In every culture there are a list of realities that everyone implicitly knows, but keep to themselves, largely to avoid looking uncouth or unsophisticated. Some are familial, such as when your uncle’s stint in jail is never brought up. Some are societal, revolving around a polite fiction regarding many historical heroes. Others involve looking the other way at well-known behaviors of certain groups.
As the Covid pandemic was coming to a close, there was another infectious disease catching the attention of health authorities. It followed a very different vector than Covid. It didn’t have an airborne vector but was transmitted through more… intimate means. The disease was originally named Monkeypox before being changed to MPox to be more sensitive. As usual for the narrative, the mass media tried to hype up the scare saying it could infect anyone, but a cursory examination showed it was happening almost exclusively to a certain cohort of the population. You wouldn’t find who they were by reading the article on Wikipedia, though. The primary victims, and disease vector, were extremely promiscuous homosexual men.
While the point made the rounds on Twitter, the first person who stated the obvious on National television was Ned Kelly, who absolutely roasted gay libertarian Brad Polumbo on Fox News, only to get dog-piled by the rest of the panel.
Kelly: As for monkeypox there’s a good rule of thumb. Don’t attend gay orgies.
Kennedy: Come on man
Polumbo: It’s not about being gay!
Kelly: Go look at the New England Journal’s report that NBC news reported on Friday in which of the 528 cases they reviewed 95 percent were between sex between men I think we-
Polumbo: <Interrupting>
Kennedy: I don't know man you don't have to be gay to get monkey pox and you don't have to be bigoted when you talk about treating something that is that easily spread-
Kelly: It’s not bigoted this is science!
Here we had a so-called right-wing Fox News commentator using woke language by implying he was bigoted for saying “don’t go to gay orgies” and the panel recoiling in terror about something where the evidence was so clear and damning. He was right, but bluntly stated an aspect of homosexual culture you’re never supposed to bring up.
Luckily, Monkeypox was more of an irritant than anything, and most people could go about their day with no chance of catching it. The media stopped their fearmongering when questions of how children and pets were getting a fundamentally sexually transmitted disease and lost control of the narrative. Unfortunately, the diseases that spread in the homosexual community due to rampant promiscuity don’t always have such relatively benign effects, and often find ways to infect and kill wholly innocent parties. Such happened in the 1980’s as AIDS swept through the United States, and tainted blood wiped out thousands of people in constant need of transfusions, hemophiliacs.
Hemophilia was largely a death sentence for most of human history. The inability to clot wounds properly, causing potential massive bleeding for even small injuries in severe cases, made their life precarious. While it is a rare genetic disease, with only about 33,000 in the United States, it has received significant attention in the Healthcare industry. Modern innovations, such as receiving plasma concentrates, has significantly increased lifespan and quality of life in modern times.
Before the 1980s and the ravages of AIDS, the 1970s had witnessed dramatic improvements in the management of hemophilia. Whereas before patients bad to endure a life-threatening and crippling scourge, the increased availability of plasma concentrates of coagulation factors made from plasma pooled from thousand of donors and the widespread adoption of home care ('treatment at the doorstep') transformed hemophiliacs into individuals able to take full advantage of their talents and opportunities. Hemophilia care became one of the most gratifying examples of successful secondary prevention of a chronic disease.
The first case of AIDS was in New York, with the CDC flummoxed by a new auto-immune disease where the disease itself would not kill them, but the secondary effects of the disease from a destroyed immune system would. They would live for several years but slowly die with no hope of recovery. It was a nasty, terrible was to die
First apparent in the homosexual population in the USA in the last quarter of 1980, the disease possessed unusual properties that initially obscured it as a distinct infectious disease. Previously healthy victims had no specific symptoms but presented with either secondary infections or tumors associated with immune deficiency
The incidences at this time were constricted to sexual transmission, with the CDC tracing the incidents to grasp how fast the unknown disease was spreading. However, the infections increased their spread to people who had no contact with the initial subjects or their wider community through medical blood transfusions.
