Richard Poirier. Social Research. Volume 87, Issue 2, Summer 2020.
AIDS has been called a plague. but recently there have been doubts expressed that it is or will become one. Good news, if true. Meanwhile, it is of extraordinary cultural interest that these doubts are being translated into very bad—and very familiar—news about male homosexuals, still the primary victims of AIDS in this country. Theories that the AIDS epidemic will not extensively move into the heterosexual population and the fact that its rate of increase is declining among gays—both of these factors seem only to exacerbate the vituperations directed against homosexuals and, specifically, against what is assumed to be their preferred sexual practice: anal intercourse. It appears that the virus—unless it mutates—cannot be acquired by casual contact; it is contended that it cannot be easily transmitted by vaginal or oral penetration. But all this means for some is that the manner in which the virus nonetheless can most easily be transmitted sexually—by penetration of the anus to the point of orgasm—gives added offense to those very commentators who, it has always been assumed, are altogether unlikely to be infected in this fashion.
It is becoming clear that the stigmatization of the most likely victims of AIDS results from the fear not of physical but of moral contagion, and that the stigmatization validates itself increasingly not on medical grounds but by appeal to the most ancient of Christian abhorrences. I refer to the abhorrence of the church fathers—I doubt if this was ever shared by many of their flocks—for those forms of contraception which not only abjure abstinence but allow a promiscuous commitment to sex as a form of pleasure and not merely, or even principally, as a means of procreation. The discourse against AIDS has become increasingly a moralistic condemnation of homosexuality, empowered by the doctrinal and biblical interpretations of sex and nature that are ancient in origin and, in the Catholic and fundamentalist churches, still extremely articulate. Basically, it defines sins against nature as any sexual act that does not afford the maximum likelihood of procreation. It prohibits oral as well as anal intercourse between people of the same and also between people of different sex. It prohibits the position mulier super virum, because the woman if on top of the man was thought less likely fully to receive and retain his seed (imagine going to confession in those days?); it prohibits sex for pleasure, which means promiscuity within a marriage as well as outside it. Thus St. Thomas writes: “Whoever, therefore, uses copulation for the delight which is in it, not referring the intention to the end intended by nature, acts against nature.” There must be no “disorder in the emission of seed,” he says, without even having to consider emissions so wasteful as the homosexual ones.
In their designation of what is sexually unnatural, such mythologies seem grotesque and irrelevant to actual human behavior, but no more so now than they have ever been, except for the fact that the people designated as unnatural, sinful, and criminal are also dying in exceptionally horrible ways. But if AIDS increases their suffering beyond endurance it also increases the need to challenge the kind of nonsense about sex which has blighted the lives of so many millions of people over so many centuries and, quite unnecessarily, regardless of sexual preference. To expose and condemn the sexual mythologies currently at work in the discourse on AIDS ought to be undertaken in the hope that we can hand on a less cruel world than we have inherited.
Homosexuality as Disease
We are all culture carriers, as Barbara Rosenkrantz remarked in her comments this morning. While thus characterizing the AIDS crisis, I am of course also aware of exceptions, of many decent responses throughout American society. Audiences, and not predominantly gay ones, have applauded dramatizations such as The Normal Heart or A Quiet End or the television dramatization An Early Frost, all of which vividly and sympathetically represent the plight of people with AIDS. Many in the churches (including some in the Roman Catholic hierarchy), people in the theater and the arts, in medicine, in neighborhoods where infected children have been allowed in the schools without fuss or self-congratulation—all these have acted more generously even than might have been expected. Meanwhile, gays have become a functioning community, with organizations like the Gay Men’s Health Crisis that have set up services and support structures that are models for other groups who will face similar catastrophes in the future.
