AIDS: Victims Twice Over

By Richard Cohen

The immortal Franz Schubert, gifted and impoverished, died at the age of 31. His strength sapped, delirious and too weak even to eat, he uttered these last words: "Here, here is my end." He was a victim of syphilis.

For a long time, syphilis was the scourge of what we now call the sexually active. Karen Blixen, writing as Isak Dinesen, recounted her fight against it in "Out of Africa"; Al Capone, the Chicago mobster, died of it and so, too, did Winston Churchill's father, Randolph, and - back to music - Robert Schumann, a romantic who died the death of one.

These notables are proof, if such be needed, that it takes a lot more than either disease or death to stay people from the pursuit of sexual pleasure. Yet when AIDS was first identified for what it is - a killer - that was the prescription offered homosexuals. The promiscuous among them were told to mend their ways; celibacy was counseled and gay bathhouses all over the country were closed down. What did not work for syphilis was, for some reason, supposed to work for AIDS.

It has not. In fact, either through the use of contaminated needles by drug addicts or through sex with persons who already have AIDS, the deadly disease is inching into the heterosexual community. The consequences were predictable. The splendidly uniformed surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, has called for an all-out assault on the disease, including sex education beginning in the third grade. The National Academy of Sciences echoed Koop. It urged a quadrupling of funds for AIDS research - to $1 billion within less than three years.

You might ask where they've all been the last couple of years. It is no secret in the research community that the fight against AIDS is in disarray and underfunded. In fact, some of the money earmarked for AIDS research has come from government cancer programs. This is the bureaucratic version of triage - the practice, usually limited to battlefield hospitals, of deciding who shall die so that others may live.

There is hardly any excuse for a country as rich as ours to fund either cancer or AIDS research in such a niggardly way - or to make the research community choose between them. In the case of AIDS, though, there is an explanation. As long as the disease was limited to homosexuals, most Americans felt unconcerned.

It is rarely instructive to look back on the Ford administration, but in the case of AIDS it is. Remember the swine flu epidemic? For that almost nonexistent threat, President Ford mobilized the government. A $135 million inoculation program was launched. Yet by the time it was halted, only 107 cases of swine flu had been reported - 58 of them fatal and some of them apparently caused by the vaccine itself. In comparison, nearly 15,000 persons already have died of AIDS and another 27,000 persons are known to be infected. The government predicts that within five years there will be 270,000 cases of AIDS and 179,000 deaths.

But when it comes to AIDS, no president has called for a war on it. In fact, the president has said precious little on the subject. Maybe that's because most of its victims are homosexuals, and the present administration counts homophobic groups, such as Jerry Falwell's Liberty Federation, as valued constituents. When it comes to homosexuals, some people think of AIDS as divine retribution.

As is often the case, the sins committed against a minority take a toll on the majority as well. That is true both in civil liberties and in public health. With AIDS the two merge. An administration that has been loath to stand up for the civil liberties of homosexuals has been equally loath to offer the scientific community either the leadership or the money it needs to fight a disease that is killing homosexuals. Presumably, it was waiting for the infectious spread of celibacy.

© 2005 LINQ Communications