In early 1982, the author received a call reporting a hemophilic patient who, treated with FVIII concentrates, had died of PCP. The physician reasoned that the clotting factor was contaminated with P. carinii and was transmitted directly to the patient. However, the manufacturing process would have removed contaminating P. carinii, and the rarity of PCP in hemophilia suggested the possibility that the patient had acquired the same syndrome that was affecting homosexuals.
The number of incidents regarding possible transmission by blood was only in the single digits in the first year. Even so, the evidence that there was a possible blood-borne route led many health officials to consider banning high risk groups from donating blood. For those of you who have donated, you are familiar with the long string of questions asked before you donate. Back in the 1980’s there weren’t nearly as stringent requirements, leading drug addicts who shared needles, very promiscuous men, and prison inmates to donate blood. Note there was also a Hepatitis C outbreak in the 1970’s due to infected blood.
This didn’t exist in the early 1980’s.
On 27 July 1982, CDC representatives met with a group of leaders from the blood industry, hemophilia groups, gay community organizations, and representatives from the NIH and FDA, to present the evidence of a possible transmission by a blood-borne agent [18]. If the attendees accepted this possibility, we reasoned that high-risk groups should be prohibited from donating blood until the issue could be clarified by future studies.
It was a long day. Detailed histories of the hemophilia cases were systematically presented, followed by data from the other risk groups and comparison of hypothetical risks posed by various etiologic theories to each risk groups (Table 1) [12,20]. Only the high risk for blood-borne infections could explain a risk common to all four groups. But, rather than expressing alarm at a possible blood-borne infection and suggesting ways to reduce a blood-borne risk, the audience expressed an almost universal reluctance to act.
For those who lived through the Covid fiasco, the reluctance to act from the CDC would seem odd. After all, government health authorities almost universally prefer to error on the side of caution rather than allow a potential lethal outbreak to pour through the population. While the numbers were small, there was enough circumstantial evidence to use caution in case the deadly disease spread out of control. Even in the 1980’s though, gay activism was strong with a listening ear in Washington D.C.
Even at this time there was fear of stigmatizing the gay populations, especially with the unsophisticated idea they are massive disease vectors. Even in the 1980’s such thoughts, as factual as they may be, were considered uncouth among Washington elites. Here we see the ascendancy of the gay rights movement in full force.
The first thing that happens when a group wants to be an accepted, protected class is make their unseemly aspects taboo to say in polite company. Even if everyone knows it, the ability to bury unpleasant information in general conversation by making it low-status and oafish to bring it up is a powerful tool. There is an incredible amount of power in organizations that can use social pressure to force everyone to ignore the elephant in the room. It also makes the burden of proof in justifying regulatory actions that negatively impact a supported community far more stringent.
The scientific community had yet to see published evidence that the syndrome was indeed an infectious disease, let alone blood borne and sexually transmitted. Homosexuals were major blood donors in the large cities on the east and west coasts. It was thought that singling out homosexuals for exclusion would unnecessarily stigmatize them without evidence that they were indeed transmitting the disease. The blood industry, threatened by losing a large donor pool, strongly supported the position of the gay groups on this issue;
It ends up they were transmitting the disease in massive numbers. While individual homosexual acts have a relatively low chance of transmission, though more than vaginal sex, it still existed.
During the study, 53 HIV seroconversion cases were identified. The estimated per-contact probability of HIV transmission for receptive UAI was 1.43% (95% CI 0.48%-2.85%) if ejaculation occurred inside the rectum occurred, and it was 0.65% (95% CI 0.15%-1.53%) if withdrawal prior to ejaculation was involved.
The key to the spread is the incredible amount of sex partners gay men tend to have, and these low percentages add up when they constantly participate in risky sexual practices.
The modal range for number of sexual partners ever [of homosexuals] was 101–500.
