December 1
December 1 is World AIDS Day. AIDS has been in the news recently as the UN has announced that they have been overestimating infections - worldwide the new estimate holds that 33 million rather than 40 million people are infected with HIV. In 2007, there were 2.5 million new HIV infections and 2.1 million deaths AIDS deaths.
In the US, events surrounding World AIDS day are normally organized and attended by gay men and their friends and families. In Utah, the Utah AIDS Foundation has organized events for the week, including a fundraiser party, HIV testing at a variety of locations and so forth.
Every year, at World AIDS Day, I ponder the rather grim historical irony that more than any other factor, AIDS is at the root of the successes of the modern gay rights movement.
It was in dealing with hospitals and officialdom that gay men realized the price of inequality. Suddenly, someone for whom you cared, with whom you shared a life, was legally a stranger. Gay men sick with AIDS found themselves at the mercy of unsympathetic and at times hostile families, separated from partners, loved ones, friends and their community.
With no legal rights, same gender couples found themselves unable to do for one another what one does for ones loved ones. Denied hospital visitation, inheritance rights, men who had built lives together found themselves not just emotional bereft but financially ruined when families legally stole their houses and assets.
In the searing crucible of the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, gay men learned to organize, to build a movement and the institutions of a movement.Â
In an era when AIDS was a death sentence, a great many men who had led otherwise covert lives found such secrecy needless. Who cares who knows if you’re gay if you’re dying? High profile AIDS cases changed the public image of what it meant to be gay. Gay men found secrecy increasingly pointless.
The tragedy of AIDS gave birth to a gay community that felt free to take itself seriously. Relationships began to matter more - not just to individuals but to their community. Job discrimination, marriage rights and other civil rights mattered more than finding someone to hook up with three nights a week.
AIDS devastated a generation of gay men, cutting a swath of destruction the true cost of which may never be fully understood. Gay men now in their 30s and 40s came of age in the dark years of Reagan’s America - a nation in which the president managed to ignore the deaths of tens of thousands of gay men. Many of these men still remember the news reports about AIDS as a gay disease, the public perception that being gay meant having AIDS. In late 80s and early 90s fatalism infected the gay community - a sense that the world was an endless round of illnesses, deaths and funerals - counterbalanced with a renewed sense of determination and optimism, a sense that we’ve learned what we need to do to keep ourselves safe. Now the rest of the world has to catch up.Â
Those same men - now more or less well adjusted adults - have served as mentors for a younger generation of gay folks.
Gay people are coming out at a younger age, as high school students attend schools that have always had Gay-Straight Alliances, as more and more adults realize they have gay coworkers and friends, the stimga once attached to homosexuality diminishes.
Increasingly, gay peoples’ lives are treated just like straight peoples’ lives. And that’s how it should be.
I know we’re not there yet. This week, I read an article quoting a conservative activist who said that conservatives have lost focus and must remember that homosexuality is not a civil right. Groups like Concerned Women for America continue to portray gay people as sick deviants who are out to recruit children. But such voices seem increasingly shrill and isolated in a society in which the majority is growing more and more comfortable with their gay brothers and sisters, friends, coworkers, uncles, aunts and neighbors. Many conservatives see reports showing that younger people just don’t see sexual orientation as big a deal as they do and it terrifies them. They can read the numbers as well as the rest of us and they know history is leaving them behind.
