“The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS: How a Tragedy Has Been Distorted by the Media and Partisan Politics”, by Michael Fumento

 

463 pages, Gateway Books, ISBN-13: 978-0895267290

Back in the 90s I used to subscribe to The American Spectator, a conservative magazine (still going in an online format) that is a kind of punk kid-brother to National Review. Anyway, when I signed on I was given a choice of a free book as a kind of welcome to the club and I chose Michael Fumento’s The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS: How a Tragedy Has Been Distorted by the Media and Partisan Politics, published in 1993…and THAT may be its most convincing argument, for here it is, going on 30-years after publication, and AIDS has not become the 21^st Century’s equivalent to the bubonic plague that AIDS activists warned incessantly that it would. In the early days of the epidemic, it was rational to worry that AIDS might explode through the general population, but once the HIV virus was isolated and more was learned on how it spread, it became obvious that it just wasn’t possible. AIDS is primarily a lifestyle disease more than anything else – like lung cancer and emphysema – and its spread could have been easily prevented had people been more willing to wear a condom and not share drug needles…and before you start shrieking “homophobe”, just remember that Fumento himself states, on the back cover no less, that “[t]he ‘myth’ of heterosexual AIDS consists of a series of myths, one of which is not that heterosexuals get AIDS. They certainly do get it…” just not in the inflated numbers AIDS activists claimed.

Rather, Fumento’s argument is that white middle-class heterosexuals were the target of AIDS propaganda because the media catered to its primarily white, heterosexual middle-class audience and homosexuals and their sympathizers who believed the disease needed to be “democratized” in order to spur research funding (as he further states, “on the opposite side of the spectrum Christian fundamentalists deploy it in order to underline their vision of morality”. So there). Lots of people wanted EVERYONE to be at risk or, at the very least, to believe that they was at risk, regardless of whether or not it was true. Fumento was denounced, harassed and lied about for stating that most AIDS victims would continue to be male homosexuals, IV drug users, women in a long term relationship with men in the first two groups and children of women with HIV…which was and still is the sad, sad case. The terrible thing is, that, by saying “Everyone is equally at risk!” those who were, in fact, highest risk didn’t get the information they needed to protect themselves. Thousands died in the U.S. alone because they were deliberately misinformed about AIDS by those with political agendas to push – agendas they weren’t willing to argue for honestly.

What’s that you say? “What about Africa!” Okay. Anyone who doubts any significant heterosexual AIDS prevalence in America is asked why we hear of a large heterosexual AIDS prevalence in Africa. As Fumento explains: Part of the African AIDS prevalence actually is from lied-about male homosexual behaviors; there are rampant malaria, STDs and other diseases which have already weakened immune systems, increasing AIDS vulnerability; there is severe limitation on the availability of health care and medications; during the early phases of the epidemic there was no money to pay for the testing of donated blood or for eliminating re-use of needles in hospitals; prostitutes with STDs can’t get medical treatment; Africa has a few high-prevalence AIDS regions just as the USA does, but the media has tended to report a high prevalence over broad regions of Africa. Better? Good.

The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS continues to infuriate a lot of people, particularly because after almost 3+ decades...it has proven to be true. This is the most politicized disease ever to afflict mankind, one in which the activists place their politics before the lives of the very people they claim to want to help. They are monsters, the lot of them.