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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (Oct. 1, 1988)
**b - Prescription for homocide Gays, AZT and mind control B N O U The plain fact of it is that this society wants homosexual people to die. It kills us directly, as it killed Harvey Milk (who prophesied not only his own murder but the method his murderer would use), or indirectly, in a variety of ways. One of the most time- honored and effective of those ways has been suicide. N uring that strange period of American history the 1950s. there was a twisted and virulently homophobic psychiatrist named Edmund Bergler. Like Dr. Goebbels, Bergler was a master of propaganda, and after an initial shot or two at writers and other dissidents, he directed his propaganda primarily at homo sexuals. Homosexuals, he kept repeating, were all very sick people; they were “ injustice collectors.” As a teenager, eager to read all I could on “ the subject,” I came across one of Bergler’s books I remember throwing it into a garbage bin in Queen’s Park — partly out of disgust, partly because I didn't want any other teenager to read those lies about himself and believe them I knew even then that what Bergler said was not true and that Bergler was evil. But 1 have to admit that I was bothered for another reason too. I was bothered by the part of the truth that all g<xxl lies contain Many of us in those days and since — have been in justice collectors, self-identified victims. We had been programmed to be. We paid $60 an hour (when $60 was worth something!) to lie on Dr Bergler’s couch and listen to his hatred and cruelty every week, didn’t we? Until one day the mind control finally detonated, and we jumped out of a window. By the ’80s. times had changed. By 1982 it was “ not fashionable any more, let alone politi cally correct,” wrote the New York poet and novelist George Whitmore, “ to link ‘self- destructive’ and gay’ in the same sentence." Nevertheless, he admitted, ‘ ’the bodies piled up around me The roster of gay dead lengthened.” Times had not changed enough to stop that The.plain fact of it is that this society wants homosexual people todie It kills us directly, as it killed Harvey Milk (who prophesied not only his own murder but the method his murderer w ould use), or indirectly, in a variety of ways. One of the most time-honored and effective of those ways has been suicide. Hie gay liberation movement was meant to stop all that And things did improve. As World War II had done 30 years earlier, gay liberation ended the isolation of many gay people. Unfortunately for many, emergence from the familiar closet into a starkly unwelcoming society was no liberation but only a change of loneliness. Whitmore was able to describe that loneli ness from the inside In a 1975 article entitled “ Living Alone" (published in the Allen Young/Karla Jay anthology After You're Out) he wrote about “ an invisible piece of furniture in your apartment that you stumble over all the time — it’s a mass of loneliness.” And that loneliness itself became for many an addiction. W’hitmore realized then, as many of us did not. that "Stonewall might have coincided with Judy's death, and the party line might have dictated that there were no more victims, but the phenomenon of gay self-destruction, of course. D ■ im Us Am RETWJVWn a did not disappear.” Whitmore saw what many less troubled observers preferred to ignore, and a 1982 article published in The Advocate. “ Aftera ’Career’ in Suicide; Choosing to Live.” provided some painful insights into the condition of many homosexual men in this society, just as the AIDS epidemic began to impinge on the gay consciousness. Whitmore wrote of his own three attempts at suicide, the first when he was only 17. In one attempt, he overdosed on drugs prescribed to “ calm” him. Suicide was some thing. he says, that he applied himself to “ with dedication. . . . Like so many others, I was doing everything I could not to come to terms with an identity I’d been carefully taught to abhor.” The Mineshaft and other bathhouses and backroom bars wedded, in Whitmore’s words, “ nihilism to lust” in a kind of synthetic pornographic rebellion, in living color. For “ how long.” he asked, “ could you live in the constant anxiety of placating a stem and unforgiving God knowing how warped, imperfect, how queer you were ?” — until finally, with gay lib. we got the chance to act like rebels. Few recognized as Whitmore did in those days that “ this is how many gay men have misunderstood and internalized the message of gay liberation: sadly, losing themselves in the process. . . . Almost all our common commer cial institutions have been set up to promulgate a Rebel lifestyle The most visible aspects of gay life are his. and the ones glorified by most of our magazines and even our ideologues. This new lifestyle Whitmore called a “ new kind of victimization, this unexamined life." "We are now,” he wrote, “ a minority characterized more for our diseases and disabilities than for our achievements and aspi rations: we are still handy victims, used to the role” and still “ Not necessarily obliged to question" specific “ substances or behaviors ” ÿr K he AIDS crisis has delivered yet another Burroughs delayed and interfered with a generation of homosexual men, in the number of proposed studies while going ahead adversity of their illness, into the hands of the with its own studies of AZT by itself and in medical establishment. And that establishment combination with other drugs manufactured by is prescribing for us a drug (of course!), a drug Burroughs. called AZT, claimed originally to prolong life (a After an aborted series of supposedly little, perhaps) for those who have been told “ double-blind” tests on AIDS patients, use of their chances of survival are practically nil. If AZT was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug one chooses to look a little deeper into the facts Administration. The main report on the results about this drug, what one finds is pretty of these tests appeared in the New England disturbing. Journal o f Medicine (July 23, 1987) as a two- AZT, also known as Retrovir, was part article. “ discovered” in 1964 at a National Cancer There is no space here for a detailed analysis Institute Lab in Detroit. Plans to try the drug as of the report, but rather than being cause for an anti-cancer agent were dropped when it optimism, it instead fueled a great deal of proved far too toxic. (Although AZT kills skepticism about the drug itself and the way the cancer cells and some viruses, it also kills just tests were carried out. Statistical tables included about everything else.) in the tests seemed to make no sense, and when Twenty years later, one of the NCI doctors asked by one researcher to explain the tables, turned his research over to the Burroughs- neither of the principal authors of the report Wellcome Company, a giant United States could do so. One author told the researcher, pharmaceutical corporation centered in “ Forget about the tables!” The researcher was England, and suggested the drug be used to treat John Lauritsen, a long-time gay liberationist AIDS. Burroughs-Wellcome took the oppor trained in statistical analysis, and he decided to tunity and proceeded to gain control over the look more deeply into AZT and the suspicious world’s supply of thymidine, the raw material testing procedures. used in AZT. So, as Dr. Joel Lexchin put it in Project Inform in San Francisco had been the Toronto Globe and Mail, “ Without a patent, able to obtain additional material from the FDA or even unique know-how. Burroughs has leg by invoking the Freedom of Information Act. ally ensured that no one else will be able to Although this material had been heavily censored make or sell AZT.” before release, Lauritsen was able to discover Having cornered the AZT market, Burroughs- that it revealed “ the dark underside of the Wellcome then proposed the drug as an AIDS double-blind, placebo-controlled trial; falsi treatment — at a price of $ 1,000 a month per fication of data, sioppiness, confusion, lack of patient, a price which, as The Economist puts it, control — things not even hinted at in the Jour “ has more to do with the temporary monopoly nal reports.’' Lauritsen set out his investigations which Burroughs-Wellcome enjoys than with into AZT in some detail in the New York Native. research costs.” (Reprints are available from the author. 26 St. The U S. government, not known for its Marks Place. New York, NY 10003.) Among independence from the huge drug corporations, his conclusions was the following; effectively gave Burroughs-Wellcome “ the “ AZT is not a cure for AIDS. AZT’s alleged final say as to whether a whole range of benefits are not backed up by hard data, and are important studies involving the drug could be not sufficient to compensate for the drug s conducted at all.” according to Lexchin. And known toxicities. Recovery from AIDS will T