Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1989. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Heterosexual AIDS -- It isn't a myth
San Francisco Chronicle - Monday October 9, 1989
Randy Shilts
Remember when AIDS was about to become a heterosexual pandemic, the new Black Death that would sweep the straight singles bars of America? "AIDS is everybody's problem," according to the operative AIDS cliche of 1985. That became loosely translated to mean: "You're all gonna get it, too." Today, in chic Los Angeles night clubs, stand-up comedians crack jokes about the mid-'80s AIDS panic and ask anybody in the audience who actually knows a straight with AIDS to raise their hand. Nobody ever responds. A lot of people are beginning to notice that the much-touted plague of singles bars has never happened. In fact, the absence of many white middle-class AIDS sufferers has led to a new contrarian philosophy about straights and AIDS, that the threat of heterosexual AIDS is chimeric, a figment of the news media's imagination. A book to be released this winter, "The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS" by Michael Fumento, largely promotes this notion. It has not taken long for conservative writers to flesh out the political implications of this thesis. Already, a Forbes magazine writer has drawn on Fumento's work to suggest that, given the absence of a straight threat, all too much research money is going to AIDS and this money should be redirected to studies on cancer and heart disease. The truth lies neither in the camp of the new contrarians nor among the hysterics. It's somewhere in between, though hard to sort out because few issues in the history of the epidemic have been the subject of so much hype and political manipulation. From the start, there was more hyperbole than biological fact behind the hetero hysteria. Without institutions like gay bathhouses, people on the procreative side of the sexual spectrum lack the conditions that spread the human immunodeficiency virus in the gay world. Moreover, the conditions that have allowed for the spread of AIDS in Africa, where AIDS is almost exclusively a heterosexual phenomenon, do not exist among the affluent populations of American singles bars. For example, venereal diseases that produce genital ulcerations and are spread essentially by blood-to-blood contact during vaginal sex are common in the Third World but comparatively rare in America. In populations where AIDS is not much of a problem today, such as among middle-class heterosexuals, it is not likely to be as large a problem in the future. However, among those for whom heterosexual AIDS is a reality today, it will be a huge and horrible problem. Where it is a problem, of course, is in the impoverished inner cities, particularly in the eastern United States. There, a huge reservoir of HIV-infected intravenous drug users is fueling a rapid increase in infection rates among young women. The crack house is becoming the kind of amplification system for poor straights that bathhouses once were for gay men. Young women trade their bodies for crack from dealers, many of them infected from past drug shooting, and end up with HIV in the bargain. To make matters worse, the sex-crack connection has spawned a new epidemic of genital ulcerating diseases, particularly syphilis, which replicates the physiological conditions that fostered AIDS in Africa. For the underclass, most of whose members are black or Latino, the heterosexual AIDS epidemic has already arrived. A recent study of New York City's female teenagers with AIDS, for example, found that 51 percent got the disease from heterosexual sex. As many as 5 percent of young, sexually active heterosexuals in some East Coast neighborhoods are now HIV-infected. Given the awesome levels of HIV infection in the inner cities, it's absurd to claim that heterosexual AIDS is mythological. What the contrarians are really saying is that there is no heterosexual AIDS problem for affluent Caucasians. In one sense, this transparently racist analysis represents political karma for the AIDS workers and researchers who spent so much of the mid-1980s fostering alarm about heterosexual AIDS. A few believed what they were saying, of course, but many more were just hyping the threat because it was the only way to bring headlines and government grants to the then-obscure disease. More troubling, however, are the political implications engulfing the question of heterosexual AIDS. The sad fact is that one reason the national news media devoted so much attention to the epidemic a few years back was because editors were convinced that the Grim Reaper was about to go strolling through suburbia. That fear also spurred government action. Without a "heterosexual threat" -- or, more accurately, a white heterosexual threat -- both the media and the government seem far less focused on the epidemic. As one writer for a national news magazine once confided to me, "This makes it less of a story. If you think we're going to be doing cover stories on Puerto Rican women in the Bronx, you're crazy."
Keywords: AIDS
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