| 1 | 1 | | The tragedy of Aids is that it burst on a world that was half expecting it. When the |
| 2 | | syndrome was first identified in 1981 the warning bells were already beginning to sound |
| 3 | | for the liberalism of the 1960s and 1970s, social purity was mobilising for action, and the |
| 4 | | New Right was on the threshold of its decade of triumph. |
| 2 | 5 | | What better judgment on the moral failures of the past than a virus that seemed to |
| 6 | | affect disproportionately those already targeted for punitive action - the sexually, |
| 7 | | culturally and racially marginal? Here, in the words of President Reagan's Director of |
| 8 | | Communications, was nature's punishment on those who had transgressed the laws of |
| 9 | | nature. |
| 3 | 10 | | In the approach to the millennium, Susan Sontag has suggested, a rise in |
| 11 | | apocalyptical thinking may be inevitable. The sense of an ending, a premature fin-de- |
| 12 | | millennium spirit, appeared early in the world of sexuality, always a sensitive barometer of |
| 13 | | cultural trends. |
| 4 | 14 | | What has been called a 'recessionary erotic economy' was well-developed by the |
| 15 | | early 1980s, with a growing fear of disease matched by fetishisation of fitness. In such a |
| 16 | | climate Aids, intimately associated with sexual behaviour and with a prominent gay |
| 17 | | minority, became a symbol for a life already corrupted, for the healthy and beautiful body |
| 18 | | undermined by the viral invader. The hollowed faces and wracked and painfully thin |
| 19 | | bodies of people with Aids were a marker for a spoiled identity, a metaphor for an ill-fated |
| 20 | | liberation, for an inflationary moral economy that inevitably crashed. |
| 5 | 21 | | As a result, instead of evoking the sorrow, empathy and identification the sick and |
| 22 | | suffering might have expected from a liberal society, people with Aids were reviled and |
| 23 | | rejected. Throughout the Western countries affected most, the governmental response |
| 24 | | - especially those governments where the New Right were dominant - was slow and tardy. |
| 25 | | As Randy Shilts has bitterly observed, by the time President Reagan had delivered his first |
| 26 | | speech on Aids, six years into the crisis, over 36,000 Americans had been diagnosed with |
| 27 | | the syndrome, and some 20,000 had died. |
| 6 | 28 | | It was not until the end of 1985, when it looked as if Aids was seeping into the |
| 29 | | general population, that the British government showed any signs of urgency, and |
| 30 | | attempted to manage the crisis. Aids was an epidemic that was allowed to happen, because |
| 31 | | of the indifference, if not downright hostility, of those in power and because of the |
| 32 | | association of the epidemic with those the culture preferred to forget. |
| 7 | 33 | | One major reason for this neglect lay in that moral absolutism which bubbled to the |
| 34 | | surface in the 1980s. Throughout the decade New Right activists, secure in their own |
| 35 | | rectitude, have preferred to attack the victim rather than the disease. So we hear the |
| 36 | | leader of the Moral Majority in America calling for the rounding up and quarantining, like |
| 37 | | sick animals, of homosexuals. We witness 'a group of Christian doctors' in Britain issuing a |
| 38 | | plan to halt the Aids epidemic by segregating tens of thousands of people carrying the |
| 39 | | HIV virus . We see a prominent police chief foaming about people at risk 'swirling around |
| 40 | | in a human cesspit of their own making'. |
| 8 | 41 | | The quotations could go on and on. They expose, in their language and |
| 42 | | prescriptions, a fear and loathing that goes beyond the rational. HIV brings terrible |
| 43 | | illnesses, but we have known for a number of years how it is spread, and how its spread |
| 44 | | can be minimised. As the decade ends we are on the verge of making Aids a condition that |
| 45 | | can be managed, at least in the developed countries. |
| 9 | 46 | | Aids would have made an impact whoever and wherever it had struck. Its power was |
| 47 | | dramatised, however, because from the first it encapsulated some of the most profound |
| 48 | | currents that are reshaping the world. Aids powerfully underlines that peculiar tension |
| 49 | | between the universal and the particular which is so characteristic of the times we live in. |
| 10 | 50 | | Aids is a syndrome of diseases that emerged in the first place in particular |
| 51 | | communities in the west: among gay men, drug-users, haemophiliacs, blacks . It is local and |
| 52 | | specific in its patterns of personal and social relationships. But at the same time it is global |
| 53 | | in its dissemination and impact, epidemic in East Africa as much as North America. The |
| 54 | | syndrome illustrates simultaneously the diversity of the world - the variety and complexity |
| 55 | | of its patterns of behaviour, its moral codes, its way of life - and our interdependence as |
| 56 | | citizens of the global village. |
| | | |
| | | Jeffery Weeks in 'New Statesman and Society', December 22, 1989 |
