Gay voters should blame themselves for Prop 8, not black Californians.
Smart LGBT leaders knew our campaign couldn’t make Prop 8 a “gay” issue.
Must we appear as churchgoers or nationalists to deserve our rights?
In part, Prop 8 failed because of inept LGBT leadership.
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By Michael Weems
Friday, January 07, 2005
I have a friend who just returned from Cameroon where he was conducting a study
on placental transmission of HIV. Before he left, I asked him to see how the gay
community in Cameroon is responding to the AIDS crisis.
He told me that the people of Cameroon did not recognize any gay community.
Nobody, not even non-Cameroonian AIDS relief workers, brought up homosexuality
or homosexuals when addressing the HIV epidemic: complete invisibility, at least
at the official level.
But there is a parallel invisibility: the frantic insistence that nobody know
a patient’s HIV status other than the doctor giving the diagnosis. This
includes not telling patients that they were positive until the doctor could
be sure that the news would not completely wreck their lives.
There is a protocol for hiding the diagnosis in medical records. If a translator
were present, there would be a good chance that seroconversion would not be
discussed out of fear of the translator finding out the awful truth.
AIDS complications can cause bodily illness and death at the biological level.
The diagnosis of AIDS in Cameroon is, however, worse. For too many people, it
is an indictment against them that causes death at the social level: ostracism,
excommunication, violence and complete erasure of familial and communal support.
You cease to exist as a person. In addition, he’d heard that nuns in
a Catholic hospital had been telling people not to use condoms because they
were infected with HIV. I’ve been puzzling about these extraordinary facts
for a while now, and I’ve come to some conclusions.
First, heterosexual transmission of HIV is the primary means of transmission
of HIV, but not the primary cause of the AIDS epidemic in so-called third world
countries.
Second, communities that do not recognize the existence of gay men as moral
human beings actually increase their rates of heterosexual HIV infection and
hinder efforts to curb the epidemic.
Since much of the persecution against homosexuals comes from Christian and
Muslim fundamentalist religious institutions, fundamentalist beliefs that condemn
gay men should be outlawed in the interest of national security and international
stability.
My first and second conclusions are based upon an assumption that heterosexual
transmission of HIV is augmented by several factors, including the necessity
for homosexual men to mask their sexual orientation by having relationships
with women.
In his article, “Help Africa’s Gay Men; You’ll Save Their
Women Too,” Charles Onyango-Obbo says, “Because gay men meet discreetly,
their wives would not know it and are therefore content that they are ‘safe,’
because we are conditioned to detect a man who is cheating with a woman, or
a woman with man, not a man who is cheating on his wife with another man.
Now, because gay men are a particularly high HIV-risk group, and they are totally
ignored by AIDS education campaigns, if we imagine that there are many such
African men, then the infections which we are blind to and doing nothing to
prevent are wiping out the gains made in the heterosexual sector.”
We should not assume that the stigma against AIDS can be separated from the
stigma against homosexuality. In Africa as well as America, homosexuality is
viewed as contagious.
Like HIV, homosexuality is seen as a “white man’s disease.”
While we in this country may assume that HIV infection is a heterosexual phenomenon
in Africa, people in Africa don’t make the same assumption.
The notion that a man with AIDS can be cured by raping a virgin is a clear
statement that affirming one’s heterosexuality reverses the course of
the disease. The lukewarm stance of fundamentalist religious communities concerning
“therapeutic rape” while screaming hysterically about the evils
of gay men (and lesbians) is dangerous not only on the local level but also
harmful to national security and regional stability in Africa.
The deafening silence around homosexuality and AIDS is fostered by Christian
and Muslim fanatics who insist, in a world of over 6 billion people, sex should
be used only for procreation. When such a belief becomes dogma, it is easy to
see how heterosexual rape is preferable to homosexual love, and why misinformation
about condoms is permissible.
Unlike homosexuality, the chance of sanctified pregnancy resulting from sex
is presumably increased when men rape virgins and sacred virgins lie about condoms.
A human population that does not regulate its growth faces two sure consequences:
population reduction through disease and violence.
Until fundamentalists (including our own) realize that, as options, these two
“solutions” are morally unacceptable and embrace gay lives, the
human race has little choice but to legislate against their doctrines.
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