For the past several weeks, I have been surprisingly pleased to see that the entire country, not just the gay community, has marked the 20th "anniversary" of AIDS with volumes of news stories and shows about the people, politics and times that shaped the early and still on-going battle against this ugly disease.
One of the inevitable questions that is being asked of the gay community in this time of reflection is how the epidemic affected the political struggles, visibility, advancement—or whatever you may want to call it—of the gay community. The answer to that question has been debated mostly in the "mainstream" media, and it's been almost taboo for gays and lesbians to ask that question ourselves.
Most of the gay and lesbian commentators who have tackled the question have angrily and categorically denied that AIDS pushed gay men into a national spotlight that might otherwise never have shined upon them, and that the resulting attention to a national tragedy may well have swayed public opinion to be sympathetic to gay men in a way that might have otherwise taken much longer to achieve.
At this point, I must say that perhaps the smartest response to the question that I have seen came from San Francisco writer Bruce Mirken, who in the San Francisco Chronicle, likened asking that question of gay men to asking Jackie Kennedy if she thought her husband's trip to Dallas had greatly improved his popularity.
The truth, of course, is that we will never know what the state of gay and lesbian politics and affairs might be today if AIDS hadn't happened.
AIDS did happen. It's an academic exercise, and maybe even a waste of time and energy, to spend too much time wondering what our world would be like otherwise.
But for many reasons, I think it is reasonable, even imperative, especially as we mark 20 years of this disease, to look back and reflect on the full impact of AIDS on the gay movement, and to assess how and why it affected the movement the way it did. If we don't, we won't learn from it.
I think most gay men resist doing this for several reasons. One is that when we think of AIDS, almost all of us think of it in personal terms: the people we lost, the friends and lovers who are no longer with us. Like everyone else, I do that too. It's clearly the most important and profound legacy of this epidemic.
But there are other reasons gay men are reluctant to talk about how AIDS catapulted the gay movement. The biggest, of course, is that many fear if we admit the tragedy of AIDS did actually help advance the gay political agenda with many Americans—as I believe it did—we will somehow look as if we are saying the disease was "worth" it, or that there is some "silver lining" in all the death and suffering that gripped us like a vice in the early years.
There is no silver lining to AIDS.
But that doesn't mean we shouldn't acknowledge how AIDS shaped the American political debate around gay rights, and even won us understanding and compassion from an often otherwise hostile general public.
Another reason some activists refuse to acknowledge that AIDS moved the issue of gay rights forward in the national consciousness is the belief that somehow by doing this, we denigrate or minimize the efforts of political activists, both before and during the worst of the AIDS crisis. But I think that is a narrow interpretation of history.
Indeed, I would argue that the general public's eventually sympathetic response ( even if it did take way too long to come about ) to gay men battling a disease that not only was decimating individuals, but an entire community, was not independent of our activism, but in direct response to it.
I do believe that AIDS gave the powerful media the reason to look at gay men much more frequently, much more in-depth, and much more "humanly" than it otherwise would have. Let's face it, stories of young men dying untimely and at times agonizing deaths in the face of a mysterious virus that baffled the medical establishment is a gripping story, regardless of the sexual orientation of the people involved. And whether gay activists like to admit it or not, the stories of gay men's life-and-death struggles with AIDS were far more riveting and profound than any protest on a state capitol or Washington, D.C.
And for most Americans, it was hard to see those images of death and pride and hope and dignity and not react on a viscerally human level, regardless of political beliefs.
Unfortunately, this is the point where the debate about AIDS and the way it's shaped the gay movement often stalls, with opposing sides bickering over whether the media attention provoked sympathy for gay men or a backlash against us.
But what is important for us as gay men and lesbians to understand is that it was more than the media attention that people in the general public reacted to.
The media simply became a conduit for Americans to see us in ways they had never before witnessed: as members of families, as loving partners, as community members fighting for our lives and the ones we loved. What struck such a response in the public consciousness, I believe, was the brave and heroic way that gay men reacted to the epidemic.
And that is what we should be proud of, should celebrate, and should try to learn from.
Dahir receives email at MubarakDah@aol.com
