letter from a mother of a gay man. sent to ONE magazine, 1958.
–
This post was flagged as adult content and the original poster was deactivated so I’m bringing it back.
A supportive parent in the 50s ran a boarding house for gay men and hosted dinner parties for her son and all his friends and people think that’s adult content.
Absolutely fucking horrific that the general public wound up hearing about monkeypox in gay people first and thinks it’s an STD or specifically gay disease. It’s not deadly like HIV but this obviously mirrors that, except the fact it isn’t a fucking STD at all, or even limited to physical contact. It can infect you anywhere, make blisters anywhere, and leave active virus on any porous enough material. Clothing, rugs, towels, seat cushions, not only are people using it for another LGBT witch hunt but they genuinely don’t know their whole families could get it from shopping, seeing a movie, anything.
The last outbreak was from pets, specifically rodents and rabbits, but contained at about 50 cases. This time there’s a couple thousand cases getting worse because most people weren’t told what it actually is or how it spreads and half the country now just thinks diseases in general are liberal hoaxes or whatever the fuck they think. America is a shithole.
…This has already done the worst possible damage to public perception and there’s going to be no reversing it. Even if people see that it can spread to anybody at all, the same people are always going to think it “came from” gay people. Now that it’s being reported in some schoolchildren, there’s just tens of thousands of people on twitter raging that they want to execute gay men because they think the kids could only possibly have gotten it by being molested. This is already being stoked by political and journalistic figures.
I’m sorry to share something so goddamn scary but the least anyone can do is counter the misinformation everywhere they see it, as often as they have the energy for. It’s an uphill battle but every single comment containing any real accuracy has at least some chance to stop someone going down the wrong informational path. I probably spent four hours yesterday just posting corrections to individual comments. I don’t think I can keep that up. That was all just in one single news thread.
Yeah most health agencies, even assuming nobody was being actively malicious, were absolutely braindead in releasing the information that most people with confirmed infections were gay/bi men. This was done under the idea that the population “more at risk” should be warned but was at best absolutely tonedeaf to the history of health stigma of gay/bi men. Especially when this is so early on and we have a recent example with COVID of how much harm the release of half baked information can do.