But the cultural odds against such efforts are formidable, sometimes overwhelming, and the odds must be addressed without illusion. The odds cannot be overcome merely by more goodwill, more contributions, or more work. In talking about AIDS and the virus which is alleged to be its primary agent, HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), I contend that the designation of the virus as the primary cause of the disease—though there are reasons to wonder if it is—has created an opportunity for a most primitive designation of homosexuality as the criminal mode of its transmission. For many powerful groups and individuals—including the US Senate, members of the President’s Commission on AIDS, the Vatican, the archdiocese of New York, Secretary of Education Bennett, elements of the medical profession, and some influential journals and journalists—for all these, AIDS offers an opportunity to propagate the belief (which anciently predates and is being perpetuated by the AIDS crisis) that homosexuality is itself a disease and a threat to human survival. Sometimes quite evasively, sometimes with alarming directness, these people are saying that the need to eradicate homosexuality, even as homosexuals lie dying, takes precedence over the need to eradicate the disease. To recall Susan Sontag’s ever-valuable Illness as Metaphor and Allan Brandt’s variations on her argument in his paper this morning, AIDS has become the metaphor for the sin of homosexuality and, more generally I think, the sin of sexual pleasure. Discussions of the disease—the kind of knowledge structure that is being made up with it and around it—is identical to that knowledge structure of paranoia which, for two thousand years and more, has sought to rationalize the prohibition of sexual pleasure, heterosexual as well as homosexual, when these are contrary to a human invention called “nature.”
The insidious effort I am describing is helped by the fact that the etiology of the disease, its causes and the mechanisms of its transmission, remain mysterious. No one knows the originating source of the virus which is believed to cause the disease, and theories that AIDS is an advanced form of syphilis or that syphilis is a crucial cofactor, have been advanced by, among others, Dr. Peter H. Duesberg of the University of California at Berkeley, an expert on retroviruses, and by Dr. Stephen Caiazza, a New York City physician whose research, along with that of some German scientists, is discussed in an article by Katie Leishman in the January issue of Atlantic Monthly. The argument, briefly, is that without a cofactor, HIV would be a nonpathogenic virus. Such investigations run counter to the huge industrial and research investment in vaccines and treatments directed only at HIV, as if it were the sole cause of AIDS. The conviction that HIV is the lone culprit, working through circuits of homosexual commerce, has nonetheless allowed William F. Buckley to propose in his nationally syndicated column that all people with AIDS, as well as all asymptomatic persons infected with the human immunodeficiency virus, should be identified and inscribed with a tattoo on forehead, genitals, and anal areas. Of course such a vicious precautionary practice would only be as efficient as the tests on which it depends, and even Buckley ought to know that no test for AIDS presently exists. Quite aside from the question of whether or not HIV is the cause of the disease or simply a cofactor, the tests now given, called ELISA and Western Blot, detect only the antibodies. These tests, which Anthony Quinton seems erroneously to think would be a dependable preliminary to quarantine, were in fact designed to screen the nation’s supply of blood and plasma. They are not diagnostic. They do not identify individuals with AIDS, nor do they prove that anyone who tests positive will get AIDS in the future. According to Mark Rothstein, only 25–50 percent of seriopositive persons will develop AIDS in five to ten years. At most the test helps support a diagnosis of AIDS by its symptoms, by the presence of various opportunistic infections like pneumocystis pneumonia, Kaposi’s sarcoma, or tuberculosis. Neither does it identify people with ARC (AIDS related complex) in the absence of clinical evidences like fever, diarrhea, and weight loss. It doesn’t predict ARC, and only a quarter of the seriopositive persons who do not develop AIDS are predicted to develop ARC. More than that, since the test detects only antibodies stimulated by HIV, it would not identify a person as positive in the period between exposure and the development of antibodies, a process that might take anywhere from six or eight weeks to a year or more.
