Condom non grata
regon Health Divison’s AIDS information
campaign has got off to a halting start.
On the one hand, AIDS activists have decried
the lack o f material directed at the population
most at risk for infection: in Oregon, homosex
ual and bisexual men. Gay leaders also fear that
the pervasive message of fear and self-defense
in the ads — “ Protect yourself” — might
lead to anti-gay violence. However, even the
sanitized ads that dismay activists have proved
too salacious for such stolid organs as the
Oregonian.
Apparently, Gov. Neil Goldschmidt, who
promised that the ad campaign against AIDS
would not be “ a shy one,’ ’ himself shied from
several ads, one of which might, if you squint
long enough, be construed as gay-oriented. The
poster featured a comely young man dressed
only in a rain coat, and read ‘ ‘Good boys always
wear their rubbers.” Goldschmidt nixed it him
self. Another rejected ad showed a roll of highly
colored condoms, with the caption “ Lifesavers.”
Other ads did pass Goldschmidt’s muster.
The black and white ‘ ‘AIDS is a killer. Protect
you rself ’ seems direct and banal enough on its
own, on the back of a bus. But when this text is
joined on TV by an image o f a hand loading,
then firing, a handgun, the subtext of anti-gay
violence becomes so obvious that only a poli
tician could deny its message. How do you
protect yourself? With a handgun. Against
whom? Guess.
The state’s ad campaign is not so much anti-
gay, as anti-humor; it aims not to inform the
people at risk, as much as not offend those at no
risk; it is designed not to educate, but to
frighten.
If you think Oregon has problems with its
AIDS education program, consider the prob
lems facing the banana lobby. Public Broad
casting Service's AIDS education documentary
‘‘AIDS: Changing the Rules” (to be aired
Nov. 6, 10 p.m. on Oregon Public Broadcast
ing) will feature “ frank” talk about AIDS and
AIDS prevention from such luminaries as Ron
O
Reagan Jr. One segment uses a banana to
demonstrate how to put on a condom. The
International Banana Association is angry: in a
letter to PBS a banana spokesperson stated,
“ The banana is an important product and de
serves to be treated with respect and
consideration.”
Well, for that matter, so do penises, and the
people they belong to. Such squeamishness
about advocating condoms masks a disregard
for the people whose use of them might prove
life-extending. The banana lobby and Fred
Stickel would change their tunes if a latex sheaf
were, for some reason, needed to protect
bananas from disease. The problem begins
when other fruits begin to use them.
W.C. McRae
Feature Editor
Montana bom and bred. Bill was educated
widely in the UK and Europe. Despite
preoccupations with bridge, visual art, opera
and pretentious cookery, he aspires to eventual
full-employment.
Am I thy child’s keeper?
“ W;
re seem to have kids on our minds
these days” reports Boston colum
nist Ellen Goodman. As the baby boom genera
tion moves into its 40s, families are suddenly
in vogue and the two-career household is now
the two kid home. Baby Boom is a popular film,
everyone talks about the kids on thirtysomething.
But in the competitive self-conscious 1980s,
kids are more than just members of a family:
- they have become essential commodities, and
hence politicized.
More to the point, behind the happy families
o f Parenting magazine, the energies formerly
engaged in discussions for or against feminism
now vitalize debates over day care and work
ing mothers. Debbie Nathan, in the Village
Voice (9/29/87) discusses the sudden spate of
child abuse cases alleged to be occurring in the
nation’s day care centers.
Traditionally, charges of child abuse have
been leveled against male adult family mem
bers who violate male and female children.
However, the Village Voice article explores a
flip side o f conventional child abuse cases:
increasingly, in what Nathan calls “ mini-
McMartins,” charges o f sexual abuse are be
ing leveled against the female staff members
o f day care centers. And the charges don’t stop
at sex abuse — allegations of Satanism, involve
ment in child pornography, and animal torture
have also been thrown into the pot.
O f course, the charges may be true. But short
o f a nation-wide infra-structure o f Satanic vol
unteer child-care providers (as some prosecutors
have advanced), it is difficult to understand how
we have come to the point where — almost
wholesale — white, middle class parents sus
pect the white middle class women who tend
their children of sex abuse. While the spectre of
Freud and his Seduction Theory wafts by,
Nathan notes that “ the weaker the family
gets, the holier is its image. . . . If the private
family is sacred, the public child care center is
profane.’' The guilt our culture places on a
mother who works is displaced onto surrogate
mothers; the guilt is expressed by prosecuting
the women who tend children in her stead.
The sins — freedoms — o f feminism have
been visited on our children.
And unfortunately, the generalized appre
hension about gay people in our society will
almost inevitably be refocused into the realm of
childhood, and emerge as accusations of gay
child abuse. New Hampshire and Massachu
setts’ legislatures have passed laws forbidding
gay people from becoming foster parents. Al
though Mass. Gov. Michael Dukakis vetoed the
bill in that state, he had already taken the politi
cally supererogatory step to procedurally bar
gay people from serving as foster parents.
Syndicated columnist William Raspberry re
cently wrote an editorial dressing down the
American Civil Liberties Union for arguing the
case o f a bisexual man whose sexual orienta
tion led to his rejection as a Big Brother.
Raspberry’s veiled argument — that a gay Big
Brother would be likely to sexually abuse a
child, that a gay Big Brother would be a poor
role model — is gratuitously induced as an
inevitability due to the stereotyped “ nature” of
gay men. Can the fire storm ofNAMBLA be far
behind?
While abuse of children by adults occurs all
too often, to fixate solely on alleged abuse by
gay men is craven, since the majority of child
hood sex abuse is committed within families by
straight men. Raspberry is merely refocusing
his adult homophobia onto the realm of children,
thereby representing as "w isdom ” what would
otherwise be labelled intolerance and prejudice.
When increasingly-family-prone America
chooses to play out its homophobia by accusing
gay men of abusing its children, do not be
surprised.
•
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