Even with these well-known facts, the CDC delayed, and it became even worse when a bureaucratic turf war occurred between them and the FDA. Through this time, Hemophiliacs continuously got infected, though many would not know until later. A silent death swept through the hemophiliac community and did not abate until a solution to sanitize donated blood was developed in 1984 and implemented across the board the same year.
The author again enlisted Dr McDougal’s laboratory. During September 1984, concentrate was sent to the CDC from Cutter (and later Alpha), mixed with large quantities of virus, and then the contaminated material returned to the manufacturer for lyophilization and heating (controls were lyophilized but not heated). The finished material and controls were then returned to the CDC for quantification of virus. No virus was detected in the heated samples [33–34].
The tragedy of contaminated blood in the early 1980’s subsided, and proper protocols were put in place that dramatically improved the blood hemophiliacs depended on. In these few years, though, the damage was done. Because of the slow nature of AIDS, often involving the victims falling ill for years before succumbing and dying, even after the proper interventions were administered the hemophiliacs infected through the earlier transfusion continued to perish throughout the 1980’s.
In the United States, officials estimate that half the 20,000 hemophiliacs are HIV-positive, and the infection rate is 80% in those with severe forms of the blood-clotting disorder. By the end of 1993, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had documented 3,342 AIDS cases among hemophiliacs. As a result of the epidemic, the median life expectancy of a person with hemophilia declined from 57 years in 1979 to 40 in 1989.
Such a dramatic drop in life expectancy was devastating, especially so soon after their quality of life dramatically increased so recently. They could finally live normal lives for a while, only to go back to essentially ground zero. Through the moral weakness of federal bureaucrats and misplaced empathy towards the gay community, some of the most vulnerable Americans died.
One could argue this was a senseless tragedy, but the homosexual community had no idea of the diseases they were transmitting, and once the risks were seen, they would regulate themselves with sensible policies to ensure not only their community’s well-being, but the health of general society. History does not bear this out, and cities have had to force legal restrictions and shutdowns in the name of public health to try to limit disease transmission related to sodomy. Whenever the options are public health or mass sexual promiscuity, the gay community chooses the latter.
In the mid-1980s, controversy emerged in a number of American cities over the roles gay bathhouses and sex clubs might play in the spread of AIDS, and in raising safe-sex awareness. In 1984, San Francisco became the first city where political debates broke out over AIDS-related policies for bathhouses and sex clubs. These debates were dominated by questions of public health and gay civil liberties. A variety of proposals were put forward during 1984 to try to reconcile these two concerns, or to give one a higher priority than the other. Certain officials in San Francisco's government, and members of its gay/lesbian/bisexual community, strongly disagreed over whether the businesses should be closed, should make their own AIDS-prevention efforts, or should continue operating under new regulations.
Anyone who grew up in the 1980’s and 1990’s is familiar with the panic of AIDS in the general population, authorities unleashing countless bits of propaganda regarding safe sex and pushing the idea it could happen to anybody. The 1988 tear-jerker Go Towards the Light features a young boy who gets AIDS, presumably through a blood transfusion. The incredibly dark 1995 movie Kids showcased an irredeemable teenager who manipulated virgins into having sex with him, transmitting AIDS to all of his victims in the process. Even in this far-less woke era, there was a conscious effort to obfuscate the cohort who first got infected as well as the specific sexual behaviors that made getting AIDS most likely. The message was “anyone can get AIDS, so don’t have unprotected sex”. Technically true, but the fearmongering was to redirect blame from gay men who were responsible for spreading the disease.
Stigma is a good thing
The rapid ascendency and acceptance of homosexuality has not been because of more enlightened moral thinking or better understanding, but simply a victory of the mass media propaganda apparatus along with the crushing power of the state. Gay Marriage was legalized through the courts, and before then sodomy laws were struck down by the same method of lawfare. Restrictions put on homosexual behavior were the will of the people who understood homosexual behavior. They have been aggressively promiscuous since antiquity, they are disease vectors, and they endorse all sorts of socially destructive behaviors.
