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Posted on 04/23/2003 7:07:56 PM PDT by Dog Gone

I never thought I’d say it, but I approve of Bush. Well, let me rephrase: King George II has finally done something of which I approve. On Friday, April 4, he added SARS—severe acute respiratory syndrome—to the list of diseases that can call for a patient to be quarantined. The executive order, which allows for “detainment or quarantine” of people infected with SARS, is the first of its kind in 20 years. The last disease to be added was Ebola. That’s the one that causes you to bleed to death through every orifice of your body, including your eyes, and it has a fatally rate of more than 50 percent. There’s no treatment. 

SARS is a severe viral pneumonia. There’s no treatment except supportive measures. Compared with Ebola, it has a much lower—but still very scary—death rate. Most people recover, but some, especially older people or others with health problems, can’t fight it off and succumb in a matter of days. 

Of course, there is no need to worry yet about massive quarantines. The last time anyone was detained in federal quarantine was 1963, to prevent the spread of smallpox. But at least this is being addressed early in the game—unlike the last deadly virus to come around in the early 1980s, HIV. Where were the executive orders then, the lead from the Centers for Disease Control (before it added “and Prevention” to its name) or the World Health Organization? Where was the government outcry, the immediate worldwide involvement? 

Nowhere. Because just queers were dying. 

I’d like to think this response to SARS from the administration is one brought about by years of learning from the mistakes of how the HIV virus was handled. Alas, I doubt that’s the case. 

SARS swept the news and the world by storm in March and April after first appearing in China last November. (China later apologized for not letting everyone else know a little sooner—oops!) Everyone began wearing masks in Hong Kong and Beijing, where the disease appears to have originated. People on planes complaining of flulike symptoms or fevers of 100.4 degrees or higher caused entire planes to be quarantined on runways until safety was assured. Because the respiratory ailment could be fatal, reaction was swift. 

What’s eerie is that statements from the CDC and WHO could easily have been confused for statements about HIV 20 years ago. “We don’t know the exact cause yet, but it is believed…” “We’re not 100% sure of the way it is transmitted, but it appears to be…” “We know the disease can be fatal…” “This virus appears to spread rapidly, and we don’t know very much about the epidemiology…” 

As I watched And the Band Played On—the HBO film passed along journalist Randy Shilts’s history of the bungling of the early years of the AIDS epidemic—on late-night television in the middle of all of this, I wondered what would it have been like if HIV had really been treated like a disease, and not a political or social condition. 

In 1982 they were arguing in San Francisco whether or not to close the bathhouses. At that time, my late husband Andrew was 16 years old. What if they had closed the bathhouses? Quarantined those with HIV or at least those with clear symptoms of AIDS until they could figure this out? Would Andrew, my dear friend Lorenzo, Michael Mungarro, John Delicce, Frederick, Mark Rodgers (insert your names here)… Would they all still be here now if Reagan had issued executive orders, if the gay community had shut their mouths and let the CDC work with impunity in the community? I’d like to have at least seen what would have happened. They did finally close the bathhouses in 1985, but they reopened shortly thereafter. And now they are back and as popular ever. 

What am I suggesting? That the government should have rounded up all the gays and tested them in the early days, as soon as the antibody test became available? Quarantine those found to be infected? Mandatory reporting of all sex partners? Well, maybe, if that’s what needs to be done for viruses that kill people, spread like wildfire, and go on to decimate the world and an entire generation of gay men, not to mention Africans and Asians and…so many dead. Maybe such extreme measures would not have been necessary; I’m not a medical expert. But whatever needed doing, HIV should have been treated like a fatal communicable virus, just like SARS is being treated, just like any deadly agent of infection—it should have been handled however the medical experts deemed best, not the politicians, not the shouting homos crying out that their rights were being violated, not a generation painted as victims, not the civic leaders, not the business people, not talk show host or writers like me—none of them. 

The people in charge should have been the doctors, the virologists, the experts in the handling of a communicable infectious disease. What they said we should do, we should have done. 

But SARS was and is different, you might say, because it’s airborne. Unlike HIV, SARS can be caught from a cough or even passing touch. Yes, HIV was sexually transmitted, for the most part. But we didn’t know that at first. Some even thought HIV was airborne early on. No, HIV wasn’t airborne, it proved to be an STD. So it should have been treated like one. For most STDs, diagnosis mandates the notification of sexual partners. Not HIV. With HIV, no one could be contacted because anonymity was demanded, the right to privacy invoked. For some reason it was a special STD. The reason? The gay community’s protest fell in line with the stigma and the fear from every side. 

It was too scary, too shameful. No one wanted to know. 