Even if HIV is the cause of AIDS, there is still no reliable way to infer the active presence of the virus from the evidence of the antibodies to it, or to infer from those antibodies that a person will eventually get AIDS or ARC. The virus is not the disease. Nonetheless, it seems clear for the present, in this country at least, that the disease has firmly established itself among certain groups, specifically homosexual men, intravenous drug users, and their sexual partners, male or female. Because these groups are already marginalized, despised, and to some extent criminalized in American society, the very mystery and uncertainty surrounding the virus has made it quite easy to add culpability, criminality, and ostracism to the devastations of the disease itself. To be a victim of AIDS is to carry a stigma, more insupportable than the “A” worn by Hester Prynne. “A” for AIDS will never be read as also meaning Able or Angel, as was Hester’s “A” by a few admirers. Instead, its secondary meaning is apt to be Anus, the reproductive location of the virus, the always forbidden seat of corruption and satanic inversion. The anus figures as the bodily equivalent of the dark center of the earth, the place of insubordination and decreation. It has for centuries been imagined in this way, as in that moment in the Inferno when Vergil, carrying Dante on his back, makes a U-turn around the buttocks of Satan, whose lower portions are forever encased in ice. This begins the ascent which will eventually take Dante, in the Paradiso, to his vision of an opposing image: the rose of heaven. This rose, as Joseph Pequigney I think accurately surmises, refers to the vagina of the Virgin Mary. Love may have pitched his mansion in the place of excrement in one of Yeats’s poems, but Dante and the church fathers knew that the physical proximity of the seat of waste with the source of birth required that, conceptually, they be placed as far away as possible from one another.
Leaving aside those who have contracted the disease from intravenous drug use—they, too, as we shall hear in a moment, are said to be victims of homosexual promiscuity—HIV is, by a wide range of commentators, so exclusively linked to anal intercourse as to suggest, in some of the phrasing, that it actually originated in and from the anus. Charged as it has always been with the particular abhorrence of the church fathers and the fundamentalists, and used, as it has always been, to mask a fear and detestation of sexual pleasure itself, anal intercourse, and the promiscuity that is mistakenly said to go with it, has moved to the center of the discourse on AIDS, especially for those who at the same time want to sustain a united front against abortion and contraception. These, too, are said to be sins against nature and forms of murder. Let me make clear that I am not denying that HIV can be transmitted by anal intercourse and that everyone should for the time being abstain from the practice. Nor need anyone be surprised by a further fact—that once a plague or a threat of plague gets linked to a sexual act of any sort, then the expectation of divine retribution follows. Even before the Christian era, plagues were almost always taken to be signs of God’s displeasure for sins, often, as in the case of Oedipus, sins of a sexual kind. The plague of Thebes, you will recall, is precipitated by incest, an act also defined as unnatural. And it is immensely suggestive that the genealogy of the Theban plague in Oedipal incest parallels the genealogy of Freudian analysis. In some remarks of his on Maurice Blanchot’s study of Foucault, where this conjunction is noted, Randall Havas of the Yale philosophy department recalls the remark supposedly made by Freud to Jung on the ship taking him to America: “They don’t know that we bring with us the plague.” Abstention from anal intercourse for medical reasons is absolutely necessary; that is not an issue any longer. Neither is the fact that human beings apparently fear, in Western culture, that sexual activity can call forth the retaliatory power of the gods. Rather, what is at issue is the rhetorical use being made of these factors. I am objecting primarily to these, and to their cultural, moral, political, and practical consequences. I am objecting to the terrible legacy which can be handed on by our response to the AIDS crisis.
The War Against Homosexuality
Freud helped give a pseudoscientific credence to the ancient fear of the anus and anal intercourse, and to its importance in the creation of the new disease of homosexuality. But long before Freud, homosexuality was treated and discussed as a contagion. It is said to be latent in people, as is HIV, who do not even know they have it. And in its latency, it is always ready, supposedly, to corrupt, seduce, and betray the carrier, whenever the immune system is for any other reason most vulnerable. One of the by-now-standard journalistic inferences about the so-called Cambridge spies in British intelligence between the wars, for example, is that those recruited to serve the Comintern were already secretly members of what is archly called the Homintern. Before the act of sodomy was identified as a conduit, indeed a source, for the AIDS infection, it was already identified as a violation of the laws of God, the laws of man, and the social contract. It is against the statutes of 24 states and the District of Columbia. In the majority opinion upholding the state of Georgia in Hardwick v. Bowers, Justice Byron White said that it is merely “frivolous” to assume that the law protects the act of sodomy between consenting adults, heterosexual or homosexual.
