Kimberly Bergalis, R I P

KIMBERLY BERGALIS, her parents said, came to feel she had a special calling. It was to bring a glimmer of truth, however forlorn, into a debate characterized by confusion, denial, smugness, and suicidal self-indulgence. That this mission, now mercifully ended, was a success is best seen in the uneasy, often resentful attitude of those for whom she was a Eving rebuke.

Why all this attention to one AIDS victim, went the refrain, when so many others are dying too? Her warnings about untested medical personnel who might be infecting their patients, like the dentist who killed her, were "misguided," based on a false sense of panic and "homophobia." And of course the solution was not to test doctors for AIDS, or encourage voluntary testing; the solution, as ever, was "more money for research." How dare we "canonize" this "lovely white woman with no sexual history," demanded Anna Quindlen in the New York Times, when obviously the real "heroes" are those courageous activists and the growing ranks of "safe sex" spokesmen. "No sexual history" is how the jaded describe a chaste woman of 23 who, as Miss Bergalis explained to disbelieving interviewers, "wanted to wait for marriage." Marriage and its joys will never come for Kimberly Bergalis, but in her integrity and courage she affirmed that other things were also precious.

COPYRIGHT 1991 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning