Get Laid, Not AIDS
Epidemiologist Elizabeth Pisani's thought-provoking new tome examines the decreasing fear of AIDS in the contexts of recent medical advances.
Peter Murphy, 12 Jun 2008
Those of us who came of age during the AIDS-scares of the 1980s did so with Leonard Cohen’s ominous Greek chorus rumbling in our ears:“Everybody knows that the plague is coming/Everybody knows that it’s moving fast/Everybody knows that the naked man and woman/Are just a shining artifact of the past/Everybody knows the scene is dead/But there’s gonna be a meter on your bed/That will disclose/What everybody knows.”
Blue Velvet was the cinematic metaphor. HIV gave us a whole new complex of sexual neuroses.
“I’ve been quite shocked, particularly in the gay community, that we’re almost back to 1978,” says Elizabeth Pisani, epidemiologist, journalist and author of The Wisdom Of Whores – Bureaucrats, Brothels And The Business Of AIDS, over coffee on a Saturday morning in Dublin city centre.
“There is no AIDS anymore in rich countries,” she continues, raising her voice to be heard over the hissing of the cappuccino machine. “We’re now in a post-AIDS world. There’s only HIV, and HIV’s invisible. I had lunch the other day with a friend who’s just turned 20, and he says, ‘Oh yeah, I was diagnosed a year ago, and it took me a year to tell my mother. I was scared she was going to be hysterical.’ And sure enough, when I talked to his mother, she said, ‘Oh god, I want to commit suicide.’ And I had to explain to my friend that it’s a generational thing, and he has to expect that from his mother, because for her, that diagnosis means that in four months time you’ll be shuffling around on a cane with black things all over your face, and in a year’s time you’ll be dead. But to my friend, he’s never seen it, that doesn’t exist, it’s just, ‘Oh bummer, I’ll have to take two pills a day – that sucks.’ And that’s how people are processing it now.”
The experience of writing The Wisdom Of Whores took Pisani from the shiny citadels of the corporatised anti-AIDS industry to Jakarta backstreets populated by he-males, she-males, transgender sex workers and rent boys. Did mixing with the cast of a Lou Reed song give her greater compassion for people, or make her feel despair at the situation they were in?
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