Today is World AIDS Day . AIDS is a slightly heavy problem, but we must face. may not have any virus that can stir up such complex individual and social emotions like "HIV".
It has been a long way from its popularity in the 1980s to being gradually recognized by the public today. In this process, we see human ignorance, fear and cruelty, and also see the kindness shown by science and society when facing the virus.
Today, we enter this not easy journey through a documentary work "Crying of the Century". The English name of this book is And the Band Played On, which is an interesting contrast to the Chinese translation. The modern society that pursues individual liberation and noisy is like a band that plays endlessly, but no one pays attention to the crying person.
Image source " Normal Heart ".
AIDS has become a silent existence in our daily lives, and it seems to have settled from the panic and hustle and bustle of the 1980s and 1990s. Those who died of various complications due to AIDS may still live in the memories of their friends and relatives, and those who survived with medication have long been able to live like ordinary people, but they often live with old nightmares and terrible memories of their dear death again and again.
Just like the name of the documentary filmed by Robert Epstein in 2000, "Living to prove it", those AIDS carriers who survived by luck are witnesses of a period of cruel years when the plague was raging. Among them, in addition to unfortunate individuals, there are various government agencies and departments, scientific groups and the mainstream of society, those ideologies that are regarded as orthodox, myths and panics about sex, and the ignorance, fear and cruelty displayed in human society when the virus is raging.
htmlCrying in the 3rd century
All of this seems to be the theme of the book "Crying in the Century: The Story of AIDS" written by Randy Shiltz, the witness.
"Crying of the Century: The Story of AIDS"
[US] by Randy Shiltz, translated by Fu Jieying
Shanghai Translation Press Publishing House , 2020-1
He shows us how a new type of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and acquired immune syndrome (AIDS) were discovered and spread in the United States, and how this plague that occurred at the end of the 20th century reflected like a mirror the various institutions, organizations, groups and individuals of human society, and how they achieved their goals through the use of AIDS.
It seems that from the beginning, AIDS was quickly metaphorized and symbolized like the plagues of other centuries, thus gradually making the medical issues that were originally virus infection encompass various politics, power and culture, and completely neglecting the AIDS infected people who are eager to be paid attention to and rescue in the real situation.
is these metaphors and symbols that lead to AIDS and its symptoms until now, which directly affects the daily life and psychological state of the infected person.
When we trace the origin of this stigma, on the one hand, it must be related to the moment when HIV was discovered in the 1980s and was named; on the other hand, as a "metaphor of disease" has its own long history in human social culture, and the metaphor of AIDS is just a part of this genealogy.
report on the " patient zero " at that time: "People who bring us AIDS." / " New York Post " page
Whether it is "Crying of the Century" or the 2012 documentary " Guide to Survival of the Plague ", it points out that when HIV is detected, a truth is hidden: The original HIV was not only found in gay men. But when the media started reporting the story, it focused on "Patient Zero" gay men, which led to HIV being associated with gay men and homosexual behavior from the beginning.
According to data from the China Health Commission in 2019, as one of the main transmission channels of AIDS, 73.3% are sexual transmission of the opposite sex and 23.0% are homosexual transmission of men. It is precisely this 23% that have become the focus of people's attention, just like when HIV first appeared in American society in the 1980s. When some media and politicians discovered that the virus seemed to be closely linked to the gay group, they immediately attacked the sexual minority through metaphors and symbols of AIDS, so AIDS was initially called "gay cancer" and "gay plague".
Hate, exclusion and too late
As Foucault pointed out in his French course "Unormal People", there are often two modes for people infected with plague: One is the "leprosy model" that uses rejection as the main means; the other is the " plague model" that uses accommodation as the prevention method.
"Unormal People: French Academy Course Series: 1974-1975"
[France] by Michel Foucault , translated by Qian Han
Shanghai People's Publishing House , 2018-11
These two different methods of dealing with plague-infected people suggest different social classifications and power operation modes. With the development of modern society, exclusion behaviors (such as throwing leprosy patients out of cities or on isolated islands) are gradually reflected and abolished, replaced by a positive power operation mechanism using distinction as a means.
Due to the ideological stance of the media, politicians and some scientists, they hope from the beginning to bind AIDS to the homosexual group to achieve the goal of excluding this group.
Because of this connection, the Reagan administration in the United States always wanted to regard HIV as a specific group problem, and because this group itself was "Abomination", they did not intend to spend more money on the government budget.
plus the traditional Western Christian concepts, many right-wing religious politicians, media, priests and people think that AIDS is God’s punishment for “Sodom’s sin,” so they gloat and admire the rampant AIDS in the gay group from the other side. It is precisely because of these presupposed and imagined metaphors and symbols that they often ignore or intentionally ignore the virus infections that appear in heterosexual men and women until it is too late.
" Philadelphia Story " released in 1993 is adapted from the first AIDS discrimination case in the United States in 1987.
The ignorance, panic and imagination about the early stages of HIV may be very familiar to us who have passed the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, but people have learned lessons from history without allowing these unfounded metaphors to become uncontrollable.
But even so, the special nature of AIDS is here, on the one hand, because it was originally bound to the gay group, and on the other hand, because of its special sexual transmission pathway, it has a more ambiguous color than other infectious diseases. Due to its close connection with sexual behavior, people infected with HIV have to face moral scrutiny and judgments such as those infected with syphilis. It seems that it is precisely because of the individual's unrestrained body in his private life that causes viral infection. Therefore, it is regarded as a punishment for this imprudent behavior, and thus becomes the yardstick for reviewing individual morality. Who is the fault of
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In the drama "Normal Heart" created by Lery Kramer based on his own experience (2014 Ryan Murphy filmed the same name), he - the hero is his incarnation - warned others of the importance of safe sexual behavior during the 1980s. But for young people who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, this warning is tantamount to depriving them of sexual autonomy they gained through struggle, resulting in many people not realizing the terribleness of AIDS contagiousness.
html Social debate caused by AIDS in the 1980s./Smithsonian MagazineIn Shiltz's "Crying of the Century", he mercilessly accused group leaders of their inaction and their hope to use AIDS as a bargaining chip to achieve the purpose of negotiating with relevant departments...
