Guns, Civil Liberties, the Bath Houses, AIDS, and Epidemics

[alcibiades_mystery]

I had to do some traveling for work recently, and I like to read journalistic nonfiction when I travel, but I didn't want to buy a new book. I browsed my own bookshelf at home and saw a book I hadn't read in ten years, but that I remember really liking (to the extent you can like such a thing): Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic.

The book, of course, was controversial for any number of reasons when it first appeared. But one of the enduring and - with hindsight - still striking arguments is Shilts' analysis of tension between public health and private liberties when it came to the (mostly) gay bath houses, particularly in San Francisco and New York. Put plainly, the bath houses were in many ways central to gay liberation culture at the time, to the extent that the political argument still encompassed a broad ranging argument for sexual liberty. This argument is somewhat hard to comprehend today, since the strategy has very much changed to "normalizing" LGBT sexuality, but in the 1970's and early 80's, the more dominant arguments were for "queering" LGBT sexuality - showing off its difference from hetero-normative monogamy rather than displaying its sameness (as recently as the late 90's, there were strong LGBT argument against gay marriage, like Michael Warner's The Trouble with Normal).

So, it's 1980 and here came HIV/AIDS. And the problem, of course, was that the very activities that were promoted in the bath houses and that were central to gay liberation culture were instrumental in "amplifying" the epidemic. But they couldn't close the bath houses. Not in 1981, when they thought perhaps the bath houses were sites of infection. Not in 1982, when they knew they were. Not in 1983, desperate now, sure of the harm to the public health. Only in 1984, and even then it was a struggle. Gay newspapers and magazines, filled with ads from the bath houses, predicted concentration camps. The closing of the bath houses was "sexual fascism," tyranny, a horror, the destruction of gay culture. So went the argument. But the epidemic! The public health finally won out.

Shilts account, I think, has much to say to us about our current conundrum on guns. In hindsight, now, we look back slack-jawed that the San Francisco head of public health tip-toed around bath house closure for three years - three years that saw tens of thousands infected. It's incomprehensible. Of course they should have closed the bath houses immediately in the epidemic, we think!

I will say this: no anti-gun control arguments for "liberty" are any more sensible than the gay liberation arguments against the closure of the bath houses. They make equal sense - they are equally valid. The RKBA crowd is, in my view, completely analogous to the "Right to Keep Open and (Bare) Bath Houses" groups of the early 1980's. Their arguments make sense internally, and are central to a particular kind of culture. But we are in an epidemic, and the epidemic of gun deaths, as serious as the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the early 1980's, requires that the culture change. Of course the RKBA people are going to scream bloody murder about it. So did the bath house crowd. And they were right, so long as they forgot about the epidemic streaming and amplified from their practices. In an epidemic, the public health trumps.

Some say we didn't really start paying attention to AIDS until it affected children, little children - the babies, Ryan White. That may be true. And it may be true of our gun death epidemic as well. Gun Culture, like 80's gay culture, will have to change. For its own sake.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

1. to be fair to gay men, gun owners are not a stigmatized group

so closing the bath houses came with real fear that there would no safe space for gay men.

so while i think your parallels are certainly interesting, gay men had real reasons to fear closing bathhouses. here i am not really sure what the fear is.

though i will say this is an interesting way of saying, enough is enough. we have done enough damage.

[alcibiades_mystery]

2. Absolutely, and I'm sorry I didn't make that more clear in my original post

There was certainly an argument to be made against closure. There were legitimate fears of returning to an era of repression, to be sure. That such fears are also perceived by gun culture - while obviously far less REAL - is enough for my analogy to hold, but you're certainly right that I could have stated that difference more emphatically. I did say that their arguments were correct and valid - so long as they forgot about the epidemic.

[RKP5637]

3. It is an interesting comparison. And I might go so far as to say also protecting the

innocent and naive from themselves. We are in an epidemic in this country with the gun culture wherein the innocent and naive are killed too.

[alcibiades_mystery]

4. Indeed

There was certainly a need to protect those outside the culture.

[Lone_Star_Dem]

5. Thank you for a thoughtful and thought provoking OP.

It's an interesting comparison. Sometimes when there's an epidemic, we need protection from our own selves to keep us safe.

[alcibiades_mystery]

6. One point I didn't really hit on was the influence of the business owners

and their front organizations. The NRA members and RKBA people are very much like the bath house proponents in that they substitute liberty as a concept for what may really be at stake - the private business interests of the bath house owners / gun manufacturers. It's an exactly parallel relationship.