Ah, 1992. I remember the year fondly… Dr. Dre came out with his first solo album, Kurt and Courtney got married, and movie reviewers struggled with how to describe The Crying Game without giving away that oh-so-titillating secret. (I was more interested in seeing Jeunet & Caro’s Delicatessen, personally.)
That year, my best friend Michele started a letter-writing chapter of Amnesty International at our high school, as well as another student organization dedicated to sex education. We volunteered to help teach sex education in middle schools, and I learned an awful lot of facts very well, especially about HIV–which had definitely become the Huge Scary Thing that was driving a lot of parents & teachers to want more and better sex education. It might seem a little odd that teenagers were teaching pre-teens about sex, but we took it very seriously. I had relatives and family friends who were HIV+ (and still alive, at that point) and a few years before, some of them had been involved in tests of a new drug called AZT, and methods to keep the virus from infecting newborn babies of seropositive mothers.
One thing we were careful to stress to the middle school kids was that they didn’t need to be scared of people with HIV. They couldn’t catch the virus from toilet seats, contrary to urban legend, or from kissing someone with HIV. We even had a big bucket full of water that we would haul out to show how much saliva you’d theoretically have to drink in order to stand a chance of transmitting the virus; it was a big bucket and never failed to get a chorus of “ewwww, gross!” at the thought of that much spit. Sex ed information has changed and updated since then, and we didn’t have as much precise information as we do now. But it was pretty clear to us, from our own education as well as the little sessions we were teaching, that you could not “catch AIDS” just from being in the same room with people who were positive, and that it was far from just being a “gay disease.” This stuff had been known for years and years.
Well apparently down-home traditional-values Mike Huckabee, who applied to run for the U.S. Senate in 1992, was far more confused about HIV transmission than a bunch of high school kids like us. He answered a questionnaire sent to him by the Associated Press and more or less advocated quarantining people with HIV, comparing the epidemic to tuberculosis. Which, by the way, is transmitted via airborne droplets that can infect anyone who breathes them in regularly, especially children and people in poor health for other reasons. Huckabee also said “I feel homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle, and we now know it can pose a dangerous public health risk,” and it’s all too obvious what he was talking about. A “gay disease.”
Since then, Huckabee has made all sorts of excuses about why his comments were appropriate at the time. He claims that transmission wasn’t well understood back then… somehow to the extent that it was all right for a man running for office to spread myths that I was trying to counter at the time, that only schoolchildren and apparently evangelical politicos believed? He even invoked the “but I had a friend who died of AIDS” card, twice: once for hemophiliacs and once for honest-to-gosh gay people. I wonder how he treated that unnatural, abberant, sinful friend of his, dying of AIDS in the late 80s or early 90s? (Actually, I wonder if that friend existed at all, or is just a rhetorical device.)
I don’t really have much more to add that Pam didn’t already say in her first post on the subject or her more recent one. It’s just a shame that in this day and age — whether it’s 15 years ago or today — someone running for public office can get away with spewing this kind of ignorant, fear-mongering bullshit. Not only get away with it, but be rewarded for it.
(Footnote: I just remembered that early in 1992 was also when I discovered a very strange computer network. I managed to get access to some University of Washington servers and then discovered that I could talk to people in Sweden. Mind-boggling. “All the college kids are using it and calling it… the internet! It’s way better than AOL and it’s free!” I exclaimed to my friends. Then I ran off to try and develop my first online game, which was based on a very nerdy roleplaying game about vampires, and got about 30% finished despite me enlisting a boy who could actually program.)