Like many other terms having to do with sex, sodomy cannot be precisely defined. It can refer to fellatio or to anal intercourse, to anything involving the genitals which frustrates the impregnation of the ovum. Here St. Thomas and the Georgia courts are as one. But in the discussion of AIDS it is nearly everywhere assumed that homosexual sodomy is synonymous with anal intercourse. Given the divine and secular prohibitions of this act and the odium with which it has always been described, it is predictable that once the virus associated with AIDS got associated also with homosexual anal intercourse, then the culprit would not be the virus itself; instead, it would become homosexuality and homosexuals. Thus, measures which would frustrate the virus, like the use of condoms or, for that matter, safe sex, should not in some views even be foregrounded, since these might have the effect on less threatening occasions actually of condoning a reprehensible and forever-to-be-prohibited sexual practice. Abolish the practice rather than the virus. I see no practical difference in this respect among the positions taken by Senator Jesse Helms; Pope John Paul II; his two favorite American cardinals, Kroll and O’Connor; Patrick Buchanan, formerly on the staffs of presidents Nixon and Reagan; and more than half of the 13 members of the President’s Commission on AIDS. By a vote of 98 to 2 (the admirable Moynihan and Weicker voting against), the Senate approved a bill, introduced by Senator Helms, which denies federal funds to organizations (including the Gay Men’s Health Crisis) which counsel safe sex. His argument? That it promotes what he calls “safe sodomy.” The message? Abstain, or sodomize and die. So too with Cardinal O’Connor in his objections to the limited and sensible argument of other American bishops, which is that since some people are not likely to abstain from sex out of wedlock, much less homosexual sex, they should at least be told about condoms. According to his friend Cardinal Kroll, who is the American cleric closest to the pope, the AIDS epidemic is “an act of vengeance against the sin of homosexuality.” He is only putting more directly what the pope himself meant when he referred to “the moral source of AIDS.”
Despite this kind of thing, and worse, it is contended by some gay persons themselves, like Richard Goldstein in a recent issue of the Village Voice, that “AIDS has been dehomosexualized in the popular imagination.” I don’t know what he can mean by this unless he is making an unwarranted extrapolation from the evidence that new infections among homosexuals have dropped significantly since 1982. Safe sex seems to work; gay people have significantly policed and improved their lot. Among nearly 7,000 gay men in a continuing study of AIDS in San Francisco—it began as a study of the hepatitis B virus in 1979—the conversion from antibody negative to antibody positive in 1982 was 21 percent; in 1986, it was under 1 percent (0.8 percent); and last year, in 1987, not a single conversion occurred. The rate of increase is higher among intravenous drug users, and also among their partners, which proves, as do all statistics from Africa, and recent New York City statistics about the newborn, that the disease can be sexually transmitted by heterosexual sex as well as by anal intercourse, though not as easily. A New York Times editorial of December 30, 1987, mentions reports from the New York sexual disease clinics to the effect that of nearly 600 people who came in for help with sexual diseases other than AIDS, only six of those who denied being gay or drug addicted tested positive for the AIDS antibody. Since some risk factors might have been unadmitted or unknown, this means that the disease is not ready to explode, as the surgeon general warned it might, in the general population or that it deserves his comparison to the Black Death. “In other words,” says the Times, “the AIDS epidemic may be stabilizing among gay men, it may have further spread among addicts and it has apparently not yet become self-sustaining beyond these two major risk groups and their partners.” Again, however, good news of this sort—and there has since been bad news about the number of newborn babies in New York City who carry the antibodies—seems only to increase the determination of those who want to treat the epidemic more as an opportunity for war against homosexuality (and promiscuity) than against the virus. A well-orchestrated example of such determination was evident in two recent, successive issues of Commentary magazine, edited by that historic homophobic, Norman Podhoretz.
