've never been tested? What about travelers with HIV who smuggle in their medication? Since AIDS is already well-established in North America, a fortress mentality is after-the-fact. The problem isn’t elsewhere, the problem is already here. Media Coverage. What kind of a planet would we be living on if in 1945 everyone in the world had had immediate visual access to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? There's no underestimating the power of images, or the danger of overexposure. For a while, when AIDS was still “sexy”, the media carried one picture after another of Elephant Man lookalikes and concentration camp victims. Celebrities at awards shows waded through a sea of red ribbons to get to the podium. When the sensationalism reached overkill the images disappeared and people got the idea that AIDS disappeared along with them. The gay media was just as bad. All of a sudden hard journalism with pictures of real people dying of AIDS was replaced with perky ads for HIV pharmaceuticals, protein supplements and health insurance, featuring gorgeous models climbing mountains or attending picnics. AIDS was downgraded from a scourge to an irritant. Is it any wonder that the HIV infection rate among gay men – and everyone else – is on the upswing? We live in a culture that confuses reality with entertainment. We talk about the amorality of terrorism and AIDS, but what about the amorality of the media? There is grave danger in sensationalizing either AIDS or terrorism and of switching it off when people get bored. Global Reach. There are about 40 million people around the world living with HIV/AIDS, mostly heterosexuals. Every day around the world almost four times as many people die of AIDS as were killed by the tragedies on September 11, 5,500 of them in Africa. It has been projected that the number of people with AIDS on the Indian subcontinent will overtake sub-Saharan Africa by 2010. Things don't look very good for Russia either. The U.S. has targeted terrorism with a global reach, by which they mean pointing at North America, but as long as terrorism exists anywhere, aimed at any population internally or externally, the impetus and breeding ground for violence – as with AIDS – will continue to exist, threatening everyone. Last year at the International AIDS Conference in Durban, confronted by the understandable rage of the developing world, the U.S. and the rest of the West were forced to concede that inward-looking, defensive policies don't work. By far the best thing I’ve learned from AIDS is that in a crisis it’s best to maintain perspective. Several years ago I was with a group of people at a weekend retreat where I was training to become an AIDS volunteer. We all showed up with suitably long faces. About halfway through the first day our facilitator said, “You know, AIDS is already a tragedy. It doesn't need any help.”
Originally published in The Georgia Straight, Canada's largest independent weekly. © Guy Babineau 2003-2004
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