It is these wanton behaviors that provide bystanders with sufficient evidence to prove that HIV is a punishment for those who are indecent personal sexual life. Viruses are the symptom of individual moral flaws, red characters and imprints. In this traditional metaphorical system and culture involving sexual viruses or diseases, people with HIV have to start to endure greater moral pressures that have not been truly cleared until now.
In Susan Sontag "Metaphor of Disease", she pointed out that traditional society often builds a complete set of complex and sophisticated metaphorical systems around diseases (especially epidemics and infectious diseases), as a tool to consolidate mainstream ideology and crack down on and exclude non-orthodox people, behaviors and ideas.
"Metaphor of Disease"
[US] by Susan Sontag, translated by Cheng Wei
Shanghai Translation Press, 2020-7
In the article "Aids and its Metaphor", Sontag revolves around the AIDS panic in the 1980s and 1990s in the United States. analyzes the metaphorical treatment of the AIDS disease, which makes it a unique "disease" of the homosexual group that once emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, and also devalues the group from a moral level again through the moral treatment of AIDS. thus leads to: Once infected with HIV, it means that the infected person is portrayed as a morally flawed, sexually perverted and punished by God, abandoned.
So how to remove stigma and correctly view HIV and its infections have become a retention project for almost every year's "World AIDS Day". But the complex and wrong metaphors constructed in history have long been deeply rooted in our daily lives, culture and ideology, making it gradually difficult to detect but always exist clearly.
This moral loss and personal life problems cliché not only affects AIDS patients infected by sexual transmission, but also directly affects those carriers of viruses infected by blood or due to medical needle contamination, as well as groups infected by mother-to-child transmission. People will not ask the infected person whether he is "innocent", but will automatically call this series of metaphors and clichés without any room for freedom to make quite plain judgments.
Metaphor of Overcoming Disease
In the widespread stigma, AIDS prevention and control have become more difficult. In the " Caixin Weekly " in January 2019, there was an article titled "The Color-Changing "Light Blue"" that covered the cover report on the issue of blued, the largest gay dating software in China, and minor users who are infected with AIDS. This report takes the 10-month survey report of Zhang Beichuan for blued-related users as the starting point, pointing out that the infection rate of minors in the MSM (male sex actors) group with the highest HIV infection rate in China has increased.
On every year "World AIDS Day", according to the data released by National Health Commission , we will also find that the proportion of minors in sexual transmission has increased significantly, and the hidden problems behind this are precisely the tragedy caused by information asymmetry caused by the lack of sex education and stigmatization.
Image source movie "Crying of the Century" (1993)
In order to avoid the frequent binding of homosexuality and AIDS, many people have begun to advocate the use of MSM to replace specific group names, hoping that people can view the virus more objectively. People want to remedy it, that is, to limit it to a professional and scientific scope, to remove the metaphors and symbols given to it based on fantasy, imagination or ulterior motives, and to make it merely regarded as a virus and disease that needs to be explored and treated by medicine.
As a metaphor, this cultural model of disease will not disappear easily.Because, as Foucault or Sontag discovered, the reason why diseases themselves are metaphorized is often not directly related to the virus itself, and they are often just used as a tool or container to realize the redistribution or organization of society, culture and power.
When people know very little about HIV, hospitals are reluctant to accept infected people, doctors and nurses are unwilling to take care of them, and when they die, they are often packed into black garbage bags for disinfection. The development of modern science and technology cannot completely guarantee human security, and the belief in democracy, dignity and freedom cannot change the contempt and distraction of human beings when encountering plague.
Black Death When people burned the dead in the open air; in modern hospitals, nurses put the dead in garbage bags... Swedish TV series "Wearing Gloves to Wipe Tears" was a typical behavior at that time: doctors would wear gloves to wipe their tears to patients in order to prevent infection. Under the invasion of strange viruses, stable social relations and a series of norms have become vulnerable, and the dignity of human beings has completely dissipated. A natural state seems to be back, revealing the terrible ghosts under the foundations of human society and its civilization.
Locke Hudson (left) died of AIDS in 1985. /《年年山年山》
What really made the mainstream American society begin to nervous is Hollywood The famous actor Locke Hudson died of AIDS. People who have been watching the fire from the other side of the river have realized the "blindness" and indiscriminateness of the virus itself; at the same time, they also discovered that even the image of "straight men" on the big screen such as Locke Hudson may have been homosexual.
The clear distinction between the boundaries and the image of others are ultimately ambiguous. Modern lepers can no longer be clearly diagnosed and defined like in ancient times, and then throw them out of the city. On the contrary, fusion and ambiguity are the most typical characteristics of modern society and daily life, and this also provides an inevitable modern situation for the spread of the virus.
This may be the modern genealogy of HIV, and for every infected person, they have no choice but to inherit these shadows and stigmas.
Although after decades of publicity, education and recognition, the myths, ignorance, horror and clichés surrounding AIDS are gradually disappearing, the deep-rooted prejudice and discrimination are also continuing to operate.
But all the symbols and metaphors and the profound crises involved should not be the reason for us to ignore the individuals in our daily lives who are truly stigmatized and crises. , as Hiltz pointed out in "Crying of the Century", we often forget the living individuals because of many dogmas or obsession with ideas.
