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“None of These Will Give You AIDS,” proclaimed a New York state public health poster in 1987, showing a toilet, a dinner table, a door knob, and a handshake. The misinformation on display in the Moral Majority Report’s cover image necessitated a response about the relative difficulty of HIV transmission. Public health advocates in the mid- and late 1980s needed to reframe the danger from germs. Families and friends who looked after a loved one with AIDS felt tremendous distress at having to wear masks, don protective gowns and gloves, and place these in bags labeled “infectious waste” after visiting their loved ones in isolation zones in hospitals.Īs knowledge of AIDS transmission improved, medical practitioners attempted to reverse some of those fears of contagion to adjust to the reality of this new virus. When HIV/AIDS emerged, this approach to health and safety contributed to stigma and anxiety.ĭuring the early years of the AIDS crisis, especially when transmission was poorly understood, basic acts of care were fraught with a fear of contamination. Thanks to these efforts, people saw danger lurking in household surfaces, dirt, and flies, as well as dust and saliva. In her book, The Gospel of Germs, historian of medicine Nancy Tomes described how public health campaigns in the early 20th century that encouraged people to think of hidden worlds of germs on surfaces and in the air instilled a fear of contagion in North Americans. Maybe every generation develops its own relationship to and ideas about germs and contagion.
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I am predisposed to be wary of new habits and ways of being that will develop in the face of novel diseases. Maybe my generation has been so shaped by AIDS, or more accurately, public health responses that aimed to quell fears about contagion and the attendant prejudices that often surrounded them, that I can’t help but see a fear of germs as an inherent act of discrimination and intolerance. Perhaps we are all always “thinking with the banisters of the past,” as Hannah Arendt put it, and not taking reality on its own terms. Maybe every generation develops its own relationship to, and ideas about, germs and contagion that limits our ability to understand contemporary medical threats in new ways. They are affixed so firmly in my mind to the Christian Right, and a cynical deployment of a dystopian image that places gay people as being outside of American citizenship, that it is mind-boggling for me to see masks as an iconic part of a material culture of Black Lives Matters protests today. The two pandemics don’t share the striking parallels that other disease comparisons elicit: Coronavirus is not always physically disfiguring as AIDS often was, it does not elicit disgust in its beholders as AIDS sometimes could, and it is not freighted with sexual or “lifestyle” transmission.Īnd yet, this image of medical masks as symbols of homophobia haunts me. I don’t think of history as being necessarily edifying or as offering up clear lessons for the present. I’ve studied and written about the AIDS crisis in North America and I’ve tried consciously not to superimpose pandemics of the past onto either HIV/AIDS or COVID-19. Courtesy Jerry Falwell Library, Liberty University
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Although HIV/AIDS is not an airborne disease, in July 1983 Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority Report used an image of a family in surgical masks to stigmatize queer people.