What fears did the AIDS epidemic reveal?
AIDS touched on a really essential tension that had to do with modernity or the nature of modern life toward the last quarter of 20th century. The public health profession was feeling like contagion had been conquered, or could be. In the 1970s small pox was eradicated, polio vaccines had diminished what had been a terrible scourge among children, there was vaccination for measles. It was a hopeful moment. At the same time that there was great faith in the advances of modernity, there was a feeling that maybe bad things were going to happen (because of modernity). That’s a persistent theme in western history, that something we’re doing, something that our parents or our grandparents didn’t do having to do with piety or sex or diet, somehow means we’ll “reap the whirlwind.” Then AIDS comes, and people talk about homosexual men like they’re getting their comeuppance. Jerry Falwell even used that term about gay men “reaping the whirlwind.” As if something about the sexual revolution, the
