AIDS Is a Gay Disease
14th February 2017
David Benkof points out some inconvenient truth.
Of course straight people suffer and die from HIV-related illness, just as about 200,000 Gypsies were murdered by the Nazis. But “AIDS is not a gay disease” was a situational political strategy, not a scholarly consensus. It was an epidemiological and historical obfuscation designed to gain sympathy and funding for the illness in an era when gays were outsiders. Yet it remains in 2017, repeated almost as a mantra anytime someone “outrageously” links AIDS with homosexuality.
But of course AIDS is linked with homosexuality. Even today, gay men receive more than two-thirds of HIV diagnoses, and earlier in the epidemic that number was even higher. Gay men are maybe 2 percent of the American population, but 55 percent of Americans living with HIV. Men who have sex with men are more than 60 times more likely to contract HIV than those who don’t.
Like calling Tay-Sachs a Jewish disease, or sickle-cell anemia a black disease, calling AIDS a gay disease is a rhetorical shortcut, not finger-pointing.