Back then it was called AIDS.
I was a newspaper editor in about '86/'87 and back then there was a big furor about AIDS going global and wiping out humanity. I didn't believe any of it, having met many potential journalists in college and working with many of them as a newspaper reporter before I became an editor. They were bottom-of-the-barrel intellectually. Still are. (I rank them about on the same level as education majors.)
I also knew what the Bubonic Plague had done to Europe - about a quarter of the population dead. And the flu during WWI - more died of it than in combat.
I also knew plagues are self-limiting.
One day at the paper I got a package from the CDC (Center for Disease Control) in Atlanta. It contained the statistics on AIDS.
Much to my surprise those infected were two-thirds homosexuals, one-third IV drug users, and less than one percent were those who got it from blood transfusions and heterosexuals.
After blood starting being tested, those infected dropped to zero percent. As for the less than one percent "heterosexuals," it turns out many of them were "bisexuals" or homosexuals pretending to be straight.
Heterosexuals with AIDS were virtually nonexistent.
Of course, homosexuals were transmitting it through their extraordinary promiscuity and drug use. Their transmitting of diseases have been noticed for thousands of years, which is why every culture has disapproved it it.
A few years later many homosexuals marched on Washington D.C., screaming that Reagan was killing them for not using the entire federal budget to cure AIDS. Then they screamed at Clinton. In their minds these men were killing them, not their sodomizing each other.
That didn't surprise me because the first defense of people is to blame their problems on other people. But their level of blame was outrageous. I expected to see that from four-year-olds.
I've known a few people who've died of HIV. All of them were homosexuals and most of them were theater majors from my college. Some "plague."
HIV has pretty much disappeared off the radar screen except for Africa. For the U.S. it's ancient news - and you can't cover what's not there anymore.
I still have zero respect for mainstream journalists. I listen to nothing they have to say.
I quit reading newspapers and watching TV news decades ago. No wonder so many newspapers have gone out of business - including the one of which I was editor.
7 comments:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subtypes_of_HIV - well, it depends.
Jon Rappoport wrote a book in the 80s about AIDS being a hoax and a money tree for Big Pharma.
http://www.amazon.com/AIDS-Inc-Jon-Rappoport/dp/0954659015/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1449108609&sr=1-5&keywords=jon+rappoport
HIV is still cutting a scythe of death among the existing homosexual community ensuing that not many live to old age.
I read this one years ago. Interesting.
http://www.duesberg.com/books/pdbinvent.html
The first gay person I met was in 1984. He actually did not get laid a lot and did not like anal sex. He was actually at very low risk for HIV/AIDS. Later, in Southern California, I was at a party (late 1987) where there was a gay guy talking about the bathhouse scene prior to AIDS. He said that gay men were extremely promiscuous and that was exclusively the reason why they got AIDS. They used to get all kinds of STD's prior to the emergence of HIV.
it so happened that this individual, who worked in the medical field, read about the discovery of SIV (the primate version of HIV) in late 1978 and predicted that there would be a human version of the virus, HIV. He urged all of his friends to either be in monogamous relationships or to be celibate because a pandemic was coming that would wipe out all of the gays. They all though he was nuts and ostracized him. He said that literally all of the people he knew at the time (late 70's) had died of AIDS by 1985, every single one of them.
My friend is still alive and quite healthy. He is not promiscuous.
"I didn't believe any of it, having met many potential journalists in college and working with many of them as a newspaper reporter before I became an editor. They were bottom-of-the-barrel intellectually. Still are."
There's still a ton of nepotism, favoritism, and insider back-scratching in journalistic hiring. I had a friend who tried breaking into journalism several years ago. He was a pretty bright guy with a lively, readable prose style, but every position he applied to ended up going to some editor's semi-literate, half-wit nephew. It gets worse as you go up the ladder.
Tell me about it. That's one of the reasons I left the field.
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