The first, by a journalist named Michael A. Fumento, appeared in the November 1987 issue and was titled “AIDS: Are Heterosexuals at Risk?” (his answer, two months ago, was no); the other, in the December issue, is by a psychotherapist named Marjorie Rosenberg, entitled “Inventing the Homosexual,” as if a bunch of celibate priests along with other interested parties have not for centuries been inventing “the heterosexual.” Fumento’s well-conducted argument is meant to prove that AIDS will remain lodged within the self-infecting groups where it is currently taking its toll. That being his conviction, why must he then beat up on them even more, as with the smartaleck suggestion that because homosexual-rights groups are aware of “the appeal exercised by the notion that AIDS is nature’s or God’s retribution on them they have sought to tie AIDS to heterosexual sex”? That particular achievement belongs to the World Health Organization (not known to be a homosexual-rights group), a surgeon general well known for his conservative views on abortion, the National Institutes for Health, and the researchers for the Centers for Disease Control. At the end, Fumento insists that from now on every commercial must stress that “promiscuous anal intercourse and needle sharing are the overwhelming risk factors in the transmission of AIDS.” But the predictable effect of such an emphasis would be to pretend that the heterosexual risk factor does not exist, which no one even after Fumento’s adroit figuring should dare to concede, and it would mean that all funding for such commercials, and for most research—only to save faggots and drug abusers?—would dry up. Recall that Senator Helms has already counted 98 Senate votes against paying for anything that leads to “safe sodomy.”
Fumento’s essay sets the statistical and political ground for the piece by Rosenberg. Hers is an altogether less impressive performance, full of question-begging, harrumphing moralism, and the by now ritual attacks on homosexual promiscuity and anal intercourse, as if anyone, under present conditions, is ready to promote either of these. The insinuating, ghettoizing tone of the Rosenberg and Fumento arguments—particularly unbecoming in a magazine supported by people on the American Jewish Committee who know very intimately about the historical persecution of minorities—can only deflect energy and attention away from practical measures, even while it frightens already very frightened people who need every encouragement to come forward if they are to receive counseling and experimental treatment.
The scapegoating of such pieces is the more dangerous for its rhetorical claims to moral rectitude and intellectual cool. No less so, it is necessary to add, is the sprightly pretense to dispassion by which the philosopher from Oxford on this panel, Anthony Quinton, expresses his concern less for AIDS victims than for the insurance companies who might have to pay their medical and death benefits. His modest proposal is that the infection can fairly be considered the result of “voluntary actions from which [the victim] could have abstained,” so that it can be argued that the victim has no more rights to insurance payments than would a suicide who only recently took out a policy. Leaving aside the various meanings of “voluntary,” why not apply the same principle to anyone who gets into a fatal accident after drinking an immoderate amount of alcohol? Or to anyone who willingly exposes herself, even in the care of loved ones, to an infection known to prove fatal? The “voluntary” principle is especially grotesque in the case of AIDS because many of its victims, and probably most of them, picked up the virus even before it was known to exist; and since its incubation period can be as long as 10 years, many more who carry it cannot in any sense have “volunteered” to get it. An argument so specious is not to be understood as mere speculative solicitude for Lloyds of London.
The writers in Commentary, and others who more indirectly share their view, all exhibit, you will notice, nothing of the fear and terror that these two writers and others who share their views exhibit, nothing of the fear and terror that provoked earlier scapegoating during the onset of plagues, as in the flagellant processions and the intensifications of the pogroms against the Jews during the Black Death in the middle of the fourteenth century. There are, to be sure, evidences here and in England of an equivalent fear and terror about AIDS. Some people in Arcadia, Florida, as everyone knows, burned down the pathetically wretched home of a family whose three small hemophiliac boys had developed AIDS, and a house in London was recently torched by neighbors who knew that its two inhabitants had AIDS. But if there is a choice between the arsonists in Arcadia and the intellectualists in Commentary and elsewhere, it is a choice only between fire and ice. And the ice is neither very clear nor very sparkling. What, for example, is anyone expected to do about AIDS when told by Ms. Rosenberg that “To the Greeks it would have been inconceivable that free men would choose to engage in such activities”? I would suggest, to paraphrase a much shrewder woman when it comes to sex, that freedom had nothing to do with it. And how are we possibly to take the anatomically startling reassurance from Mr. Fumento, never to be outdone in the glorification of free men, that “some sort of passageway is needed [for the virus] and in the case of most Americans such passageways do not exist”? Reassuring, I suppose, especially when it might be thought that we had become a nation of such passageways!
