Let's put shame where it belongs

It's time to have a conversation about shame, and who deserves it. This has become an issue lately, as two local notables have been telling their audiences that people with HIV infection deserve whatever shame and stigma they get.

One is a talk radio host who has called homosexuality a sexual disorder, gay behavior stupid and gay people, even married ones, promiscuous. The other is a state Senate candidate running against a gay incumbent whom he calls a "marriage-diluting sodomite," suggesting he has AIDS and could spread it by shaking hands.

Jan Mickelson and David Leach have been responding to a series of ads sponsored by the AIDS Project of Central Iowa in which I played a role. They feature a variety of Iowans, some known, some unknown, saying that whether or not someone has AIDS won't prevent our associating with them. Each of us begins a sentence with "HIV won't stop me from..." Sen. Matt McCoy, whom Leach is challenging, continues "shaking hands with my constituents." I say, "putting a human face on people who test positive." The ambiguity about which of us has it underscores that "HIV is not the sum of who we are."

But Mickelson claims HIV does discriminate - against gays. As for Leach, he wrote on his website that he fell on the floor each time he heard McCoy's ad. He suggested McCoy must have HIV based on "which direction the disease would be most likely to travel," and if so, would put people at risk by shaking their hands.

One would have hoped by now everyone knew HIV isn't transmitted by hand-shaking and isn't a gay disease, but one which everyone must take precautions against. Clear Channel Communications, which operates WHO Radio, where Mickelson's show airs, took the unusual step of saying on air that he had made factual errors "regarding HIV/AIDS, its spread and current efforts to inform the public about this disease." But Mickelson is unrepentant.

I've written about people with AIDS from Iowa to Ethiopia. There was the 53-year-old straight ad company executive who learned she had contracted it on a safari to Kenya years earlier, when injected by a contaminated needle. There was the gifted gay New York Times reporter who died at 39, after coming out publicly and beginning to write about others with AIDS. "At times I think my fellow AIDS sufferers are laughing at me, looking up from their beds with eyes that say, 'You'll be here soon enough'," he wrote.

There was the 27-year-old heterosexual Iowa couple. He was wracked with guilt that he may have unknowingly given it to her after contracting it during a nine-month gap in their eight-year relationship. And there was the Ethiopian couple engaged to be married who learned, in my presence, that he was HIV positive, so the engagement had to be broken. All of these people were on my mind when I was asked to take part in the ad campaign. I jumped at the chance to help break down prejudices.

Stigma kills. That's what I learned from the ad executive. She wanted to put a human face on HIV so other women would be less scared of coming forward. Studies show women are a third likelier to die than men in the same time period - maybe because, fearing disapproval, they get diagnosed and treated later. "I let this virus [make] an intelligent, creative, artistic, fearless (I thought) woman become someone who was so pathetically afraid," she wrote me.

When you consider these stories in light of the horribly offensive and irresponsible things being said, you see where the shame really belongs - and it's not with the AIDS patients.