WE MUST REMEMBER THAT VIRUSES DON’T DISCRIMINATE, PEOPLE DO
In June, I remember seeing my friends in Europe starting to post on social media about this illness I hadn’t heard of before, monkeypox. Without shame or stigma, these men posted about how they believed they were exposed, discussed their symptoms and sent out compassionate warnings to their friends and followers.
In these posts, a growing global network of LGBTQ advocates, activists, sex workers, lovers and friends shared our collective rage, confusion, frustration and fear. The sense of fear has been especially ominous as some of the initial mistakes in monkeypox communication, reporting, vaccine production and distribution have felt all too reminiscent of early crimes against our community during the HIV/AIDS pandemic. We are being handed yet another disease our LGBTQ community will need to battle as public health systems fail us again.
We are asking ourselves, how much worse will this get?
Unlike HIV and the early days in the 1980s of that virus, a vaccine that offers protection against monkeypox already exists. Currently, there aren’t enough vaccines to protect us all, yet there could have been. That feels like yet another slap in the face to our community, and we are rightfully angry.
At least there are tests and treatments, but so far accessing those has been far too difficult for far too many, because these tools and the education about them were slow to reach health care providers. This approach also assumes people have access to health care and aren’t met with discrimination directly from their providers. Advocates in our LGBTQ community have heard from too many men being turned away because their symptoms were dismissed as mild and not of concern. In the U.S., one in eight LGBTQ people live in states where they can be denied medical treatment.
How we message to the general public matters. Monkeypox is not a sexually transmitted infection, nor is it specific to the LGBTQ community. The reality of this current outbreak has been that, from late April to late June, about 98 percent of the cases were documented in men who have sex with men and that 95 percent of those transmissions occurred during sexual relations. What is needed for our community is compassionate care and education, not false fears, tired tropes and stigma.
Discriminatory language matters. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a dramatic rise in antiAsian and Pacific Islander rhetoric and in turn violence. We are already hearing the same old hate speech targeting the LGBTQ community from White nationalist and White supremacist groups. These are the same people targeting LGBTQ rights, abortion rights, women’s rights and voting rights across this country. This hate and misinformation does a few things; it puts an already-marginalized minority community further at risk of discrimination and violence. It also puts nonLGBTQ people at risk of ignoring the need to educate themselves about the signs, symptoms and treatment of a virus which can then exacerbate an outbreak. Viruses don’t discriminate, people do.
Let’s not pretend for one second that the LGBTQ community has been the only community failed by stigma. Our government, media and health care systems have a long history in this country of failing people who aren’t White, Christian, cisgender, heterosexual and men with wealth in matters of public health. We seem to not be learning from our own history.
A few things give me hope. I know our community understands how to tend to one another, educate one another and take public health matters seriously. That is the legacy of generations of LGBTQ activists, advocates and allies who carried us through decades of systemic oppression. I am also deeply grateful for the current compassionate and intentional collaboration efforts being done to support and center those most impacted by the monkeypox virus. The county, state and federal governments all declaring a state of emergency to properly address the issue with greater funding, flexibility and coordination show that we have made significant strides since the darkest days of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.
We still have far to go.
We must educate ourselves and each other with compassion. We must stop stigma in its tracks. We must learn to lower risk factors that can lead to infection. We must increase testing and treatment. We must expedite the production and distribution of vaccines and treatment anywhere in the globe where outbreaks occur. We must immediately fund organizations on the ground that are already doing public health outreach to impacted communities. We must provide shame-free paid time off and telecommuting options to workers who become infected. We must hold our media outlets, health systems, elected officials and ourselves accountable.
We can do this.
Monkeypox is not a sexually transmitted infection, nor is it specific to the LGBTQ community.
López is the executive director of San Diego Pride and lives in University Heights.