Andrew Jones Respond to Jones at rffan34@ucla.edu. Click Here for more articles by Andrew Jones

With talk of our current war on terrorism comes talk of racial profiling. Nobody likes singling out a particular group for negative attention – yet at certain times in history, this approach has been necessary. And, as the particular history of AIDS demonstrates, ignoring a minority group’s specific problem for fear of “singling them out” does far more harm than good.



The history of AIDS – so important in understanding its future – has been whitewashed to remove all associations with the homosexual community.

It’s generally known that when AIDS first appeared here, it was localized entirely within the male homosexual population (Center for Disease Control, Historical Fact Sheet 1998). But it’s taboo to argue that the gay leadership of the early 1980s is utterly to blame for the wider prevalence of AIDS today. Taboo or not, these are all verifiable facts and trends.

But the radical gay left has replaced fact with myth and persists in blaming AIDS on anyone but itself. A typical canard, revived in TenPercent’s Spring 2000 article “Unworthy Prestige,” blames AIDS on President Ronald Reagan. Did Reagan “have the power to control the epidemic but (do) nothing instead” as TenPercent alleges?

  Illustration by ED OYAMA/Daily Bruin

Emphatically, no. A conservative, pre-perceived as hostile to “the cause,” could not by words alone induce abstinence on the part of homosexual men engaging in highly promiscuous and dangerous sexual activity as a part of their “gay liberation.”



The truth is this: the power to control the epidemic was in the hands of those contracting the disease. But because the means of controlling AIDS – modification of sexual activity – struck at the core of how the community defined itself, radical gay leaders chose instead to ignore the disease, take deliberately ineffective action, and attack irrelevancies.

AIDS arrived shortly after “gay liberation” during which radicals first achieved rank and prestige. Typical were liberationists like Edmund White – author of “The Joy of Gay Sex” – who pushed promiscuity as a means of freedom, crowing, “Gay men should wear their sexually transmitted diseases like red badges of courage in a war against a sex-negative society.” The first group that contracted AIDS had taken such ideas to heart, averaging 1,000 sexual contacts per year per person (David Horowitz, “Radical Son”). Odds of contraction for gay men were higher due to the abrasive nature of anal sex, which opens internal lesions ripe for infection.

An activist, radical leadership suppressed the only means of containing the disease: mandatory testing and reporting, contact tracing of infected partners and explicit warnings against unprotected sex.

Having so recently “liberated” themselves, there was fear that acknowledging AIDS as a disease causally linked with promiscuous anal sex would re-stigmatize the community. In the minds of gay radicals, the possibility of political isolation was worse than letting the disease spread unchecked.

Bathhouses were a major locus of AIDS. But rather than admit the problem, the radical left fought to keep them open as a center for ongoing “liberation.”

Horowitz illustrates the consequences of dissent with the case of Bill Kraus, a gay activist who tried to have AIDS warnings posted in the bathhouses when thousands of outsiders arrived for the Gay Pride Parade. The proposal was rejected, and Kraus was ostracized, condemned as a “sexual fascist” and a “traitor to the community.”

Larry Littlejohn, another gay activist, was similarly condemned for threatening to collect signatures for a referendum on shutting the bathhouses down.

The gay leadership compromised and enacted ineffective “monitoring” of the establishments, while Littlejohn was savaged by the Bay Area Reporter, the newspaper for San Francisco’s predominantly homosexual Castro district, as a “traitor extraordinaire.”

In the eyes of the leadership, any attempt to moderate gay behavior was an attack on homosexuals themselves. As Horowitz shows, there were some who foresaw the consequences.

Catherine Cusic – a lesbian nurse, official of the Harvey Milk Club and care provider for AIDS patients – explained, “There are leaders in this community who don’t want people to know the truth. Their attitude is that it is bad for business, bad for the gay image. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, are going to die because of this attitude. The whole thing borders on the homicidal.”

This much is clear – for purely political motives, leftist homosexual leaders allowed a beatable disease to spread unchecked. Their label of AIDS as “everyone’s disease” proved a self-fulfilling prophecy, for the disease did spread unchecked into the wider population.

The history of AIDS is also an object lesson in establishing boundaries for civil liberties.

Genuine, but mostly misplaced concern, brought about the establishment of Japanese internment camps during World War II. History has treated the decision harshly. But understand that such violations stand alone as startling aberrations.

By contrast, disease containment has been universally celebrated. Would history have opposed the forced vaccination of polio and small pox?

While the current detainment of Middle Eastern Americans and the possible violations of their civil liberties will be judged by history, we cannot succumb to identity politics if the need to protect human safety, liberty and national security is at stake.