New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Get louder than the bullies
There’s a moment from the late 1980s that remains stuck in my head.
The scene was a newspaper newsroom. The managing editor was leading a meeting about how to cover the AIDS crisis. I’m going to guess it was 1985, the year of Rock Hudson, Ryan White and “As Is.”
At the meeting, we were throwing around ideas for coverage that might prevent the spread of HIV, which meant that we were talking about condoms.
The managing editor took a beat and then said, solemnly, “We haven’t decided yet on whether we’re going to use that word in the newspaper.”
In my memory, I spoke up. I said, “You know, (name redacted), we gotta be able to look at ourselves in the bathroom mirror every morning.”
That might not be true. I might have waited until the managing editor left before I said that out loud. The paper was a weird place then. A new publisher had been brought in, and he ruled by fear. His editors had a hard time making good decisions because their first thought was about what this guy was going to do if they (in his view) screwed up.
I tell this story for several reasons.
First, it’s a reminder of how many things changed as a result of the AIDS crisis, including the removal of such silly prohibitions as withholding words such as “condom” from “a family newspaper.”
The rhythm track to the current pandemic has included, almost since its inception, a thudding tympanum beat of “Get back to normal.” Boom. “Get back to normal.” Boom.
As the Canadian musician Bruce Cockburn sang in 1983, “The trouble with normal is it always gets worse.”
We didn’t go back to normal after those early years of AIDS. We changed things. Starting with condoms, whose sales went up 33 percent in a single year (1987). By 2008, you could buy “Star Wars”-themed condoms. Actual slogan: “Feel the Force.”
The term “safe sex” was coined in 1984. At first, it seemed to apply only to gay men and gay sex, but its desirability as a public health message made it spill over into the general population. You might have missed it, but syphilis was nearly eradicated in the United States. by around 2000. (We then took our foot off the brakes. You know what happened.)
Safe sex wound up meaning not only condoms and dental dams but increased exploration of non-penetrative sexual behavior, including phone sex.
Public health became more interdisciplinary. AIDS taught us that, for instance, housing instability made prevention and treatment more difficult. Public health became more global. Dr. Daniel O. Griffin, an infectious disease thought leader, says once a week on his podcast, “Nobody is safe until everybody is safe.”
He’s talking about COVID, about the necessity of vaccinating people in the poorest countries. Under the Biden administration, the global effort by USAID has been both impressive and not enough. COVID fatality in developing countries is triple the rate of top tier economies. Even if you don’t care about that and couldn’t find Mali on a map, rest assured that the SARS-CoV-2 in Mali can find you on a map.
So, Lesson 1 from AIDS: Don’t even think about going back to normal. There are better realities than the old normal.
Lesson 2: Be scary or be victimized.
By 1986, gay people in America were noticing that there was no coherent national policy to address the mounting pile of corpses. There was no vaccine. There were no Emergency Use Authorizations for therapeutic drugs. (Our modern notion of EUAs had some early stirrings during the AIDS years but came into full flower, oddly enough, as a result of 9/11. The idea was to be able to cut through red tape after a bioweapon attack.)
AIDS activism and, specifically, ACT UP were born. The policy establishment had placed people at risk of AIDS in a mental ghetto. Gay men, intravenous drug users, people with hemophilia. Not worth taking a political risk for those folks, especially when the risk entailed blowback from a large army of Christian soldiers led by the likes of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.
ACT UP represented the realization that policies don’t change in your favor unless people in Washington, D.C., and state capitals wake up worried about what you might do next.
Most recently documented in the new podcast “Fiasco: The AIDS Crisis,” ACT UP specialized in protests whose loudness and anger concealed cagey tactical planning and welldefined goals.
They intentionally got arrested in waves. Have 100 people block a busy intersection in New York’s Financial District. As they’re arrested and carted away, another 100 take their place. And then another 100. Prolong the pain.
ACT UP and other AIDS activists also muscled their way into the rooms where it happened. They found out where the policies were made on public health and, especially, drug development. They got seats at the table. (Modern note: within the last few days, Connecticut changed its allowable limits for dangerous mold in medical marijuana. They did this with reportedly no input from immune-compromised people, many of whom are cancer patients who use medical marijuana and face the greatest risk from impurities.)
What has happened in the last two years is that public health policy has been hijacked by a different minority — the people who oppose anti-COVID measures and will pick a fight, make a scene or, you should pardon the expression, act up in public spaces.
In May, as the infection rate rose, pushing all Connecticut counties into either high or medium risk, the commissioner of public health, Dr. Manisha Juthani, said there would be no new rule impositions, describing the state as “beyond mandates at this point.”
The month before, a Florida federal judge voided the mask mandate for trains, planes and other transit. In an unconscionable act, the airlines dropped the policy in midflight and flight crews danced joyously in the aisles. A vulnerable person who, after carefully weighing the risks, decided the flight was safe enough was suddenly in a more dangerous situation, as were people hoping to get home from their travels in days to come.
I hate the advice I’m about to give to the 7.5 million immune-compromised people in the United States and to the people who love them and don’t want to bring a virus home and to the millions struggling with long COVID and to the millions more who have other risk factors and to the millions more who just don’t want to catch the disease and deal with its unpredictable and inadequately understood symptom presentation.
There are a lot of you. A comparatively smaller group of bullies, thugs and know-nothings have won the battles. (At the time of the April ruling, 56 percent of Americans supported masking on transit.)
Get organized. Get loud. Get scary. Get inside the room where it happens. Get seats at the policy tables. Maybe squeeze businesses — especially airlines — to make themselves attractive to you. There’s nothing stopping, say, Jet Blue from having mask-required flights. Nothing stopping Big Y or Whole Foods from requiring masks on certain days or during certain hours.
Our society has decided to reward the people with the worst manners. You may have no choice but to become one of them.