BOOK REVIEW: EPIDEMIC POLITICS UNDER MICROSCOPE

Crimp, is an excellent anthology published by MIT Press last year and available in its second printing this year. Fourteen essays examine the culture of contempt and disinformation which has shaped the character of AIDS in America. Four essays recommended in particular are: "AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification", by Paula A. Treichler; "AIDS and Syphilis: The Iconography of Disease", by Sander L. Gilman; "Is the Rectum a Grave?", by Leo Bersani; and "How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic", by the editor.

Treichler writes: "The 'free-floating' iconography of disease attaches itself to various illnesses (real or imagined) in different societies and at different moments in history. Disease is thus restricted to a specific set of images, thereby forming a visual boundary, a limit to the idea (or fear) of disease. . . the 'taming' of syphilis and other STDs with the introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s left our culture with a series of images of mortally infected and infecting people suffering a morally repugnant disease--without a sufficiently powerful disease to function as the referent of these images. . .
AIDS appeared then as the perfect referent."

In the following passage Douglas Crimp quotes Senator Jesse Helms in the right-wing lawmaker's effort to foment support for an amendment to deny Federal funds for gay safe sex education.

" . . . about 10 days ago I went down to the White House and I visited with the President. I said, 'Mr. President, I don't want to ruin your day, but I feel obliged to hand you this and let you look at what is being distributed under the pretense of AIDS educational material . . .'

"The President opened the book, looked at a couple of pages and shook his head, and hit his desk with his fist."

The book in question was "precisely the sort of safe sex education material that has been proven to work, developed by the organization (Gay Men's Health Crisis) that has produced the greatest amount of safe sex education material of any in the country, including of course, the Federal government . . . when we see how compromised any efforts at responding to AIDS will be when conducted by the state, we are forced to recognize that all productive practices concerning AIDS will remain at the grass-roots level."