In "Stonewall at 40," Frank Rich celebrates in the NYT the June 28, 1969 Greenwich Village drag bar riot that symbolically launched the gay liberation era:
Rich never mentions, and I suspect that Obama won't either, that the catalyst for the riot was Judy Garland's funeral the previous day, and that most of the rioters were cross-dressers.
Rich goes on:
Uh, I think a big chunk of history has been shoved down the Memory Hole here. The 1970s were not a time when gay liberation "advanced haltingly;" in reality, the 1970s were when all effective legal restrictions on industrial scale homosexual promiscuity were utterly ended in precisely those cities -- e.g., San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York -- where AIDS broke out most virulently in the early 1980s.
Gay liberation caused the AIDS epidemic.
What's even more striking is that this huge historical event of the recent past has been so distorted that, according to Google, nobody in the history of the Internet has ever before posted the words:
"Gay liberation caused the AIDS epidemic"
Instead, we're all supposed to believe AIDS was caused by discrimination against homosexuals in the military, the absence of gay marriage, and/or Ronald Reagan. Indeed, it's precisely because the evidence for cause and effect is so overwhelmingly clear that the pressure to lie and to submit to others' lies is so intense.
On Monday, President Obama will commemorate Stonewall with an East Room reception for gay leaders.
Rich never mentions, and I suspect that Obama won't either, that the catalyst for the riot was Judy Garland's funeral the previous day, and that most of the rioters were cross-dressers.
Rich goes on:
After the gay liberation movement was born at Stonewall, this strand of history advanced haltingly until the 1980s. It took AIDS and the new wave of gay activism it engendered to fully awaken many, including me, to the gay people all around them. But that tardy and still embryonic national awareness did not save the lives of those whose abridged rights made them even more vulnerable during a rampaging plague.
Uh, I think a big chunk of history has been shoved down the Memory Hole here. The 1970s were not a time when gay liberation "advanced haltingly;" in reality, the 1970s were when all effective legal restrictions on industrial scale homosexual promiscuity were utterly ended in precisely those cities -- e.g., San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York -- where AIDS broke out most virulently in the early 1980s.
Gay liberation caused the AIDS epidemic.
What's even more striking is that this huge historical event of the recent past has been so distorted that, according to Google, nobody in the history of the Internet has ever before posted the words:
"Gay liberation caused the AIDS epidemic"
Instead, we're all supposed to believe AIDS was caused by discrimination against homosexuals in the military, the absence of gay marriage, and/or Ronald Reagan. Indeed, it's precisely because the evidence for cause and effect is so overwhelmingly clear that the pressure to lie and to submit to others' lies is so intense.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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57 comments:
One thing I recall from the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the mid-1980's was the campaigns to shut down gay bathhouses in San Francisco and New York and some other cities. It really puzzled me - what could be so dangerous about communal bathing? Then, in 1987 or 1988 I read the book And the Band Played On, which among much else chronicled exactly what went on in the bathhouses. Suffice to say it was more than just bathing.
Peter
"It took AIDS and the new wave of gay activism it engendered to fully awaken many, including me, to the gay people all around them."
The first time I saw Rich talk on TV I assumed he was gay. That impression was strengthened by the subsequent times I've seen him on TV. But in the above quote he implies that he's straight. I just looked him up on the Wikipedia, and it says there that he's married with two children. I don't even know how to take that.
It wasn't just the vocal mannerisms, although those were definitely there. For years he reviewed musical theater in New York.
It took AIDS and the new wave of gay activism it engendered to fully awaken many, including me, to the gay people all around them.
Grrroan. I guess Frank Rich enjoys being propagandized.
Anyone who takes evolutionary psychology and biology seriously has to consider legal and other restrictions of homosexuals to have arisen as protections against virulent pathogens and diseases.
You're full of it, Steve. Everyone knows that Reagan didn't care about homosexuals so he left them to suffer.
There are a grand total of 8 results for "Gays caused the AIDS epidemic", all mentioning Jesse Helms
"Anyone who takes evolutionary psychology and biology seriously has to consider legal and other restrictions of homosexuals to have arisen as protections against virulent pathogens and diseases."
PC liberals don't take evolutionary psychology and biology seriously.
I remember reading an article that gay bathhouses were reopened in San Francisco.
The article was full of angst ridden statements like straights resented gay guys having sex, I think, or maybe that was something else.
It was incredible because a (supposedly) hetero guy went undercover as a gay guy to a gay bathhouse to see what it was like. Why would any hetero man do that?!
I found the article:
http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/08.29.96/gay-bath-9635.html
---
Men cruise the hallways clad in nothing but towels. Some of the doors are open; in bathhouse etiquette, this signals a desire for company. A tall Asian man with a beard is stroking his genitals and staring intently out the door. An obese man lies on his side, reading a book. Others watch TV, either cable or porn. Bathhouse etiquette suggests that those who lie on their stomachs prefer the bottom in sexual encounters. The tops are lying on their backs.
---
For $20, you can rent these rooms for 12 hours at a time, with two hours of in-and-out privileges.
---
"Safer Sex Tip" on the wall, reading: "You are less at risk from safer sex with many people than unsafe sex with one person."
---
He has a boyfriend, but each of them tolerates an occasional trip to the Watergarden.
---
Anti-bathhouse activists acknowledge that closing bathhouses may force men who want quick sex into more public areas like bars, street corners or parks--and that, they argue, may at least slow the rate of multipartner sex. But bathhouse defenders say that men in stressful or shameful situations will be less likely to take life-saving precautions.
---
Anyone who takes evolutionary psychology and biology seriously has to consider legal and other restrictions of homosexuals to have arisen as protections against virulent pathogens and diseases.
Nonsense. Liberation may have eased spreading the epidemic within the gay minority, but it also rather effectively limited the epidemic to gay men, drug addicts and straight men who visit low class prostitutes. When it is easier to be openly gay there are fewer closeted gay men with cover relationships and the less the disease will spread to heterosexuals.
The most un-PC aspect of the epidemic is that straight white men are almost completely safe as long as they avoid low class women, but of course we're very unlikely to get that advice in sex ed. One reason AIDS spreads so easily among blacks are the supposedly straight men with secret homosexual encounters; they're much more numerous, given how impossible it is to be simply gay in most black societies. Of course we're also unlikely to hear about the dire need for black men to become more tolerant when we're listening to the usual lecture on how AIDS is ravaging black communities...
" . . .the campaigns to shut down gay bathhouses in San Francisco and New York and some other cities.It really puzzled me - what could be so dangerous about communal bathing?"
Sheltered youth?
I mean, really sheltered.
"One thing I recall from the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the mid-1980's was the campaigns to shut down gay bathhouses in San Francisco and New York and some other cities"...
Good point...
Now if memory serves the now Senator Feinstein was the then mayor of San Francisco...
The political problems vs the public health problems (examples: here and here) must've been a real headache...
The most nontrivial fact that I never learned in sex ed is that certain kinds of viruses -- like HPV and herpes (!!!) -- aren't stopped by condoms. So there's really no such thing as "safe sex".
Thank god I married early.
The thing about homosexuality is that we should be treating it as a mental disease. We search for cures for other mental diseases because they are considered diseases.
The most dangerous thing about homosexuality right now is probably the fact that they're spreading MRSA. Imagine an AIDS transmitted by simple skin-to-skin contact...
As the first commentator says, And The Band Played On is a relevant book here.
The author, a gay journalist who died of AIDS, writes about San Francisco during the early years of the epidemic.
One of his complaints is that the gay community refused to accept that promiscuity, in particular bathhouses, were spreading HIV. In particular, there were attempts to close down the bathhouses (which eventually succeeded, but too late), but they were resisted because, he says, gay people saw it as homophobic oppression and a "rights issue".
I have no idea if that's true, but I don't think you're first person to think that "Gay liberation caused the AIDS epidemic" even if you're the first to write it.
Judy Garland dies, a bunch of drag queens riot, and a decade later gays start dropping like flies 'cuz they can't stay away from the pooper. History.
Instead, we're all supposed to believe AIDS was caused by discrimination against homosexuals in the military, the absence of gay marriage, and/or Ronald Reagan.
Really Steve? Has anyone ever claimed that? I thought the crazy left claim was that Government labs started it. If Gay Liberation caused the epidemic, so what? AIDS mostly just killed Gays, so if they're happy with the choice good for them.
The spirit of posts like this and most of the comments is why immigration restrictionists in the U.S. are almost powerless politically and badly underfunded.
I noted in a comment earlier here that gays have traits that make them effective modern politicians. They also will open their wallets if they feel under threat. You advocate for both immigration restriction and take potshots against them, you drive them and their educated family/friends into political coalitions with NAMs.
This is basically what happened in Colorado when the Republicans went on an anti-gay kick, spurring a two gay tech multi-millionaires to spend $12 million and raise much more and turn what was a solidly Republican state into a solidly Democratic one. They are worth a combined half billion and are ready to spend more.
I would point out over in Europe the mere two times in major countries very strong restrictionists came to power it was:
1 - gay Pim Fortyn, whose created a restrictionist party he named after himself, which became the 2nd largest party in parliamont out of many and part of the governing alliance in the Netherlands, though he was assinated shortly before the election
2 - bisexual Jorg Haider in Austria was a region's governor and united the new right parties in Austria, getting them to 27% of the vote and part of the governing coalition with the older and more centrist right-wing party.
I could say much the same thing about jews.
"Anyone who takes evolutionary psychology and biology seriously has to consider legal and other restrictions of homosexuals to have arisen as protections against virulent pathogens and diseases."
Why the restrictions against lesbians, then?
Anyway, the problem with stating that gay liberation caused the AIDS epidemic is that it assumes that gay liberation = gay promiscuity, and implies that the way to forestall the further spread of the disease is to reinstitute restrictions on gays that were both unjust and dehumanizing. Wouldn't it be better (i.e. more truthful and less politically charged) to simply say that gay promiscuity caused the AIDS epidemic?
On the other hand, I do think it's silly for gay activists to try to pin the AIDS epidemic on anything other than gay male behavior. Even today, gay activists will parrot silly lines like "The higher incidence of HIV among African-Americans is due to homophobia in the African-American community," the reasoning being that African-American gay men can't come out and therefore are forced to have a string of casual encounters. When in fact, African-Americans, gay or straight, have much higher rates of all STDs than their white counterparts.
I also think it's silly to spend the amounts of money we do on AIDS prevention, at this point. People know how HIV/AIDS is spread. Obviously, some funding is necessary to continue to educate future generations. But a lot of people getting infected today - I suspect the majority - know full well how the virus is passed and make the decision to engage in risky behavior. No amount of prevention is going to stop some people from making such decisions.
You should watch the movie version of "And the Band Played On."
While it lays out the history of the AIDS epidemic well, it also gratuitously cuts in images and clips of Reagan and other Republicans in an attempt to suggest that, somehow, all those deaths from AIDS were caused by a deliberate policy of genocide hatched by evil Republicans.
I'm going through an LPN program right now. We spent an inordinate amount of time on AIDS. We were told that the AIDS epidemic was, in fact, a wonderful opportunity in that it has led to a grand exploration of the intricacies of the immune system that we would have otherwise ignored.
We were also told that those evil Republicans refused to fund AIDS research. If you care to look up the facts, you will discover that AIDS research has been lavishly funded.
the fact that gay activists have blocked quarantining, doctors reporting aids cases (as they are required to do with any other 'epidemic' ) and now, its 'racism' or 'homophobic' to even block AIDs cases from entering this country! (thanks bush!) All this demonstrates that our elite and gay groups are no more interested in curing AIDs than Neocons are interested in bringing democracy to the Arab world...
"And the Band Played On" makes several relevant points. First homosexuals changed their practices in the 1970s. Before, their sex was mostly oral sex. After, significant numbers did anal sex. The difference is oral sex is less likely to transmit disease.
Gay liberation ideology in the 70s also embrace STDs as a positive sign. They were a badge of courage. When HIV came onto the scene, this proved to hasten the rate of infection because STDs frequently cause open, bleeding sores.
