I hate homophobia

I was having a nice morning. I was sitting in Starbucks working on another poem in the Suite. It was getting to be time to go, so I got up, put my cup in the trash and headed for the door. Then I remembered it was Tuesday, and thought I might go to the newspaper rack and buy the New York Times for the science section. When I got to the rack however, all I could see were 18,000 copies of the San Francisco Chronicle (unbought of course, ridiculous waste of paper that it is) with the front page sweeping headline “S.F. gay community an epicenter for new strain of virulent staph.”

Do I have to tell you how pissed I was about this homophobic headline? Do I have to tell you how much it smacked of the early 80’s “Gay Cancer” panic which caused a virulent strain of homophobia itself, from which we are all still healing? Do I have to ask the question, Have we learned nothing?

There’s no doubt that the new strain of staph – or flu or HIV or whatever – is deadly, and could end up mutating to a point of global population annihilation. People have been saying for years our downfall will be a virus. After all, there are too many human beings on the planet right now versus other organisms in the biosphere, and the universe has a way of keeping everything in balance. Viruses will do what viruses will: they will mutate, and mutate, and live, godammit. If they live in or on people, and there are a lot of people hanging around, then they have more places to spawn. Common sense.

But it is not gay men’s fault! Why is it so easy to blame the “dirty, bad sexual habits” of gay men we have grown to vilify over the years on everything bad that happens in society? Some would say a headline like this “alerts the gay community to a potentially fatal disease!” But it does nothing of the sort. All it does is give rise to people’s homophobia and affords them yet another reason to be prejudiced and hateful toward gay men, and everybody else who is queer, by association. And it pisses me off! You are not going to get staph from a gay man, I promise. You are going to get it because too many years have gone by that we have anti-bacterialed our bodies forcing our immune systems into weak receptacles for bugs. They cannot fight bugs because they do not know how: we have prevented exposure (the only thing that teaches our immune system how to deal) since the 50s, slowly ensuring our bodies can fight nothing on their own. Conspiracy of the drug companies perhaps?

So then I get to work and there is an “all staff email” in my inbox from someone linking to the article and saying “let’s stop using hand towels in the bathroom and everyone bring their own instead. Communal hand towels is one way the staph virus is passed.” And so it begins. 588 individuals of the 800,000 who live in San Francisco proper have shown up with Staph, a staph that originated in SF General Hospital because hospitals are petry dishes for shit like this, not gay men, and now we can no longer share hand towels?

Do you want to know the real reason why viruses are proliferating? What should be the real headline on that stupid article? Globalization and Industrialization. Overuse of antibacterial this and that. Overuse of antibiotics. MRSA is profligate because of people like L’s doctor, who, when she went to see him because her flu still wasn’t better said “I don’t think it’s anything, but here’s some tetracycline anyway.” Tetracycline! That’s fucking why. She had a goddamn bad cold! Because every commercial on TV makes mothers panic that their kids are going to die tomorrow if they don’t Lysol every inch of their world, right now.

We need to stop blaming the victims here and start looking at the root causes. I think I hate shit like this most because like Obama said in the NH debates: words do matter, and words like this headline do go in, and we all suffer. Homophobia – like any phobia – is a fear plain and simple that keeps us from loving and living.

Tags: gay panic, homophobia, staph virus