Your Bodies, Yourselves

Demanding control over one's own body has turned out to be the most paradoxical (and potentially damaging) slogan of both AIDS activists and pro-choice abortionists. For it is patently evident that had gays not engaged in weird promiscuity or drug abusers indulged in dirty needles, they wouldn't be in the fix they (and we) are in. And one of the great weasels of contemporary politics is that AIDS is a universal plague--i.e., not life-style specific.

True, blood transfusions have inflicted the terrible disease on a few innocent people. And even more hapless newborns have contracted the HIV virus from their mothers. And bisexuals have spread the disease. But these facts are peripheral, not central, to any discussion of AIDS.

The public health establishment has contributed to the quiet lie that AIDS is a problem for everyone to keep from seeming to gay-bash. In 1985, I happened to be in Geneva when the World Health Organization held a press conference in that organization's efforts to safeguard the world's supply from HIV contamination. Yet the more the WHO folks insisted there was no danger, the more I was convinced on the spot that they were protesting too much. The blood supply in parts of the world is still in danger over four years later.

In his presentation, the Munich professor in charge of the commission used the term "super-infection" several times in his report. I asked him to define super-infection. He defined it operationally: "When a gay man has contracted venereal disease repeatedly through anal intercourse with an infected man, his immune system finally collapses."

I asked him if there were other instances in which repeated reinfections (say, of malaria) might also lead to an immune system breakdown. I was thinking of the "pre-history" of AIDS in places like Haiti or Zaire, or even of the epidemiological fluke of a high incidence of the disease in places like Belleglade, Florida. His answer has haunted me: "We think so, but there are no reliable statistics (or none at all) in Africa to make a scientific theory with."

I have found no more plausible hypothesis since then. Public health officials and politicians have skirted this issue because they don't want to alienate gay constituencies. But to use the trite latitudinarian rhetoric, most of the victims have indeed been "freely consenting" adults. Ditto the women whose control over their own bodies has been so defective that over a million of them have had to terminate their pregnancies (rather than prevent them by thoughtful contraception). What we have here is a silent struggle between the realities of the situation and tactical maneuvers of interest groups protecting themselves.

The dead giveaway of the meretriciousness of the "control over our own bodies" rhetoric is that it is quickly followed by pleas for more government support for research and treatment. Or for Medicaid abortions for "the poor." The liberalism about sexual morality that has led both to the AIDS epidemic and the abortion explosion has turned out to be a defective social idea. Freudian hacks have half-destroyed family life in America with their silly notion that self-control ("repression") is destructive of autonomy and the free human being. Fiddlesticks.

And the reluctance of ideologues to counsel celibacy to the black underclass is an egregious form of racism. It posits that "those animals" could never control their sexual urges; therefore we must assume that birth control clinics in high schools (junior high, anyone?) are the only mature solution to adolescent sexuality. And middle-class white women willingly lose control of their own bodies so frequently that over a million abortions must be preformed a year.

I used to be a pro-choice person until a college friend of mine came back from the D.-and-C. with the attitude that it was sort of a root canal job in a different part of the body. "It's no big deal," she assured me, and my mind and heart reeled in shock. And this woman was raised a Catholic.

It's not that I wouldn't counsel abortion in the case of rape or incest or threat to the mother's life. It's just that the arrogant Narcissism of both gay men who engage (or did engage) in "unnatural" (tell me ripping the rectum wall is natural and I'll tell you you'll believe anything) acts and women who play Russian roulette with their periods is something I reject as a taxpayer.

Yes, taxpayer. That's where the "control" myth runs up against reality. Human beings are not isolates who can do anything they want to and then whine like babies that the government and/or the public is against them.

Homophobia is admittedly a gross reaction of the immature heterosexual to alternative life styles. And I would defend to the death gays' rights to pursue those life styles. Ditto abortion-seeking women. But don't then come running to the public to pick up the pieces. You've made your beds. Now lie in them.

No person with a whit of compassion can help but be devastated by the illnesses and deaths caused by this horrible disease called AIDS. But your heart can reach out to the sinner while deploring his sins. Jesus taught us, after all, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone." But surely Christ was not promoting adultery or prostitution with this plea for empathy.

I went up to New York to view the "Vanishing Witnesses" AIDS show at the Artists Space in TriBeCa because incoming National Endowment for the Arts president John Frohmeyer had temporarily withdrawn the show's $10,000 grant.

Inside there was hung one of the most mediocre art exhibitions I have ever seen. The lib press artcrits daintily danced around this obvious fact--probably for fear of looking like gay bashers, or of being hetero-bashed by gays.

One of the more disgusting works of art (mercifully obscure in its technique) is a celebration of sado-masochism and anal intercourse. Sadly, the artist has already died of the disease in question. Another young man who is very much alive (but who refuses to let people quote his screed without his permission) fumes in his painting about those public figures who try to make distinctions between helping sick infants and "consenting adults" who are paying a stiff penalty for their freedom. (It was his hysteria that had worried Frohmeyer.)

This artist's point about despicable pols who pick and choose whose diseases they want to treat reminded me of the most ominous issue raised at the World Health meeting in Geneva. A reporter from The New Scientist (London) expressed a fear that WHO funds would be diverted from, say, malaria control in the Third World to crash problems to deal with this white middle-class male affliction. (This was before crack babies and the IV drug user part of the epidemic.) The head of the WHO reiterated his promise that no such diversion would take place. Well, it did. White gays are articulate and well-organized politically. Third World babies are expendable.

The head of UNICEF recently told Charlie Rose on CBS "Nightwatch" that every year over 40,000 babies die who could be saved with pennies invested in clean water and better nutrition. Unborn, aborted American babies are "luckier." They have the jackbooted Christian right opposing abortions physically through demonstrations that are getting rougher and rougher.

How about a bit of glasnost on the AIDS and abortion issues? How about controlling our own minds for a change? Because that's the best way discovered so far for controlling our bodies. It's called "humanism," and it seems to be disappearing from single-issue ethicists' hearts these sexually fascist days.

Cool it, AIDS and pro-life activists. The sanity you save may be your own.

--from Welcomat, Volume XIX, Number 25, January 10, 1990