I’ve heard all the arguments that measures like mandatory testing, possible quarantine, mandatory notification of partners and such would have pushed those suspected of having HIV underground. Well, let’s look at what the converse did—the secrecy, the anonymity. How many dead? Over half a million in the United States alone as of 2002 and millions—almost an entire continent—worldwide. Monetary cost? Hundreds of billions. And in the past 20 years, did we find a cure to make it all better, to salve our guilt for letting it spread unchecked? Nope. We have partially effective treatments, some almost as deadly as the disease, and not so much as a potential vaccine, much less one that works. 

Yes, our community, who screamed for our sexual freedom, got to continue having sex however we wanted. I’ve always argued that anyone who has unprotected sex and is HIV positive is committing a criminal act, and if it can be proved, should be prosecuted for assault and battery. If someone had smallpox and knowingly went around infecting people, they’d be treated like a criminal, right? If someone who knew they had SARS decided to hop into a crowded bus or airplane and cough on everyone, wouldn’t they be dragged away in handcuffs and quarantined? Oh, but not HIV: Today we have parties in bigger cities where people actually go to have sex with HIV-positive people: bug-chasing parties. It’s criminal. 

While I hold the Reagan administration, the CDC, and WHO to blame, I also shoulder a part of that blame as part of the gay community. We behaved so badly—still do, when it comes to AIDS. Our sexual freedom was worth all those lives, right? And what freedom was that, again? Because no one except the lunatic right ever suggested gay men stop having sex. They suggested we stop having unprotected sex. They suggested we should stop having sex in ways and places that put people at risk for infection. But no, even that was an infringement. The sexual freedom of the few hundred or thousands of gay men at the beginning who could have been legally forced—yes, even via quarantine—to stop spreading this disease in America, that was more important than the lives of millions of others. It was more horrible to consider exactly the kinds of travel restrictions and mandatory testing of immigrants that we’re all supporting with SARS than it was to protect the hundreds of thousands of our gay brothers who would contract HIV and die. 

All those steps at the beginning that are now being taken with SARS and could have been taken with HIV weren’t because AIDS took hold in an already oppressed community, one that the far right would have been happy to toss into internment camps with or without a deadly disease as an excuse. I understand what happened, I just can’t figure out why. It’s a virus. It’s a medical condition. But we made it into a social condition, a political issue. Now it’s buried in politics and red ribbons and advertisements seem to tell us that it’s chic, as slick ads with buff men reassure us that we can live with HIV, no problem, don’t worry about changing our lives. It’s Magic Johnson time. 

Perhaps the hoopla and early intervention in the case of SARS will stop this new infection. Who knows with a disease? Maybe extreme efforts at the beginning wouldn’t have helped stop HIV. We’ll never know. Even now, we treat HIV like a stigma, not a virus. We don’t report those with it to any central medical authority, don’t notify their partners. We don’t have mandatory testing for those at risk. In some places if a doctor is stuck by a needle accidentally, they can’t even demand to test for HIV the blood of the person that the needle was in first. How ridiculous is that? Every other infectious, incurable disease has been treated differently, from Ebola to SARS. 

As I look back on the last 20-plus years, I do see progress. Andrew lived most of his adult life with HIV thanks to new treatments. He died of what I allege is malpractice, not AIDS. He lived 13 years with it, and that’s something. 

But I also see so many mistakes. Made then, being made now, and I cry. Literally. That sappy movie And the Band Played On, a bad film by some accounts, made me cry for hours. I’ve been grieving every two years for the past 20 years. And I’ve had the easy part, I’ve stayed behind. Tears are a luxury of the living. Angry? You bet I’m angry. At myself, at the gay community, at the Reagan administration; I’m even mad at the current Bush administration for their swift action in SARS, because there was so little action against HIV. I’m angry because of all the goodbyes. 

And I’m angry that the mystery whether or not treating HIV as the deadly virus it is, like SARS, and not as a social or political condition, would have changed anything will never be solved. I’ll never know if all those people really had to die, or if the religious right would have gotten their wish and all the gays in the US would be in a big camp in Montana somewhere. Well, never fear; if we were, I’m sure Jeffrey Sanker would be there to throw the annual White Party, given all the snow. There’d still be lots of unprotected sex, because, hell, we’re all in this stupid AIDS camp anyway. I’m sure there’d be alcohol, and maybe even drugs other than AZT, Protease Inhibitors, etc., you know, E, X, K, because we’d all be in one place…how easy to distribute. Wait, this sounds like Palm Springs, West Hollywood, San Francisco…maybe they all got their wish after all. 

SARS is a virus that can kill. HIV is a virus that can kill. To a virologist, they’re the same in that they need to find the cause, find a treatment, and find a cure. They need to isolate them and contain them. They need to prevent them. Each is unique, yet much of the methodology is the same. But oh, to the people, how they’re so very different. To the people, SARS is a health threat wildly spreading while AIDS was, and is, an indictment on a culture. In this tale of two viruses there is no happy ending, but at least SARS has a better beginning.

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