Page 64 - Push Back

inexperienced, underfunded, and understaffed as political movements go, and the issue received
little support from politicians or the nation in general....

Then came AIDS.

Surely, many activists thought, this would be their movement’s death knell. For while they were
trying to convince the mainstream that homosexuals represented a normal, healthy, alternative
lifestyle, along comes a modern plague - horrible, incurable, fatal, and spread primarily by
promiscuous homosexual men.

AIDS - originally named GRID (gay related immunodeficiency disease) until activist
homosexuals pressured the medical establishment to switch to the generic acronym AIDS
(acquired immune deficiency syndrome) - was the ultimate public relations nightmare. It gave
society a brand-new reason to fear and shun homosexuals - namely, concern over becoming
infected with a nightmarish new disease.

And AIDS did something else. In order for the medical establishment and news media to
communicate to the public how the disease was being transmitted, it became necessary to focus
publicly on the one thing homosexuals most wanted to downplay - the sometimes-bizarre sexual
acts in which they engage and their often astronomically high number of sexual partners. (A
widely cited 1978 study by Alan P. Bell and Martin S. Wineburg reported that 43 percent of
homosexuals had more than five hundred sex partners during their lifetime...)

As a public relations matter, AIDS was daunting. This modern plague, if not handled brilliantly
in the court of public opinion, could result in homosexuals being widely shunned...

The movement definitely needed help. The defiant, storm-trooper tactics of in-your-face groups
like ACT-UP (Aids Coalition to Unleash Power) may or may not have been successful in
pressuring the federal government to increase its commitment to combating AIDS. But such
tactics definitely were successful in giving activist homosexuals a very bad name.

(The author proceeds to describe the December 10, 1989 incident where a group of homosexual
activists stormed into St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City while Cardinal John O’Connor
was leading mass. Some demonstrators wearing gold robes in imitation of the Catholic clergy’s
vestments, held up a large portrait depicting Jesus in a pornographic, frontal nude shot.
Demonstrators stood on the pews, tossed condoms into the air, and screamed obscenities at
Cardinal O’Connor and the parishioners gathered for mass. One of the activists grabbed a
consecrated wafer, viewed as holy to Roman Catholics, and tossed it to the ground.)

Clearly, the young movement was flirting with oblivion if it persisted in such ugly, indefensible
tactics. It needed a new, more civilized direction if it ever hoped to convince Americans that
homosexuality was a perfectly normal lifestyle...

In February 1988 some 175 leading activists representing homosexual groups from across the
nation held a war conference in Warrenton, Virginia, to map out their movement’s future.