It’s 2014, but Barbara Fletcher at OZY is still spreading (pun intended) 25 year old misinformation about AIDS:
Then the happy ending: Rose gets the all-clear and we’ve all had a hearty laugh. But in 21 minutes we’ve also learned something: AIDS is not just a “gay disease” and it can happen to anyone. Understanding is vital. A pretty good lesson from a show about four older women living together in Miami, Florida, don’t you think?
No, AIDS couldn’t “happen to anyone.” But gay activists needed that myth.
AIDS was one of the best thing to happen to the “gay cause” because it became a weapon of “normalization.”
Promiscuous gay men couldn’t be bothered actually using all those Trojans they tossed around during Pride Parades, but activists employed AIDS as a Trojan Horse, to get their false “we’re all the same” message into the culture.
(Note: the writers on Golden Girls were gay men.)
This led to the AIDS Industrial Complex we’ve been putting up with for years, although losing a bunch of members of that industry in one day may cripple it temporarily.
While The Golden Girls was on the air, rich conservatives were dunking tens of millions into think tanks and magazines, but not much into producing pop culture counter-narratives.
Barbara Fletcher effortlessly remembers a TV show that aired in 1990. Enough others did too, to warrant an article about it at OZY.
Can anyone (even the men who wrote them) recall a single white paper produced by Hudson or Heritage at that very same time?
