My earliest impressions of sex were directly linked to AIDS. The first time I heard about AIDS was at the same time it was becoming national news and the same time I was starting to become aware of my own sexuality. Queerness, AIDS and sexuality all coincided and became intertwined in my consciousness.
It was the early 1980’s, and AIDS was explained to me as a deadly disease that gay men get because they have anal sex. That was the exact definition. I was very young and did not know much at all about sex, but I got the clear impression that queer sex was fatal and queer people were doomed. The time I learned about straight sex and the time I learned about AIDS seem very close together in my memory. As a kid I remember literally considering that if a man’s cum going in your butt gave you AIDS, how could it possibly be safe to have it in your pussy? AIDS was found in semen, so I had to learn what that was, and logically it just didn’t compute that semen was bad when it went up gay guy’s asses but OK for women’s pussies... Kids are rational even when adults are being hysterical, but it would be years before anyone talked about straight people getting AIDS. My mother explained that a condom was kind of like a sock. AIDS was attached to a very specific kind of sex. At the time, it wasn’t even discussed as an infection, but as some mysterious something in the body fluids of gay men that would contaminate others upon contact. Not expose others, but contaminate. People literally got AIDS from anal sex. All gay people have anal sex, therefore all gay people have AIDS. (Lesbians were treated as mythological and irrelevant anyway.) Between AIDS and the tainted Tylenol, the world of the 1980’s became contaminated. Rumors and horror stories were our main source of information.
With Ryan White, the media made it known that you could get AIDS from blood as well as semen. I remember a teacher talking about how if you saw a car accident at the side of the road it was now a different matter to decide whether or not to help the victims because of AIDS. Because you might get blood on yourself and get AIDS. There was no non-threatening information about how it was transmitted, only word of mouth and fear. My mother kept having regular blood tests because she had received a blood transfusion prior to the hospital screening for HIV. As always when there is little information, stories start up and fear takes over. This is how you end up with a community holding fundraisers to keep Ryan White out of his own neighborhood school. There was no accurate information coming from the government, the doctors, the press, or anyone.
Several years later, we knew slightly more, a fact that must be entirely credited to the unrecognized and tireless work of activists in ACT UP and other grassroots groups. There is one incident in my memory that really captures straight suburban thinking around AIDS and homosexuality in the early 1990’s: With all the puffed-up authority only evangelical christians can muster, a girl in my high school declared, “All gay people will have AIDS eventually.” Another born-again student dramatically stood up to her and said, “Maybe this is God’s way of testing our compassion.” Well god knows if you can be compassionate towards some homos you are sure to get into heaven! No wonder I was scared to come out and join the damned and the doomed. There were no dissenting voices to be found anywhere.