Date: Mon, 21 Aug 1995 11:56:00 -0500 From: mohr richard d AIDS and Its Academics by Richard D. Mohr (October 1994) November 17th, some fifteen-hundred gay and lesbian academics will descend on the University of Iowa to hear three- hundred papers presented over three days at the 6th National Lesbian and Gay Studies Conference. There was the usual measure of academic silliness. Papers bore titles too clever by half: "Anals of History," "Butch Rage," "The Erect Penis: Can We Top It?" "Clits in Court." But there were a fair number of AIDS presentations too -- all with sober titles. Death concentrates the mind. How has the academy been doing on the AIDS crisis? Academe's response to the crisis has largely been governed by the various strands of what is called "postmodernism." Chief among these strands are moral relativism, cultural determinism, and skepticism about science -- strands which the French philosopher Michel Foucault spun out in the 1960's and 1970s. Foucault himself died of AIDS in June 1984, but a decade later the styles of thought that he inspired still dominate the social sciences and humanities. Unfortunately, the results have been a series of opportunities and lives lost. Postmodernism's influences on government regulation, applied science, and educational policy have been a disaster. Traditionally academe has at least tried to provide cool reason as a brake against social hysteria. But under postmodern pressures, academe hasn't even tried in the AIDS crisis, where magical thinking and prejudice have usually carried the day. The traditional structures of public health policy are based on the classical liberal understanding of rights -- the belief that the individual is the primary unit of social value and that restrictions on the individual should be limited to the least restrictive means that will protect others from harms and from perils for which they themselves are not responsible. But in the postmodern view, the individual is the product of social forces and therefore cannot constitute a source of value over and against the popular will. Postmoderns have been chary to own up to the communitarian and communistic consequences of their premises. And yet, their effects on the popular press have been seductive calls for the government to enforce "responsible" behavior, where the criteria for "responsible" are communitarian and communistic. I am thinking, for instance, of _New York Newsday_'s weekly gay columnist, Gabriel Rotello, who takes Foucault as his intellectual hero. As AIDS in the 1990s has again come to be socially viewed as an affliction of minorities, governments have been all too glad to answer such calls for coercive measures. Over the last four years, half the states have passed laws making acts that might transmit AIDS count as attempted murder even when the acts are consensual. It is less likely that these unjust measures would be on the books if academe had nourished rather than undercut the country's liberal traditions. After Larry Kramer abandoned ACT-UP, it came under the sway of Foucauldian academics like Douglas Crimp. In consequence, politics corrupted science. ACT-UP's slogan became "Drugs into Bodies!" The slogan derived from Foucault's homage to drug use in an interview published posthumously in _The Advocate_ (August 7, 1984). Through media blitzes and demonstrations, ACT-UP got the government to release the anti-viral drug AZT untested -- a fine enough anti-paternalistic move. If people desperate for anything want to put untested drugs into their bodies, that's their own business. But apparently believing that ignorance is bliss, ACT-UP also got the government to abandon its double-blind effectiveness studies of the drug, which itself was known to be highly toxic and whose anti-viral effects diminish with extended use. Now, double-blind studies are how rationality is maintained in drug trials. In them neither the doctor nor her patient knows whether he is getting drug or placebo. In this way, the effects of false hopes are screened away. Politically-driven false hopes proved disastrous here. For subsequently, the broad-gaged French and British Concorde Studies found that people on AZT live no longer than people with AIDS who take no drugs at all, though the on-set of fatal opportunistic diseases is somewhat delayed with AZT. Rather than admit it had made a whopping mistake, the U.S. government now recommends that individual doctors decide on a case-by-case basis whether or not to prescribe AZT. But in terminating the fine-tuned double-blind studies, the government botched acquiring the very knowledge that doctors need in order to make this decision -- knowledge of when AZT's toxicity and diminished returns become reasonable trade- offs for its delaying effects. Thanks to postmodernism, doctors are now back to square one as far as anti-viral therapies go -- thrashing about in the dark. Postmodernism has also bedeviled preventative efforts. Postmoderns hold that sexual categories and, derivatively, sexual desires are socially formed, and so. socially re-formable. All we have to do is change the way we talk and think about sex, and -- voila -- our sexual natures, desires, and behaviors will comply with the current social understanding of goodness. Or so it goes. With this as background dogma, Foucault disciple Simon Watney, for instance, holds that we simply have to get kids to believe -- the lie -- that safe sex is part of the very definition of gayness, and gay kids will, in turn, act accordingly. Similar lies blare from posters which read "Safe Sex Is Great Sex" -- a case of the lady protesting too much. Not surprisingly, these simplistic efforts backfired. When people see through the lies, they simply lose faith in safe-sex campaigns. After a decade of safe-sex advertising lies, gay men are again becoming infected at a rate that will return AIDS to its saturation level among them -- about fifty percent. Realistic AIDS education teaches that safe sex is merely okay sex and counsels, without moralizing, the prudence of reduced expectations. Realistic AIDS education acknowledges that many people will not be saved by its message. But more people will be saved by it than by lies. Postmodernism's unwillingness to face the fact that there are facts -- to admit there is a cussedness and intractability in people, sexuality, and germs -- has bungled both therapeutic and preventative efforts and prompted needless deaths. -30-