Like Paris Hilton. Or Barack Obama.

AIDS in the Western world is not an issue that affects me, except in that I come from a country with socialized medicine into which I pay taxes. I am heterosexual. I use condoms when I engage in sex. I do not practice dangerous sex. I do not use intravenous drugs. No matter how many songs and movies are written about how important the AIDS “crisis” is, I’m afraid it’s not really my problem.

I am a recovering fag hag. And no matter how often I would try to talk some sense into my friends over their unsafe promiscuity, it was like talking to a wall. They weren’t interested. So why should I be? I wasn’t going to sit there and laugh along with them about their latest round of antibiotics for an “oops” at a bath house. Wendy, like God, helps those who help themselves, and if you’re going to continue to ride some guy’s ass bareback, I really can’t keep mustering the sympathy for you.

Neither can Barbara Kay:

Rent was conceived as a postmodern reincarnation of Puccini’s opera, La Bohème. The romantic disease of Puccini’s age was Tuberculosis, at the time incurable, and associated in the popular imagination - as AIDS is today - with a libertine, bohemian lifestyle. Then as now a disproportionate number of those afflicted were artists and their circle.

Since creative types were those best equipped to manipulate the cultural message, TB and now AIDS sufferers have been enshrined in plays, novels and movies as innocent victims, whose moral agency in contracting the disease is brushed aside as immaterial. In fact, casting any blame on AIDS victims for their situation, even though AIDS is 100% preventable (not the case with TB), is, thanks to gay artists and their media minions, culturally unacceptable.

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