Mike Tidmus

We’d all like to believe that, as enlightened, HIV/AIDS-aware individuals, that we’ve eliminated AIDS stigma within the queer community. I’m sorry to say that nothing could be further from the truth as this recent letter to the editors of San Diego’s Gay and Lesbian Times demonstrates.

Dear Editor,

As an HIV positive gay man I am not at all surprised by the passage of Proposition 8. The same bigotry, intolerance, and prejudice displayed by the good citizens of California in the voting booth is the same bigotry, intolerance and prejudice that I and other HIV positive gay men have experienced within San Diego’s gay community. Bigotry and intolerance come not only in the form of Constitutional Amendments, but also in small and subtle ways.

Recently, at a local gay bar, a person I had just met pointed to someone at the other side of the bar and said “stay away from that one he’s positive.” Then there was the party I attended where someone raised his glass and toasted “to being HIV negative.” The other day someone said to a positive friend of mine “for my luck I will meet the man of my dreams and he will be positive.” And of course one need only read a few personal adds to realize that most gay men want nothing to do with those of us who are positive. I could continue.

Discrimination will now be enshrined in the California Constitution and the fundamental right to marry will again be denied to us. I feel I should be angry, upset or sad. I am not. The prejudice that I have experienced as a positive gay man in this community has numbed me. The callous words I have heard directed at those of us living with HIV, especially harsh from the younger generation of gay men – the generation that did not have to bury friend after friend at the height of the epidemic – have stung to hard. If I am sad at all it is because I cannot feel or share in the grief of the community over the passage of this hateful amendment because I no longer feel part of this community.

For those of you who have and continue to speak derogatorily about those of us who are HIV positive – under your breathe, behind our backs, yet right in front of our faces – perhaps you can take comfort in knowing that the majority of Californians are just like you.

Jack Hogan

Jack Hogan’s not alone, and I apologize to Jack if he had not intended his words to go beyond our local GLBT paper, but I know quite a few HIV-positive people who, faced with the cruel reality of stigmatization within our supposedly enlightened community, are no longer willing to publicly acknowledge their HIV status.

Professor Gregory Herek addressed what he calls the epidemic of stigma in a 2006 World AIDS Day article entitled On World AIDS Day, Stop AIDS Stigma:

Since AIDS was first detected in the United States in 1981, the HIV pandemic has been shadowed by an epidemic of stigma.

In the early years, it wasn’t uncommon for people with AIDS (and those simply suspected of being sick) to lose their jobs and homes and to be shunned by their family members and former friends.

[ … ]

Those who took care of people with AIDS and HIV — partners and spouses, family members, health care workers, volunteers — experienced what social scientists call a courtesy stigma, a kind of guilt by association.

[ … ]

AIDS stigma has declined in important ways since the 1980s. By 1999, my national surveys showed that only about one American in ten supported quarantine for people with AIDS.

But that same year, one fourth of the public believed that people who got AIDS through sex or drug use have gotten what they deserve. One person in five felt afraid of people with AIDS, and more than one in four felt uncomfortable at the prospect of being around someone with AIDS.

AIDS stigma remains a reality today. If we hope to eradicate it, we must understand how it operates in individuals and in society as a whole.

First, the individual level. Stereotypes and prejudices against people with HIV have two main psychological sources. One source is fear — fear of disease, of contagion, and ultimately, of death. Fear motivates many people to avoid those who have (or are suspected of having) HIV. It makes them willing to support laws and policies that would separate people with AIDS from the rest of the population. It makes them unwilling simply to be around people with HIV, to share a drinking glass with them, to hug them.

The ignorance that propels fear-based prejudice remains surprisingly widespread in the United States. In my 1999 national survey, one third of the respondents incorrectly believed they could get HIV from donating blood, 41% believed they could be infected from being coughed on or sneezed on by someone with the virus, and half believed it was possible to become infected by sharing a drinking glass with a person with AIDS. A 2006 Kaiser Family Foundation national survey found that more than one third of Americans still don’t know that HIV isn’t spread through kissing, and nearly one fourth don’t know it can’t be spread by sharing a drinking glass.

The second main source of individual prejudices surrounding HIV and AIDS is preexisting prejudice against the groups linked to AIDS in popular perceptions. AIDS-related prejudice has always been a vehicle for expressing hostility toward the members of those groups — injecting drug users, Haitians and other immigrants, and especially gay and bisexual men. These linkages remain strong. Even as the face of AIDS has changed, much of the US public still thinks of it as a gay disease, and public opinion about HIV continues to be strongly influenced by prejudice against the gay community.

The good news is we can deal with individuals’ prejudices. We can combat fear with information. In the 1980s, AIDS education programs routinely addressed misapprehensions about casual social contact by explaining how AIDS cannot be spread. There is a clear need to restore that component to our AIDS information campaigns.

Unfortunately, as Jack Hogan’s letter indicates, we have fallen short of dealing with HIV-phobic prejudice within our own community — let alone with those we need to convince outside our community that they should not fear nor hold prejudice against people living with HIV/AIDS. For decades, our community has been spoon-fed the appropriate and politically-correct information, but still people living with HIV and AIDS remain invisible, ignored, ostracized and, for all intents, an untouchable caste within the queer community.

Were we not listening? It seems we were not.

We all bear some degree of culpability for this shameful attitude and we need to promptly reverse it.