The politicization of AIDS

'IT IS utter hypocrisy to tell hundreds of thounsads of addicted sisters and brothers not to share needles, especially at a time when treatment centers are being closed. And police terror against people who are strung out is on the rise to make way for gentrification." Wouldn't you know: AIDS is just another real-estate scam. That was Diane Feinberg demagoguing it (in her estrogen-less baritone voice). Diane is a lesbian activist, who has written on the political manipulation behind Big A. "Gay men, the people of Africa, and Haitian people," according to this People's Anti-War Mobilization brochure, "are not responsible for the crisis. Nor are I.V. drug users. It is the callous Reagan Administration that is responsible." Dutch, I guess, finally managed to get something substantial out of committee.

AIDS has become the vector, not just for opportunistic disease, but for opportunistic political humbug as well. Shall we get frank about it: conservative spokespeople have not been totally honorable in this precinct. If gloating made a sound, you'd hear a low rumble on the horizon now. There are men and women who consider AIDS to be overdue slum-clearance work. Imagine a gadget that can decimate both the gay and the drug-abuse populations at once. On top of that, the HTLV III virus did apparently seep from Africa: which doesn't improve public acceptance for blacks, Haitian blacks in particular. There is this whole bunkerful of Schadenfreude going around: it doesn't have a winsome scent. God did take out Sodom and Gomorrah, but, in general, His wrath will be of the afterworldly, not the viral, sort. Conservative righteousness about AIDS is uncharitable and, well, just plain bush.

And here, at Washington Square Methodist Church, the bottom-feeding Left has set up its own political enterprise zone, HEALTHCARE NOT WARFARE. On the dais there are: a high-school girl, an anti-apartheid organizer, a lesbian, a black lesbian, A PWA (person with AIDS), and a trade-union rep. The Left has been so hashed of late that, like some stereo system, it is put together with components. SAY NO TO BIG MEDIA HYSTERIA. People's Anti-war Mobilization has seen Big A as a fear issue that might just elbow the whole gay constituency leftward. Notable achievement that: gays, despite their sexual backspin, aren't uniformly liberal by a long toss. The scrotum doesn't destroy the brain. Moreover, a cure will cost moon-shot money, and guess where PAM people think that windfall should metastasize from? "Shut down military spending, not gay gathering places." Tonight PAM will demand one billion flat from the defense budget.

AIDS death is an ungenerous and, yes, boring transaction: might as well get nickel-and-dimed by some dull extortionist. Artie Felson has been plodding away at it. He huddles behind the dais table now, in a separate, distant, winter, wool ski cap and sweater on. Once or twice he will slump sideward and, patiently, reseat himself. HTLV III made Felson a host for Kaposi's sarcoma: last week the cancer began moving again. He seems to have been sucked of marrow: there is ghostly hovering about him. And I remember Annie Dillard's description of the frog taken by a gian water bug. ". . . he slowly crumpled and began to sag. The spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed. His skin emptied and drooped; his very skull seemed to collapse and settle like a kicked tent. I watched the taut, glistening skin on his shoulders ruck and rumple and fall. Soon, part of his skin, formless as a pricked balloon, lay in floating folds like bright scum on top of the water: it was a monstrous and terrifying thing." Yet AIDS, so much slower, is worse: a skinflint death. And a brusque notice of excommunication.

If not the virus, then fear, certainly, is airborne now. Felson's rabbi, under congregational pressure, asked him to worship God elsewhere, please. "Channel 4 broadcast a report. It said that if you're in the same household as a person with AIDS, you will come down with the disease. I reassured my lover that this wasn't so. But two days later he committed suicide." There is merit to the argument (made by Miss Feinberg) that public revulsion and a threat of quarantine will drive Big A underground. Fourteen thousand cases have been reported in America. I'd estimate that at least seventy thousand have not. Even prestigious New York hospitals are known to rewrite a PWA's death certificate at the request of kin. The press is just as strangely scrupulous. They'll interview some prominent person known to have AIDS and call it cancer: first time, I suppose, that "cancer" has been a euphemism. The question perplexes. We have a grim epidemic. As in the case of VD, I would assume, those who have had intercourse with X ought to be sought and informed. Yet disclosure is social annihilation. When should the right to know supersede the right to privacy?