Lastly, the book mentions that homosexuals who contracted AIDS frequently had more than one hundred sex partners. Obviously, the greater the number of partners, the greater the chance of infection.
Is there evidence either direction saying whether gays got more promiscuous as a result of gay lib? It seems plausible, but it's just as plausible to me that the bathhouses were just more easily found when the cops weren't shutting them down from time to time. Prostitution is illegal almost everywhere in the US, and yet there's still a ton of it going on everywhere.
I'll admit I don't get the evo psych/banning homosexuality point above. I have an evolutionary incentive to convince my kids not to be gay (or at least to produce the requisite number of grandkids for me), but I can't think of why I would have any evolutionary incentive to object to other gays. That much more opportunity for my genes, while Bruce and Fred are off in the bushes having a good time of it, neither one occupying a lady.
"One of his complaints is that the gay community refused to accept that promiscuity, in particular bathhouses, were spreading HIV. In particular, there were attempts to close down the bathhouses (which eventually succeeded, but too late), but they were resisted because, he says, gay people saw it as homophobic oppression and a "rights issue".
And just like our most recent disaster - this time financial - quite a few folks were profiting on activities that were considered the manifestation of "rights". Just as people were making money on liars loans to people who couldn't afford to buy a house, people were profiting from running bathhouses where HIV spread exponentially.
It's all about the Benjamins.
The movie "And the Band Played On" has a very telling scene about this aspect of the bathhouse culture.
I seem to remember Camille Paglia saying that the Gay Community should take responsibility for the spread of AIDS.
Does anyone know where, I think it was in one of her essays?
Richard
An extremely unpleasant memory I have of Atlanta in the 1970's is walking into the men's room at Lenox Square mall and seeing all the doors off the bathroom stalls. The mall owner had removed them to discourage gay men having sex. I remember looking at my grandfather with my jaw on the floor and him having to explain this.
Bathhouse etiquette suggests that those who lie on their stomachs prefer the bottom in sexual encounters. The tops are lying on their backs. --metroactive.com, via Anonymous
The Hollies' 1970 single was thus unfortunately titled-- and/or timed-- "I Can't Tell the Bottom From the Top".
Especially since they'd hired Elton John for the piano part.
The message is more than distorted: it's upside down.
The message of "Brokeback Mountain" was that straight men were responsible for the violence that killed all those gay men who actually died of AIDS.
The gay activist movement very successfully deflected the blame for the deaths of thousands of gay men. They didn't do themselves in with their own sexual behavior. They were killed by marauding bands of straight men.
Hardcore!
It's never surprising anymore when history gets twisted/re-written/modified to serve a cause--a personal one or a social/political one. When I was a kid and read a biography, I believed everything in it. Now, I have to remind myself that all writers, even those referred to as scholars, are looking for some new tidbit, some new angle on which to hang their academic hat. A relatively obscure point of information, even if true, is often blown out of proportion and used as the basis of a psychological profile that is just as often off the mark as on. This seems especially true of the so-called Presidential scholars.
We were in SF last night for a performance. To get there from BART, we trumped across a litter-strewn Civic Center in early evening before the street cleaners had gotten there, walking past the remmants of the day's earlier festivities-- empty food booths, vacation travel booths, booths for all kinds of gay political organizations.
All of us looked at one another, and one asked what we were all thinking, "Another gay celebration? Didn't they just have one?" Someone else said, "I think it's gay pride week, isn't it?" Another asked, "Didn't they just have that too?" We laughed. The celebrations seem endless and one morphs into the next into the next in this part of the country.
It made me think of the culture shock most Americans would experience upon visiting SF and even some of the burbs. A huge percentage of the men living and working in this relatively small city are gay. On the train going home, a gay couple sat across from us, one resting his head on the shoulder of the other, eyes closed, while his partner rubbed his eyebrows. They were late 20s, early 30s, both large guys, tall, each somewhat overweight, resembling junior college offensive linemen. They both had neatly trimmed beards. I laughed to myself. "Andrew Sullivan type 'bears'?"
