Posted on 02/18/2010 10:14:38 AM PST by My Favorite Headache
And Mr Dwight, what would you have Reagan do. Order all the bathhouses to close? Because that would have been the only thing that could have stopped AIDS from spreading.
Elton John has never been a deep thinker. And he’s not gay. He has admitted to being attracted to women (and men).
“I think Jesus was a compassionate, super-intelligent gay man who understood human problems. On the cross, he forgave the people who crucified him. Jesus wanted us to be loving and forgiving. I don’t know what makes people so cruel. Try being a gay woman in the Middle East — you’re as good as dead.”
You mean in a muslim country they don’t follow Jesus’ teachings? I’m shocked, I tell ya.
From the American Spectator, 1988:
“The doctors at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta called him “Patient Zero.” A stunningly handsome French-Canadian airline steward, Gaetan Dugas had over 2,500 male sexual partners on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean by the time he died at age 31.
It was in France, the doctors think, that he picked up the AIDS virus. Thence he brought the virus to both San Francisco and New York, where he infected partners through anonymous bathhouse sex and pickups from gay bars. At least forty of the first 248 homosexuals diagnosed with AIDS as of April 12, 1982 had had sex either with Dugas or with someone who had. (”Typhoid Mary” Mallon, by contrast, had fifty-three confirmed cases attributed to her, of whom three died.)
Long after his diagnosis, Dugas would sodomize willing partners in dimly lit cubicles, then turn up the lights and point to the purplish Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions on his skin. “I’ve got gay cancer,” he would say. “I’m going to die, and so are you.”
No one will ever be certain whether Dugas was the one who began the AIDS epidemic in the United States, but it would be fitting if he was. For the way he continued business as usual – or pleasure, as it were – even after his diagnosis is representative of the larger tale of miscreants and fools told in Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On, a remarkable feat of investigative journalism that traces the AIDS epidemic from the death of Danish physician Margrethe Rask, a lesbian who contracted AIDS in Africa in 1976, up to mid-1985 and the death of Rock Hudson.
An openly homosexual writer for the San Francisco Chronicle and the nation’ s first full-time AIDS reporter, Shilts names names, slams reputations, and yet poignantly testifies to those few who fought desperately to get the band’s attention and those who died horribly while it continued to play.
Introducing the members of the band:
“Fast lane” homosexuals. Some homosexuals racked up as many as a mind-boggling 20,000 sexual partners, engaging in high-risk (receptive anal) acts long after it became apparent that a fatal illness was spreading through the homosexual populations of New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Scoffing at advice to limit partners and avoid such activity, many homosexuals continued going to bathhouses, readily infecting themselves with the AIDS virus and passing it on to others.
Homosexual leaders such as Konstantin Berlandt, a columnist for the Bay Area Reporter, shed new light on the debate over whether homosexuality is genetic or acquired by stating, “I didn’t bccome a homosexual so I could use condoms.” Later Berlandt wrote: “Advice on safe sex, while perhaps well-meaning, is actually collaboration with the death regime that delights in blaming ourselves and would pin the blame onus.” Berlandt also used his column to make a pitch for “rimming,” known in other circles as oral-anal contact and then considered to be a high-risk activity for contracting AIDS. According to Berlandt, the practice could be “spiritually uplifting.”
Other homosexuals saw profit in the epidemic, as did the San Mateo doctor who promised to cure AIDS with massive doses of – you guessed it – Vitamin C. Still others made desperate efforts to pretend that the syndrome was not sexually transmitted, such as the homosexual psychologist who wrote a series of articles maintaining that AIDS victims all had suffered an “emotional emergency” as children that was now manifesting itself as fatal immune suppression.
The bathhouse owners. Even before AIDS, notes Shilts, “the bathhouses were a horrible breeding ground for disease... A Seattle study of gay men suffering from shigellosis [a parasitic disease most efficiently transmitted by ingestion of feces], for example, discovered 69 percent culled, their sexual partners from bathhouses. A Denver study found that an average bathhouse patron having his typical 2.7 sexual contacts risked a 33 percent chance of walking out of the tubs with syphilis or gonorrhea. . . .” All of which prompted one doctor in 1980 to remark, “If something- new gets loose here, we’re going to have hell to pay.” Yet even after hell broke loose, bathhouse owners refused to close up shop or even display safe-sex posters. Instead, they treated the AIDS epidemic in the way Amity businessmen treated news of the shark in the movie Jaws the less said, the better. As one callous owner explained to Dr. Paul Volberding, “We’re both in it for the same thing. Money. We make money at one end when they come to the baths. You make money from them on the other end when they come out.”
The San Francisco Health Department, which recently forbade all smoking in government offices on public health grounds, delayed putting restrictions on the bathhouses for several years so as to not offend the homosexual lobby. It wasn’t until 1987 that the last bathhouse closed its doors.
Blood bank operators. Like the bathhouse owners, blood bank operators faced the AIDS problem by ignoring it. By late 1981 there was reason to believe that AIDS was a bloodborne virus like hepatitis B and that it would turn up in blood transfusions by mid-1982 the CDC had reported that hemophiliacs had contracted AIDS through clotting factor. Yet in December 1982 an officer of the American Association of Blood Banks went on network television to say flatly that there still was no evidence that transfusions spread AIDS. It’s not that there was no way to screen blood. One method, rejected as too expensive, was to test for antibodies to the core of the hepatitis B virus, antibodies ubiquitous in the blood of AIDS patients. Another method was to ask members of high risk groups to exclude themselves voluntarily.
But at a meeting of all the major blood banking organizations it was announced that no such screening would be tolerated. “Direct or indirect questions about a donor’s sexual preference are inappropriate,” read the official statement. Dr. Roger Enlow, a New York homosexual physician and a leader of the American Association of Physicians for Human Rights, praised the policy. “We’ve preserved not just gay rights,” he said, “but the human right to privacy and individual choice.” Except, of course, for those who chose not to die of a horrible disease simply because they needed blood products. In his epilogue Shilts writes, “An estimated 12,000 Americans were infected from transfusions largely administered after the CDC had futilely begged the blood industry for action to prevent the spread of the disease.”
Does he realize he just summed up what is wrong with liberals and the welfare state?
I thought Jesus was Levon’s kid, and he wanted to go to Venus.
If he’s talking ‘bout Madonna’s latest squeeze, he just may be right!
only gay as in happy
To a gay everyone is gay, makes them feel better about their sinful lifestyle
And AIDs was showing up in the USSR in the very early 80s, called carso??? sympona and thought to be a cancer
If I recall correctly, Dianne Feinstein, when she was mayor of SF, stirred controversy in the gay community with her attempts to deal with those bath houses.
Yep, it makes one think, what exactly did the politically correct crowd want Reagan to do about AIDS?
Very good catch.
OK that one went WAY over my head.
Who gives a a*%t what Elfin the John thinks?
Yeah, the hugely infamous Dugas is legendary.
And we the taxpayers, are supposed to pay for the harvest of all of this perverted behavior?
In AMerica, spending per death for AIDS, ALREADY dwarfs all other causes of death.
Ok, there actually once was a time when Elton made some good music, “Levon” was one of his early songs:
Levon wears his war wound like a crown
He calls his child Jesus
`Cause he likes the name
And he sends him to the finest school in town
Levon, Levon likes his money
He makes a lot they say
Spend his days counting
In a garage by the motorway
He was born a pauper to a pawn on a Christmas day
When the New York Times said God is dead
And the war’s begun
Alvin Tostig has a son today
And he shall be Levon
And he shall be a good man
And he shall be Levon
In tradition with the family plan
And he shall be Levon
And he shall be a good man
He shall be Levon
Levon sells cartoon balloons in town
His family business thrives
Jesus blows up balloons all day
Sits on the porch swing watching them fly
And Jesus, he wants to go to Venus
Leaving Levon far behind
Take a balloon and go sailing
While Levon, Levon slowly dies
A revised title, so we don’t have all that hate: Saturday Night’s Not Right for Fighting
(snort) :)
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