PLAGUED BY AIDS PARANOIA

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000605320004-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 2, 2012
• Sequence Number: 4
• Publication Date: November 4, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/02 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000605320004-5
ON PAGE .I-
DD,ODR~OTH~Y~~+
RABINOWITZ.
Plagued
by AIDS
paranoia
he news that in the opinion
of a major Soviet publica-
tion the U.S. government
had produced the AIDS epi-
demic via a program of germ war-
fare induced that special comfort
one feels in the. fulfillment of any
natural cycle: as in thunder after
lightning, night after day; the reas-
surance, in short, of a predictable
rhythm in the universe.
Still, it was not necessary to go so
far abroad as the Soviet Union for
such a theory. Especially since, just
last week, we learned the results of
a. poll conducted by one of the na-
tion's most influential homosexual
news weeklies: a poll which told us
that a substantial percentage of re-
spondents hold roughly the same
view.
According to the New York Na-
tive, 37 percent of the respondents
- a sizable chunk - think that AIDS
is a disease created by an arm of the
federal government.
A slightly smaller number (32
percent) believe they understand
how the government has gone about
effecting the grand plan to annihilate
homosexuals - namely, by "the use
of some substance the government.
put into drugs" that are used by ho-
mosexual men, and drug-abusers,'
.by the by.
In fact, 45 percent of those polled
disagree. Still, to think that this gov-
ernment would not set about delib-
erately to kill a selected body of its
citizens was, the paper's editor later
said, "extremely naive."
Such naivete, could not be
charged, of course, to that 37
percent to whom the true cause of
the AIDS epidemic now stood re-
vealed.
For, as one respondent noted, he,.
had himself long suspected some
conspiracy. Otherwise why, "after a
great stretch of homosexual his-
. tory," should the "death-dealing dis-
ease, come, as it weref.-out of no-
where?
WASHINGTON TIMES
4 November 1985
Now "nowhere" is not the most
precise way to-describe the particu-
lar great stretch of homosexual his-
tory that emerged out of the 1970s:
the era of liberation whose sexual
freedom in its various forms has be-
come known to the world as a prime
generator of the AIDS plague.
A college professor offered the
prediction that if he lived a normal
It espan, he wou "see the CIA who
1111111 e as the perpetrator
One correspondent, let it be noted,
was sufficiently open-minded to
think that the germ warfare respon-
sible for AIDS might have been
waged either by "our government"
or the Soviets.
(None of the respondents and cer-
tainly nothing in the poll-report pro-
vided an answer to the mystery of
why in the face of such a plot the
government had chosen to exempt
lesbians, who, as far as we know,
aren't touched by AIDS?)
What, then, are we to make of this
phenomenon - of a study of a pop-
ulation which has, as we have heard
these many years, learned pride,
dignity, and self-esteem, thanks to its
liberation movement? It's in good
part a population which, if this poll
is to be believed, holds views of re-
ality that at the least can be said to
merit psychiatric attention.
Postulating a whole world - one's
own government, indeed - so preoc-
cupied with its hatred as to engineer
a plot to murder homosexuals: this
is liberation?
No, this is pathology - as not a
few of the enraged respondents
among the 45 percent taking issue
with the conspiracy view recog-
niz
d
e
.
One pointed out that the questions
bordered on "hysterical paranoia."
Another put the point more directly,
admonishing the editors to "stop be-
ing so ridiculous."
Ridiculous, indeed, but telling as
well - chiefly about the promotion
of paranoia and its uses, one of the
essentials of such liberation move-
ments. It tells us, as well, of the
means by which even the AIDS
plague was pressed into service in
the interest of advancing the move-
ment.
It is worth remembering, in these
last weeks' struggles over the bath-
houses, the enormous war which
journalists homosexual journal-
Vs - had to wage in San Francisco
before being able to overcome the
opposition of activists militantly op-
posed to any disclosures of the AIDS
danger. For disclosure, they argued,
threatened to abridge the political
advancement of gay rights.
The bathhouse controversy is
now, to be sure, famous in its own
right for the extraordinary degree
of cowardice it has yielded, mainly
in politicians who continue to incant
that the bathhouses should not be
closed because they are places
where education against AIDS will
best take root.
Or as New York Rep. William
Green put it: the epidemic would ac-
tually worsen without the educa-
tional opportunities. lost to us by
closing the bathhouses.
Who, hearing such stuff, can fail
to be struck afresh by the extremes
of absurdity which issues of this po-
litically delicate kind can induce in
the forces of enlightenment?
Does there remain a patch on the
globe where this information is lack-
ing? Or any child over 6 who cannot
by now list the rules of "safe sex;' as
we have come to know and love
them?
Homosexuals should go to, the
bathhouses for the preservation of
health - a notion in its departure
from reality on a par with the view
that the government of the United
States deliberately contrived to
spread the plague of AIDS among
homosexuals.
'Ib both of these notions the re-
sponse of the letter writer to the New
York Native applies:
Don't be ridiculous.
Dorothy Rabinowitz is a nation-
ally syndicated columnist.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/02 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000605320004-5