Of course the performance we saw, Bernadette Peters with the SF symphony, was heavily populated with gay couples and she, of course, played to them a bit. I wondered if the gays in the audience outnumbered the straights. During a particularly soft, sweet song, one of the guys in front of us began rubbing the leg of his partner.
I have lived in this area all my life, yet admittedly, seeing this still has an emotional effect on me, which is what made me think of visitors to the city. Europeans, many at least, would not be shocked, but most Americans would.
I also thought about how we do or don't get used to some things. Am I used to seeing men together? Women? Am I used to seeing open displays of affection or sexuality between members of the same gender?
On a gut level, I guess I am not or else I wouldn't mention it.
I guess the couple on the train or the one in front of us (and beside us and in back of us)at the performance would not have given me pause. I guess it still feels as if something didn't turn out "right," although I don't mean that in a moral sense. It still feels a bit like a car accident, one I have to force my eyes to avert. If I have gotten used to it at all, it's only on a superficial level.
Makes me wonder what's going to happen when one day they figure out the cause.
. . .the campaigns to shut down gay bathhouses in San Francisco and New York and some other cities.It really puzzled me - what could be so dangerous about communal bathing? --IronRailsIronWeights
Sheltered youth?
I mean, really sheltered. --Black Sea
Not necessarily. I'm surprised someone with the handle "Black Sea" would be unaware of Turkish baths and Russian banyas, where men happily go to bathe, and only to bathe. Perhaps IronRails (a/k/a Peter) comes from a tradition, like Japan's or Korea's, or perhaps Jaakkeli's Finns, where public communal bathing is normal and relatively benign.
This reminds me of Steve's description of Eastern European immigrant boys taking to ballet, which American boys avoid like Ebola. In their culture, it's something a straight man can do without a second thought.
An American who worked in Finland for quite a while and got addicted to sauna baths told of his visit to a "sauna" in an American hotel, I think in his native Missouri. The staff were astonished that all he seemed to want was steam. They didn't know whether he was a total naïf, or an undercover (!) cop.
By the way, he told us this story in a lakeside sauna.
I recall being a bit stupified at the huge uproar greeting the suggestion that the bath houses be closed. "Theyre spreading AIDS there,"said I,"shouldnt they be closed immejately?!?" I also learned that Ed Koch was gay. Now that was a stunner!!I thought he was slamming it to Bess Myerson--- when all the time he was probably being tea bagged by Steve Rubell!
Like you say Steve, the people involved don't want to know the ugly truth. Because then they may have to come to the conclusion that the Church was always right about the issue. Of course by now Aids is haemorrhaging straight society, especially in Africa, the West and Russia. I wonder whether ordinary straight people, whose lives are now condemned, feel like celebrating with Obama?
"When it is easier to be openly gay there are fewer closeted gay men with cover relationships and the less the disease will spread to heterosexuals."
Yea, that's why nowadays its an epidemic.
The Canadian journalist Andrew Nikiforuk made the connection in his early nineties book "The Fourth Horseman", which took an ecosystems approach to various epidemics. He stated that the gay sexual revolution had created an ecological niche for the massive spread of STVs and that AIDS was basically a disaster waiting to happen.
He was denounced by all the usual suspects, but stood his ground and has even remained on the respectable side of Canadian journalism.
intellectual pariah
I grew up in SF in the 80s and knew people who died of AIDS during my childhood.
Not only was no linkage between gay liberation and the disease, there was no linkage between *male homosexuality* and the disease. None. We were taught as teenagers that we were at risk simply by being sexually active. We accepted this as true. When I met health educators in college who had sex without condoms I was as shocked as a Victorian lady would have been by bare legs in public. I can still vividly remember one of them explaining to me that if you knew the facts, no matter what you were being required to teach the sheeple, you just couldn't take the risk very seriously for yourself.
Of course, lots of those people ended up getting herpes.
Jaakkeli is right. Gay liberation and birth control are the best things to happen to straight women.
