Expensive Thrills
Sorry, but this whole thing is retarded.
Sunday Telegraph – Last rites for the man who chose Aids
About a kid who moved in with a boyfriend he knew was HIV positive, god AIDS and died, and was this other guy’s second boyfriend to do so (with a third already moved in). And about that whole culture:
Then there was a darker side, the romanticising of Aids itself. Google led me underground, to gay clubbers with “HIV neg” tattooed on their biceps as an invitation for others to infect them, to online chats about HIV-spreading sex parties, talk of “conceiving” the virus like a pregnancy and the intense intimacy of infecting a partner.
Maybe these clubs should do credit checks. Funniest thing is, soon enough you won’t be able to smoke in them for health risks and the costs of smoke-related illnesses on the health system.
January 15th, 2006 at 5:37 pm
When the Aids virus first came to attention in the west, mainly infecting homosexuals, there was a massive gay-rights-driven political campaign to fast-track Aids research and short-cut the FDA drug approval process to get those drugs “out there”, all of which was done. On seeing this, those suffering from Hep-A(?the bad one) and other aids-like infections caught from blood transfusions and such were saying, “err, what about us? Where’s our fast-tracking?”
So, one good thing that came out of it is that the FDA’s bureaucractic mission creep got put under the spotlight.
January 15th, 2006 at 7:13 pm
Yeah one of my aunts was doing something to do with cancer research a number of years ago, and she was a little upset because it was impossible to get grants because so much money was going to AIDS research. And if you think about it, not only is that unfair because there is no cure for any virus, not even the common cold, but this particular virus can be quite easily avoided with very basic checks on one’s behaviour, whereas cancer cannot be.
January 15th, 2006 at 7:36 pm
Exactly. And these people are going out of their way to get infected?!
I should add that just before the massive political campaign to drum up Aids research on behalf of the gay lobby, there was a massive political campaign (on behalf of the gay lobby) to convince people that Aids had nothing to do with the homosexual life-style – no, no, everyone is equally at risk, nothing to do with that. When that position became untenable, out came the campaign for more research etc. Talk about cynical politics.
January 15th, 2006 at 9:11 pm
Oh it’s worse than that. That campaign succeeded. When I was sort of of an age to be learning first about AIDS we always got the any kind of unprotected sex, needle sharing, blood transfusions, all sorts of ways (but not hugs!). All these textbooks on the subject were written, and since textbooks tend to linger… Well, I heard one lady once say that her niece who lives in some south-eastern state had a school friend die of AIDS when she was in the first grade or around there (I guess the girl was born with it) and in order to deal with the girl’s death they did a little study on it, using some books that were sort of the school-board-approved ones, which made a big deal about dirty blood transfusions. Then a pair of years later this little girl got leukemia or something, and had to have a blood transfusion, and she went into hysterics thinking she was going to die like her friend did, because that book had been written back in the 80s when those people got infected from a transfusion because of a lack of screening that had long since been rectified. It was really stupid.
Up until I got too old to be “learning” these things in school, the equal-opportunity AIDS thing was still stressed, although, to be fair, it was going up in heterosexual women, but when I moved to Philly there were all these posters up in the L stations (you may have seen them) directed towards guys on the “DL” (down-low), because being gay is so stigmatized in African-American communities that all these gay men don’t think they’re gay, even though they have sex with other men, and end up getting infected and giving it to their wives, which might have something to do with the increase in heterosexual black females.