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The Hyping of Heterosexual AIDS
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# : |
19692 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1991 |
3,194 Words |
| Author
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Melanie Scarborough
Melanie Scarborough is a psychologist and graduate student in
journalism at Virginia Commonwealth University. |
Despite the media establishment's relentless efforts to convince us otherwise, the simple truth is that AIDS is still largely confined to homosexual and bisexual men, intravenous drug abusers, and their regular sex partners.
It is also clear that blacks and Hispanics are at far greater risk than whites for contracting the disease. But egalitarianism is so entrenched in journalists' collective psyche that they seem to find it intolerable to acknowledge important distinctions, even in reporting epidemiology.
The reluctance of the media to stigmatize certain groups as purveyors of a deadly disease came as a relief to gay activists, who, early on, recognized a strategic problem: Public sympathy (i.e., tax money) was not likely to be forthcoming for a disease contracted through behavior that is remote to most people's experience.
Playwright Larry Kramer, a militant leader in the homosexual community, warned his fellow gays that "if AIDS does not spread out widely into the white, non-drug using heterosexual population, as it may not do, then the white, non-drug using population is going to hate us even more--for scaring them, for costing them a f--g fortune, for our 'life-style,' which they say caused this."
The solution was to convince the unwary public--despite statistical reality--that all are equally at risk for contracting AIDS. It worked at first, but fear subsided as evidence of a heterosexual epidemic failed to ensue.
Of the more than 175,000 known cases of AIDS, the Centers for Disease Control report that approximately 90 percent are homosexual and bisexual men or intravenous drug abusers. One percent of victims are hemophiliacs who got the virus through contaminated blood products; an additional 2 percent received the virus in a transfusion. Between 4 and 5 percent can trace infection to heterosexual intercourse; if native Haitians and Africans are excluded, that figure drops nearer to 2 percent. The majority of heterosexual AIDS victims are working-class black or Hispanic women whose sexual partners are IV drug abusers.
Heterosexual transmission among middle-class whites accounts for only 0.5 percent of all cases, yet this minute percentage has received perhaps the bulk of media coverage and has been heavily targeted by most information campaigns. If airline safety were approached in the same way as AIDS precautions, aircraft
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