Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone Read Online Free PDF Page A

1984? War is peace, ignorance is strength, et cetera?

More Stupidity
     
    The horrifying thing is that we are the experts. My friend McCully from Manhattan Beach, California, told me this story about a scientist who was writing a position paper about nuclear winter, ensconced in some think tank in Santa Monica, or maybe it was Toledo, Ohio; anyway, at the end of one especially stressful session, he felt a need to get another opinion, to ask the adults, as it were, and at that point he realized that he was the only expert in the entire world in his particularly arcane field. He was the adult. There were no other adults. He couldn’t have been older than forty.
    Is that what empowerment means? Or is it merely the existential anxiety one feels when faced with the uncertainty of the future and the knowledge that one is responsible for one’s actions?
    It’s scary to find out you are as smart as the media, as smart as the opinion-makers. One fine day, just for the hell of it, the Jewish media conspiracy decided to make Vanna White a celebrity, just to see if it could be done. And it worked.
    So in the Soviet Union, the official disinformation is that AIDS is caused by experimental germ warfare by the United States government that somehow got out of hand. Luckily, in the U.S., we’re too savvy to believe this explanation, aren’t we?
    And back in New York City, our Commissioner of Health decides that there are only 50,000 homosexuals infected with HIV, as opposed to the previous estimate of 250,000. This was done using a simple ratio of infected San Francisco fags over dead ones. Solve for x. But the infection rate was estimated at 50 percent, and I have personally slept with considerably more than 100,000 New York queers (okay, maybe a few were tourists) in just the past six months. Does this make any sense? Back in the fifties, Kinsey came up with a conservative estimate that 10 percent of the male population is gay; that gives at least 600,000 fags in New York City. And N.Y.C. is a major metropolitan area with a special appeal, drawing homosexuals like NoPest strips draw flies. So you would have to assume an infection rate of less than 8.33 percent. And with these new estimates, maybe the public at large is going to stop paying attention to the health crisis. Are we just being paranoid when we distrust these figures? You figure it out.
    In October Scientific American has an AIDS issue, with a review of Randy Shilts’s And theBand Played On by someone from the National Institutes of Health. It wasn’t particularly favorable. But isn’t that like Josef Mengele reviewing the Talmud, or Richard Nixon reviewing All the President’s Men, or Prime Minister Pieter Willem Botha reviewing Biko? What would you expect? Praise?

Memories of Underdevelopment
     
    Two weeks before the demo the incredibly glamorous Susan Sarandon (millions of lesbians and heterosexual males performed acts of self-abuse inspired by her breasts) visits ACT UP, offering moral support. She will be working at a fashion benefit for several AIDS groups, possibly including our own. Susan wears a low-profile, low-star-wattage outfit—an army-surplus jacket and jeans; yet she is a true goddess in our midst, our Kewpie-doll heroine. My local media experts tell me that she recently appeared on “Letterman” wearing a SILENCE = DEATH button: courage in the face of sarcasm and ridicule. The following day she goes on “Good Morning America” and talks about the planned action at the FDA.
    Susan leaves to applause! acclaim!—and not a moment too soon. The evening’s meeting quickly degenerates into the usual chaos. The two newest facilitators, elected last week to thunderous applause, allow the meeting to disintegrate into complete anarchy. Today has been one long demonstration: a protest at noon at the Waldorf against a Republican campaign fund-raiser with Reagan present; a rally a four at Sheridan Square called Gays of Rage, modeled after the black