Patient Reader, forgive the View, in this Pride Month of June, and in memoriam Larry Kramer, for invoking the sacred moral pledge the gay community makes to each other, viz., Silence = Death. Let those who have ears to hear, read on… — let those without, skip to the native plants.

Go back to your younger self, your 80’s self, and recall the feeling you had in the pit of your stomach the first time you read in the newspaper or saw on TV about the “gay cancer” mowing down queers — and Haitians — in New York, LA and San Francisco. Recall reading over the next few months all kinds of things you didn’t want to know about the gay lifestyle, age-old gay stuff that had never really came out of the closet until that moment. Recall how impossible it seemed for society to disconnect revulsion for gay sex from the medical condition of having a virus. Recall how “The Band Played On.” Remember the hollowing out of gay neighborhoods in cities across the country, when “Die Faggots,” in those words, appeared on the the city walls and, in more polite words, in newspaper editorials.

Remember ACT UP and Queer Nation; and the revulsion, the scorn, the religious assault heaped upon our reeling community, and the humiliation of poor little Ryan White. Recall the AIDS panics and violent attacks and raids, and shuttings down, of bath houses and HIV clinics alike. Remember when passing out condoms earned handcuffs. Remember all the social policing inflicted upon homosexuals in the name of “public health.” Recall how, when there was at last a ray of hope, a test to determine reliably if someone was “HIV Positive,” that science was swiftly turned by the state into a Scarlet Letter, a badge of leprosy allowing — encouraging — landlords and employers and insurers to dispossess people trying to live with the virus. Remember the moves in city council after city council, state legislature after state legislature, to criminalize, evict, restrict and surveil. Remember the harsh legal penalties enacted for “knowingly spreading the virus” — and recall your own feelings about people who would do that sort of thing, and about the rightness of the state heavily policing private sexual activity.

Those laws are still on the books. Prisoners are still sitting in prisons for passing virus.

https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/policies/law/states/exposure.html

The deep psychological wounds, the lifetime of suspicion, and the social discrimination that all gay people have been forced to bear for forty years as a result of the HIV virus, are still really existing.

Remember all this, Patient Reader, and please answer, with all the love and good will in your heart, why gay people, and HIV positive people, and people who love justice and reason in general, should not be burning white hot with incendiary rage, screaming ourselves blue about the hypocrisy? About the blinkered moral double standard of urging, begging, forcing, America to “re-open anyway,” forcing workers to go back to work to infect customers and colleagues, and all just pretend that HUGE numbers of viral transmissions, knowing, un-knowing, or willy-nilly, aren’t happening — or anyway that it just doesn’t matter, just doesn’t count, just has to be accepted. Passing THIS virus, it turns out, has no moral content at all! Nobody is liable, nobody needs to be tracked and dogged for their contacts, and nothing needs to be shut down, certainly not cruise ships or airplanes or hotels or meat-packing plants with hundreds of infections. And it’s all no-fault, and nobody can be sued, much less imprisoned! And it isn’t a moral outrage to just put on your flip-flips and go to the mall or the gym or the movies or a political rally or a crowded church, or to let the kids go back to schools (where they’re all packed into over-crowded trailers, remember). This, knowing, that in the re-opened states, thousands more are dying this week than last. All this collateral damage in the name of global corporate capitalism destroying our dying earth much, much faster, now that money is no longer (literally!) an object.

If that is straight morality, I’ve never been prouder to be a pervert. Happy Pride, Patient Reader. Black Gay Lives Matter. Look to the Rainbow.