People who lived a hundred years ago were well aware of these behaviors, which was why they put in these social controls. They knew it wasn’t simply a matter of what happened in a person’s bedroom, but could easily spread and cause untold havoc on general society. To this day, as acceptance has grown, their behavior has not changed, and the rats of HIV and AIDS in these populations paint a horrifying picture.
From a pure health standpoint, banning sodomy would be justified, but were not allowed to have that conversation anymore. Instead we’re expected to foot the bill for their behavior.
A same response to a cluster of people doing dangerous sexual activities regularly would be to punish them, either legally of financially through health care premiums. The last thing would be to create moral hazard by directly supporting such practices, yet here we are.
The argument against the gay rights revolution died far before the quips of “It's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” and other weak rhetoric made the rounds. The gay rights movement won the moment the disgusting reality of their subculture became taboo to discuss, while practically non-existent lifetime monogamous same-sex relationships was propagandized as the norm to the general public. A decade after gay marriage was established by judicial Fiat, very few ever got married, largely because of the actual realities of gay life.
The want for respectability is a mind virus that will destroy critical thinking and proper action. Thousands of hemophiliacs died because health authorities refused to be blunt about the dangers implicit in sexually active homosexuals giving blood. In their want to be proper and sophisticated, they refused to see what was right in front of them. While this sphere does not have an issue with being blunt, almost all of our colleagues in real life do, and need to be forced to acknowledge reality, kicking and screaming.
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If interested the book "And the Band Played On" is very informative. It's long, closely-written and very detailed. It was written by a homosexual who later died of AIDS and although he blames Reagan etc for not funding research and treatment he is, to his credit, very frank about the points the author makes. I remember one statistic along the lines of: the average homosexual in New York in the late 70s or 80s had over 70 partners per year. He also goes into detail about the reluctance of homosexuals to curb their habits and the selfishness of the man they believed was one of the first North American HIV patients: Gaetan Dugas
Well written post, Alan. I remember the first time aids came into public view. An article in time identified “patient zero”, a homosexual French flight attendant working the Paris to New York shift. In it Time described the man’s illness, diagnosis, and why he was considered “patient zero”. It seems his frequent patronizing of the NY and Paris bath houses had produced about 500 different sex partners…per year for the last 3 years. So, yeah, gay men spread this scourge and they couldn’t give a shit.
Also, the UCLA medical researchers who eventually became the first to identify the aids virus as the root cause of all the attendant illness in the afflicted group referred to this mystery disease as “the gay flu” because nearly every one of their subjects was a homosexual man. But…let’s not discuss any of that because love is love, or some similar bullshit.
If interested the book "And the Band Played On" is very informative. It's long, closely-written and very detailed. It was written by a homosexual who later died of AIDS and although he blames Reagan etc for not funding research and treatment he is, to his credit, very frank about the points the author makes. I remember one statistic along the lines of: the average homosexual in New York in the late 70s or 80s had over 70 partners per year. He also goes into detail about the reluctance of homosexuals to curb their habits and the selfishness of the man they believed was one of the first North American HIV patients: Gaetan Dugas
Well written post, Alan. I remember the first time aids came into public view. An article in time identified “patient zero”, a homosexual French flight attendant working the Paris to New York shift. In it Time described the man’s illness, diagnosis, and why he was considered “patient zero”. It seems his frequent patronizing of the NY and Paris bath houses had produced about 500 different sex partners…per year for the last 3 years. So, yeah, gay men spread this scourge and they couldn’t give a shit.
Also, the UCLA medical researchers who eventually became the first to identify the aids virus as the root cause of all the attendant illness in the afflicted group referred to this mystery disease as “the gay flu” because nearly every one of their subjects was a homosexual man. But…let’s not discuss any of that because love is love, or some similar bullshit.