Any doubt as to the political intention behind the serial publication of these two pieces in Commentary was dispelled by the use made of them by Patrick Buchanan. Not that he needs help on the subject, having already written two syndicated columns in May 1983 entitled “AIDS Disease: It’s Nature Striking Back.” In his column for December 2, 1987, he gives repeated credit to the Fumento piece—and by then he had doubtless read the Rosenberg—in order to put the position shared by all three with brutal directness: “There is only one cause of the AIDS crisis,” he writes, “—the willful refusal of homosexuals to cease indulging in the immoral, unnatural, unsanitary, unhealthy, and suicidal practice of anal intercourse, which is the primary means by which the AIDS virus is being spread through the ‘gay’ community, and thence into the needles of drug abusers, the transfusions of hemophiliacs, and the blood streams of unsuspecting health workers, prostitutes, lovers, wives, and children. By the way they define themselves, i.e., by anonymous and promiscuous sex, the unbridled homosexuals are killing themselves and killing others as well … Anal intercourse—buggery—the defining practice of the homosexual, is uniquely suited by human nature for the spreading of the AIDS virus. The only way to stop the epidemic is to stop the sodomizing.” In fact, anal intercourse is not the “defining practice of homosexuals” except in the paranoid fantasies of male heterosexuals like Buchanan. The predominant practice even before AIDS was mutual masturbation and fellatio, which also accounts for the famed (or infamous) capacity of more active homosexuals for multiple scores in one evening. Obviously, under present conditions, mutual masturbation and fellatio, usually with a condom, is even more the custom. The idea that if sodomizing stopped so would the epidemic is nonsense, as if sodomy gave birth to the virus in some grotesque impregnation of the anus or that it is responsible for its transmission by needles.
Buchanan really does not want a cure for AIDS; he wants a cure for anal intercourse. Is there one? Perhaps. Since, in his attack on promiscuity and sexual practices which are against nature, he depends so implicitly on the church fathers, Buchanan ought to read more deeply in the works of one of them, Albertus Magnus. In the synthesis of theology and canon law begun by the church in the middle of the thirteenth century—a synthesis which clearly remains potently at work in the twentieth—Albertus was the first to comment extensively on what came to be called homosexual behavior. Such behavior offended “grace, reason, and nature” more so than adultery, which offended, he said, only the first two. He describes sodomizing as a contagious disease, very hard to get rid of. However—and here I will quote from James Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality—”in his treatise on animals he described an easy cure: the fur of the neck of an Arabian animal he called ‘alzabo,’ burned with pitch and ground to a fine powder, would cure a ‘sodomite’ to whose anus it was applied.” Albertus was using, without knowing it, a transliteration into Latin of an Arabic word which means “hyena,” a fact that might have embarrassed him, since in vulgar tradition the hyena itself was considered homosexual. This could hardly have been consistent with his claim that sodomy was an act contrary to nature.
It is not for us, however, to speak condescendingly of the past, not when we have William F. Buckley’s tattoos to our credit, or the recommendation of the publisher of the Saturday Evening Post, Cory Ser Vaas, who, with John Cardinal O’Connor, is one of the 13 members of the President’s Commission on AIDS. She told the New York Native that she hopes scientists will discover “the genetic predisposition to being homosexual so we could minimize that behavior thereby reducing AIDS.” Again, the same illusion: that if you can only get rid of homosexuality you will get rid of or reduce AIDS. In this view, the cure is not medical; it is moral, in line with the always presumptuous Christian notion that facts of nature are no more than the moral facts we have invented to stand duty for nature. The effort to turn the AIDS crisis into a renewed campaign against sexual practices of a contraceptive kind, and thus into a punitive campaign against homosexuality, will only delay and frustrate any effort to control and end this nightmare disease, to isolate and disarm a virus whose mutations, if we fail to go after it now and directly, might in time, as Joshua Lederberg’s paper starkly reminds us, become a threat to human reproductive survival, and which even in its present form is already producing its antibodies in one out of 61 newborn babies in New York City.