The first because it created a self-contained group of fanatics who do nutty things to each other, and not to women. The second because back in the old days before birth control, poor straight men in the slums sometimes partook of male prostitutes, not because they (the "tops") were really gay, but because there were no pregnancy complications or the possibility of emotional involvement. We see this in Hispanic world today. The men play a mental game assuring themselves that active partner isn't gay and all is well.
But he can still pick up some nasty bugs.
With birth control this is no longer necessary so the incidence of opportunistic switch hitting has dwindled. And heterosexuals escape to breed another day. What's wrong with that?
This book treats gay lib and AIDS carefully & honestly:
http://books.google.com/books?id=w6XeOcFpcE0C&dq=william+a.+rushing+aids&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=LPO8dast1j&sig=5IKeU9VdnUkfGWTOdBzJStg3JfA&hl=en&ei=IsxHSvTGEYu7twf15NyYBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1
Anyone who takes evolutionary psychology and biology seriously has to consider legal and other restrictions of homosexuals to have arisen as protections against virulent pathogens and diseases.
EvoPsych is a laughable, un-scientific, 'discipline' (and I'm a conservative) but I do concur with the basic biological sense of your statement.
in reality, the 1970s were when all effective legal restrictions on industrial scale homosexual promiscuity were utterly ended in precisely those cities
What restrictions? Weren't the bath houses in full swing throughout the 50s (if not earlier) and into the 70s? So what kind of restrictions were there that would have allowed for the existence of these places? It was actually after the outbreak of HIV that the bath houses began to be shut down.
The homosexual men I knew were ridiculously promiscuous, before any official "liberation" broke out. I always assumed that random sex was a way of life for the typical homosexual male, and that's why so many of them had to submit to medical procedures, long before AIDS came on the scene. Do you think that homosexuals during, say, the 1950s or before, were not indulging in freestyle sex, or what you call "industrial scale" promiscuity? Were there restrictions on these places during that period? After AIDS broke out, I wondered how something similar had not occurred sooner.
Rolling Stone had a long article on the AIDS epidemic back in 1984. One of the facts they had was that in the early years of AIDS, the average AIDS victim had had more than 1,400 sexual partners. That's not encounters, mind you, but partners.
These people would not have been able to rack up these numbers but for the gay liberation movement and the availability of multiple partners that bathhouses made available.
AIDS, the easiest disease NOT to get. And I keep waiting for the heterosexual AIDS epidemic. Any day now...AIDS is always someone else's fault.
"Rich never mentions, and I suspect that Obama won't either, that the catalyst for the riot was Judy Garland's funeral the previous day, and that most of the rioters were cross-dressers"
What is your source for Judy Garland's funeral being the catalyst? That sure sounds like revisionist lore, given the detailed description on Wikipedia of how the events unfolded. Also, see the footnote on this.
"In the years since the riots occurred, the death of gay icon Judy Garland earlier in the week on June 22, 1969 has been attributed as a significant factor in the riots, but no participants in Saturday morning's demonstrations recall Garland's name being discussed. No print accounts of the riots by reliable sources cite Garland as a reason for the riot, although one sarcastic account by a heterosexual publication suggested it. (Carter, p. 260.) Although Sylvia Rivera recalls she was saddened and amazed by the turnout at Garland's funeral on Friday, June 27, she said that she did not feel like going out much but changed her mind later. (Duberman, p. 190–191.) Bob Kohler used to talk to the homeless youth in Sheridan Square, and said, "When people talk about Judy Garland's death having anything much to do with the riot, that makes me crazy. The street kids faced death every day. They had nothing to lose. And they couldn't have cared less about Judy. We're talking about kids who were fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. Judy Garland was the middle-aged darling of the middle-class gays. I get upset about this because it trivializes the whole thing." (Deitcher, p. 72.)"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots#cite_note-67
It really is amazing, gay promiscuity causes -- or at least greatly accelerates -- one of the worse and no doubt most expensive epidemics and yet this serves to mainstream homosexuality.
Blacks riot in several major cities, quite literally ethnically cleansing (avant la lettre ) sections of them, runs others (Detroit) quite literally back to the jungle, engage in huge numbers of interracial crimes, and yet it is white Americas that beat themselves up over its racist and the evil practices of their ancestors.
States with high recent immigration, especially Hispanic immigration, become unlivable overcrowded basket cases with collapsing economies and schools and yet we are told how vital mass immigration is to our well being.
4 of the top 5 (indeed the top 4) and 8 of the top ten H1-B users are Indian outsourcing consulting businesses and yet we are told how *US* high tech industry couldn't compete without these 'best and brightest' foreign workers.
I picture the great and the good sitting around somewhere -- perhaps at a chalet in Davos-- laughing uproariously and what the way they have caused the general public to believe, think and act. They do take us all for chumbalones.
Victoria wrote:
"Do you think that homosexuals during, say, the 1950s or before, were not indulging in freestyle sex, or what you call "industrial scale" promiscuity?"
I think that during the 1950s and before it was much less socially acceptable to be gay than it is now. This social pressure led millions of people to try to suppress their homosexual urges in the past. Obviously, not all of them were successful at this, but some were. I'm sure that on average this led to longer, healthier lives for those who were unfortunate enough to have been born with such urges.
We could compare this with the Scandinavian governments' periodic attempts to ban or heavily regulate alcohol consumption. The common thread here is trying to save congenitally vulnerable people from themselves, as well as trying to limit collateral damage to those who aren't congenitally vulnerable.
I think the real cause of the AIDS epidemic (or why it happened when it did) has more to do with the results of globalization and open immigration. HIV virus supposedly had existed in Africa for centuries before it spread to the world at large. Enough homosexual encounters were probably taking place before gay liberation to spread the disease at baseline.
Consider that the Hepatitis C epidemic started about the same time. Hep C is not primarily passed through sexual encounters, but rather through dirty needles in the setting of IV drug abuse or tatoos. My friend's mom actually had to have a liver transplant from Hep C contracted during a blood transfusion. Men typically aren't outraged about Hep C because shooting up and tatoos are such "manly" things to do.
Apropos of this topic, I stumbled on the following:
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/threat-of-world-aids-pandemic-among-heterosexuals-is-over-report-admits-842478.html
Threat of world Aids pandemic among heterosexuals is over, report admits
quote:
"A 25-year health campaign was misplaced outside the continent of Africa. But the disease still kills more than all wars and conflicts"
"The impact of HIV is so heterogeneous. In the US , the rate of infection among men in Washington DC is well over 100 times higher than in North Dakota, the region with the lowest rate. That is in one country. How do you explain such differences?"
Yes, yes, how, how DO you explain such differences between North Dakota and Washington, D.C.? Hmmmm....What's the common factor?
What COULD it BE? And HOW does Africa fit into this? Hmmm...Such a puzzle...
For us long-term Isteve readers, the above sentence causes an involuntary, EVIL giggle
"gay liberation = gay promiscuity"
In one of his books - forget which one - Francis Fukuyama notes that "gay sex" aka promiscuity is really "male sex". The only problem is that straight men can't get most straight women to co-operate. Something to be said for that...
"Why the restrictions against lesbians, then? "
I used to enjoy asking people who thought that AIDS was God's revenge on gays this question: If a high incidence of AIDS is God's revenge on gay men, does the low incidence of AIDS in lesbians make them God's chosen people? Most HIV positive women get it from men after all.......
" gay Pim Fortyn, whose created a restrictionist party he named after himself, which became the 2nd largest party in parliamont out of many and part of the governing alliance in the Netherlands, though he was assinated shortly before the election"
Yeah, not only that, but later on he got killed by some Muslim dude.*
* Some call it an assasination
Sorry, people, I couldn't help it. I am still laughing about Bob's freudian slip there.
There IS a connection between proiscuity and AIDS. Only political correctness makes this unsayable. Gay men are in general more promiscuous then hetero men.
I think it likely (although we will never know, since no researcher in his right mind would try to persue this line of inquiry) that the HIV virus (which has been around a long time) was so hard to contract that it never would have become a problem unless it had the incredibly disease-promoting environment of gay-liberation gay men to incubate in. Once it reached critical mass, it could start to take hold in other vulnerable populations, but it couldn't start there.
