San Francisco Chronicle - November 13, 2008
Jon Carroll, jcarroll@sfchronicle.com

From the New York Times comes a story about the sad situation at Normandy High School in St. Louis. On Oct. 13, a letter went out from the superintendent of the Normandy School District, Stanton Lawrence, to the parents or guardians of Normandy's 1,300 students, grades nine to 12, that the county health department had reason to believe that the HIV virus might have been transmitted "among some Normandy Senior High School students."

"We weren't trying to create hysteria and panic," said Lawrence. "We didn't want to initiate an environment of fear." What he ended up doing, of course, was to create hysteria and panic, thereby initiating an environment of fear.

He could, of course, have confidentially notified the student or students involved, asked about sexual partners and done a little epidemiological flow chart based on the data received. That's kind of the way it's usually done. "We didn't have a playbook," he said. Well, yeah, but I bet he knew where to get one.

HIV is not like the bubonic plague. People do not fall in the streets frothing. Obviously, with 50 possible cases, there was some urgency, but a mass mailing to 1,300 kids' parents seems like overkill.

OK, well, damage done. Students crying in the halls. People refusing to attend school. Officials at a rival high school asked if it was safe to play a football game. Well, you know, depends on what they plan to do in those goal-line pileups. No biting, lads.

But there's more. The Times quoted Jamar McKinney, 17, a senior at Normandy: "I don't trust nobody until I see the results. Nobody wants to walk around and say they've got HIV because of how they'll be treated. Everybody's going to think they're just a walking disease."

Anyone see a teaching opportunity here? Maybe Lawrence would like to talk about prejudice against people with disease, and how that hurts so many people and destroys compassion and tolerance. Perhaps he might include a brief history lesson about the time when HIV was "the gay plague," and homophobia was added to misinformation and superstition. Why, there's even a mainstream movie on the topic: "Philadelphia."

Continued Jamar: "I'm not going to just hop into a relationship. I'm gonna talk it out first with the person, and see what they sound like. And if it sounds good, ask if there's any way I can see the results."

Yeah, well, there's another thing you can do after you've decided there's a mutual attraction: You can practice safe sex. In this entire story, the word "condom" was not mentioned once. Numerous studies have shown that adolescent males have disdain for condom use, apparently more so in black communities, where some people believe that HIV-AIDS is part of a government conspiracy. That's all the more reason to preach about condoms, explain why condoms work, even pass out condoms.

It may be that Patient Zero at Normandy contracted HIV from intravenous drug use - the health department wouldn't say, although it did rule out tattoos - but I sense that Jamar is not talking about drug buddies; he's talking about sex partners. Why can't we discuss sex freely? We all do it, or consider doing it - it's like breathing, except less frequent.

How much more damage can our maidenly modesty about sexual activity do? It infects all areas of our social discourse. For instance, the fear of gays and lesbians is a fear of sexual difference - they do It differently. I know that the various People of the Book cite apposite, or apparently apposite, quotations, but one can't help but notice that there's a lot of Holy Book cherry-picking going on. Stoning your wife to death for adultery? Not on the agenda.

Support for the passage of Proposition 8 was in large part funded by the Roman Catholic and Mormon churches, who want their list of sins to become everyone's list of sins. They want their morality to become public policy. I believe in tolerance for all religions, but they apparently don't believe in tolerance for me. Is this the best use of their money? Aren't there, like, people going hungry or needing succor?

And I think the Prop. 8 story and the Normandy High story have roots in the same places: fear and hatred. If the HIV virus had appeared on the scene in some other way, as a disease cropping up among promiscuous heterosexual Iowa farmers, for instance, the entire story would have been written another way. And because it's that gay HIV and not that darned straight syphilis, the administrators at Normandy panicked. And because of the puritanical streak that runs through all of American society, frank talk about sex was put off. And schoolchildren may die, and apparently that's an acceptable risk.

Remember when there used to be guys dressed like condoms walking around handing out free samples? Those were the days. I want those days back. It made public education so much easier.

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