There was an interesting post that I’d read yesterday, which linked Harvey Milk and the struggle against HIV as two connected precursors in the movement towards Marriage Equality. This is an idea that deserves consideration, and I hope you read the post. I’ve often wondered, if there would be a strong gay male identity or community if there had been no AIDS epidemic. I suppose there would have been something. However, a real sense of identity for gay men was born out of being a community under siege, and as Watson describes, AIDS forced people to come out visibly in ways that had never happened before. I also believe one of the reasons we are seeing an increase in the HIV infection rates today, is because of the way a negative stigma was associated with sex through the early years of the epidemic. As much as many of us fought against it, the language of the Religious Right- that AIDS was God’s punishment- was internalized in direct and indirect ways. Even many gay men believe that those who become infected “deserved it” because they were promiscuous. In reality, sex doesn’t cause AIDS, a retrovirus does, and a community who already was shamed as deviants was more deeply shamed.

In my opinion, no one deserves AIDS any more than any person deserves any other disease. Disease or health isn’t a punishment or reward to be earned by how we act. Rather it is a causal reality where if you are in contact with a disease vector like a retrovirus, you are at risk of being infected. No one deserves to be ill. No one deserves to have a terminal or an incurable disease. Period. But this notion of reward and punishment is directly connected to our JudeoChristian heritage and purity ideals found in the scriptures. This is one of the greatest failings of Religion: to instill guilt and shame where it doesn’t belong by promoting the idea that some deserve to be healthy and others deserve illness as punishment. Such morality garbage has done more to promote the spread of this disease as well as other diseases and problems than any other cause.

Also at work in our culture in general is a dynamic to blame the victim when that victim is anyone except a straight white male. Consider how women are blamed for sexual assault- they are raped because their skirt was too short. Blaming the victim is a way privilege and shame are perpetuated. Couple this with fallacious moral judgement, and it is easy to see why cures are never found.

Everyday people are at risk for illness. We come in contact with all sorts of germs and bacteria and viruses. Science is demonstrating that some individuals are more predisposed than others to some diseases as well. The issue is how do we make choices to manage our risk? Even where we can draw a causal relationship between action and outcome, any notion of deserving is inappropriate. Additionally accidents happen. Unexpected consequences happen. Risk is risk and we are not all powerful over it. If we were, it wouldn’t be risk.

Managing risk when it comes to AIDS was never allowed as an acceptable model for dealing with it. In fact you could get shamed big time for suggesting such a thing, and I hope to write more about that in a later blog post.

In my opinion, because sex has become synonymous with shame and “bad”; moral judgement has been Internalized; and our culture perpetuates blaming the victim, we have never been able to find rational ways to consider risk and choice when it comes to sexuality, and HIV/AIDS prevention.