Killers at large
Wednesday, October 31st, 2007Tony Venenum (we’ll call him), 26, reasons that he has always taken risks in life. He was raised by a single parent and made his way in a neighborhood where toughness was a requirement for survival. He discovered, in his teens, that he had solace in male companionship, and before he was 20, had been seduced, and had lived then with Guido, an older man. Both had jobs in establishments that required conformist behavior, but then Guido took sick and the diagnosis was AIDS. The retrovirus inhibitor kept him alive and active, but after two years the poison prevailed, leaving Tony both bereft and desperate for relief, which he found in crystal meth. This cheered him greatly but also increased his craving for sex, which he engaged in diligently. But then early in June he recognized symptoms like those that had gradually disabled Guido. He didn’t consult a doctor–he had no trouble in getting access to the inhibitor drug, and the crystal meth, for a sometime street kid, was easy to find. So were more partners, to whom he didn’t confide his illness. So that when the public health official came by and told him he wanted information, and if necessary could get a warrant, Tony decided fatalistically to cooperate.
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The health office wanted the names and addresses of everyone Tony had had sex with, a question that made Tony laugh through his hoarse coughing. How could he possibly reconstruct such a list? A few guys, sure, but all of them? The New York Times reports, in two stories on the new and virulent strain of AIDS, that those who seek to do something to arrest the virus are driven to “more aggressive” measures than in the past. Charles Kaiser, the historian and author of The Gay Metropolis, makes the basic point: “Gay men should not have the right to spread a debilitating and often fatal disease. A person who is HIV-positive has no more right to unprotected intercourse than he has the right to put a bullet through another person’s head.”
Public health officials are considering measures which, 20 years ago, would have been thought fascistic interventions in human rights. There is thought of infiltrating gay sites, particularly those on the Internet. What, having identified such sites, will they then do? Interpose a message about the danger of unprotected sex? Collect names and e-mail addresses, and send individual warnings to prospective victims? Such measures are not easily composed: “Dear Sir: You have recently kept company with Tony Venenum. Tony has a new and dangerous strain of AIDS and you may have contracted it. You should report to a doctor and you must not engage in unprotected sex because in doing so you may be committing murder.” The boundaries of the new campaign, let alone the niceties, haven’t been resolved upon, but not much thought is being given to con-privacy concerns of privacy. Murderers need to be stopped, and if this means opening their mail, well–such things happen and you can take comfort that you may be saving a life.
The objective is to identify the carrier, and to warn his victim. Someone, 20 years ago, suggested a discreet tattoo the site of which would alert the prospective partner to the danger of proceeding as had been planned. But the author of the idea was treated as though he had been schooled in Buchenwald, and the idea was not widely considered, but maybe it is up now for reconsideration.