Thus, western gays are direcetly responsible for not only the deaths of their own group, but the millions of Africans who have died as a result of the plague they created.
No wonder the blacks in CA voted down gay "marriage"...
Ditto other commenters on Randy Shilts. He told the truth, and I'd recommend "And the Band Played On" for a frank account of the early days of AIDS.
That drag queens sparked stonewall shouldn't come as a surprise if you know about drag queens. They are surprisingly tough. Anecdotally, I've been going to gay bars for about 20 years. (Yes, Steve has gay readers). I've only seen 3 fights in a bar, and all of them involved a drag queen. Guys who do drag can be far more confrontational than the average gay guy.
Chris
Bob said...
I noted in a comment earlier here that gays have traits that make them effective modern politicians. They also will open their wallets if they feel under threat. You advocate for both immigration restriction and take potshots against them, you drive them and their educated family/friends into political coalitions with NAMs.
This is basically what happened in Colorado when the Republicans went on an anti-gay kick, spurring a two gay tech multi-millionaires to spend $12 million and raise much more and turn what was a solidly Republican state into a solidly Democratic one. They are worth a combined half billion and are ready to spend more.
Maybe Colorado changed over the years because of immigrationn from Mexico and the inmigration of liberals from California.
I thought this guy was to blame for Aids
http://norulesnoshame.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/stallone.jpg
Two excellent books for those curious about AIDS:
Gabriel Rotello's "Sexual Ecology"
Richard Berkowitz's "Stayin Alive"
Rotello basically makes the argument that Jimbo in his comment above makes: that HIV is hard to catch and pass along, and that it was only in the weird Petri dish of late '70s gay behavior (ie., in that particular sexual ecology) that it could catch fire and take off.
Berkowitz is amazingly frank about something no one in this thread seems aware of: the political gays saw promiscuity as a civil right. They wouldn't stand for talk of quarantines, abstinence, reducing numbers of partners, etc -- because, in their view, they'd fought a hard civil rights war for their right to be promiscuous. Promiscuity was central to political-gay-male identity, in other words. So they invented the "safe sex" approach to dealing with AIDS as a way of protecting and defending their "right" to be promiscuous. In other words, the goal of the "safe sex" campaign and approach was maybe less to combat AIDS than it was to protect the "civil right" of promiscuity.
Rotello had to take a lot of heat when his book came out. I'm not sure how Berkowitz fared.
Agree with Michael, Gabriel Rotello's book "Sexual Ecology" is a great look at the epidemiology of AIDS. He is a gay man who is critical of gay male sexual behavior.
We know gay men were not engaging in industrial level promiscuity before the late 1960's because there was a rough balance in STD's between men and women back then. After the gay sexual revolution, STDs afflicted men at higher rates - reflecting men having sex with men.
There are still bath houses, but many fewer. Not that it would matter today. The internet is the hook up method of choice. That is lot more difficult to control.
"Victoria said...
There are blacks now writing about this phenomenon of men coming out of prison infected, and passing the disease onto to women. These men can't exactly be called "gay."
Yes, that's why we used to have words like "sodomite" and "catamite".
"Peter A said...
""Instead, we're all supposed to believe AIDS was caused by discrimination against homosexuals in the military, the absence of gay marriage, and/or Ronald Reagan.""
Really Steve? Has anyone ever claimed that? I thought the crazy left claim was that Government labs started it. If Gay Liberation caused the epidemic, so what? AIDS mostly just killed Gays, so if they're happy with the choice good for them."
Hell yes, they claimed that. You must not have been around, or were too young to be aware at that time. During the 80s, it was a routine thing to blame (somehow) Ronald Reagan for the AIDS epidemic. Somehow (never explicitly stated) Reagan, and by extension all conservatives, were to blame for it all. The fact that some homosexual men were participating in dozens of anonymous sex acts in one night (fueled by drugs) had nothing to do with it. Homosexual activists made it sound like Reagan went around in the dead of the night injecting gay men with the virus.
Strangely, Reagan - given his Hollywood background - quite possibly had more homosexual friends than Bill Clinton did. I don't recall Reagan ever making a statement that was even remotely critical of gays.
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