confronting the Aids Zone
Ironically it took the arrival of whatever Aids is to teach me some of the most important things about the world
I am writing this in a sixteenth century
castle in France. The weather is splendid and the autumn hues have never
been so beautiful or haunting. Each day I put on my galoshes (wellies) and
go walking in the forest or through the beautiful tiny village called
Gouvix. Who could have predicted in the sense-crazed seventies, when we
were all going wild discovering how necessary it seemed to have lots of
drugs and multiple sex partners, that now late into the nineties we would
have lost most of our swinging gay friends to a «lethal, incurable world
virus»?
There is an interesting trail of events that leads to the fact that I am
quaintly labelled «a long term survivor». In this Aids Struggle I am
indeed a survivor, but for reasons very different from those which the
Aids Establishment may wish to know or accept. when I first quit the sunny
shores of Australia in 1968 I had great expectations - to get away from
our quasi-isolated continent and discover the rest of the world in all its
then perceived mysterious glory - in so-doing I wanted to discover who I
was. After all, I was only twenty three years old and knew nothing. Now
thirty years later I think I can talk with some experience under my belt.
Ironically it took the arrival of whatever Aids is to teach me some of the
most important things about the world and myself, and they are not always
easily palatable.
As an early baby-boomer I was an Aussie who discovered the sexual
revolution not in the sixties but in the seventies. We were in those days
a little behind in world movements, but we certainly freed ourselves with
a vengeance from our Victorian heritage. With the benefit of hindsight I
now see the sixties and seventies as periods of enormous social change in
contrast with the eighties and nineties which I feel were an interval to
reassess the effects, both positive and negative, of these changes.
Overall I feel Aids phenomenon is just one of the factors enabling us to
prepare properly for the gigantic changes in store for us in the next
century. This may sound horribly simplistic but it is the result of quite
a few years of research and observation. I am one of the increasing number
who have totally 'lived the life' but who remain healthy; I'm also one who
has had hundreds of friends who have died with Aids diagnoses -
iatrogenically, I strongly believe.
First I would like to clarify my position in this very minor group which
is quite separated from what is called by some the «Aids Zone». Like the
founder of Continuum Jody Wells. I am an Aids dissident, that is one who
doesn't believe the majority opinion that an hiv causes aids. Hiv is in
quotes because, like my compatriots Eleni Eleopulos and Val Turner who
have published a much unheeded but superbly researched proof of the
non-existence of this virus, I also believe that hiv is nothing more than
a biochemical reaction arrived at through procedures which at a certain
time show a positive result. The so-called Aids test I believe is the
single most misleading and dangerous marker for anyone to take and
incidentally has been the cause of innumerable deaths simply through its
application. In 1983 I believe my body secreted antibodies to something or
other; five years and two negative tests later I received a positive
result exactly at the time that I had contracted a simple bout of the
clap. Who knows what this test meant? If I am to trust my body's signs I
for one am sure that it is no direct marker of ill-health. But back to my
story which I believe may elucidate some of the reasons the Aids scenario
exists.
In 1968 the war in Vietnam was the biggest poitical hot potato in
Australia. American soldiers were visiting Sydney in droves on R est and R
ecreation (R&R) leave. Little did we then know that the drug industry
was lying strong foundations for its future market. Hundres of thousands
of brain-washed soldiers were returning to the US, men who would
contribute to the gigantic drug culture which was to permeate the country
leaving a tragic scar. The golden Triangle in Burma and Saigon, ironically
along with the drug barons of the legitimate sort who were selling
antibiotics by the miilions to the ever fearful masses were to make a
killing ( forgive the pun). I travelled to the US in January 1969 with no
idea of what was going on. The first night I spent in the city of
Portland, Oregon where I witnessed a body being carried out from my hotel.
I was told by the locals, «Just another O.D.» I should have realised the
symptoms were already obvious - this was just the beginning. Haight
Ashbury, the district in San Francisco fabled for hippies and
flower-power, was already strewn with heroin casualties. The epidemic in
its insidious way had already started, but I didn't know that fifteen
years later scientists were to label it the new pandemic.
On a later visit to New York in 1979 I witnessed the increasiing state of
sexual madness that immediately preceded the cirisis that appeared soon
after. So...circa 1981 when the imminent threat of Aids was announced to a
packed, hushed audience in the Dental Block of Melbourne University I was
more informed than most about its possible aetiology and the myths which
were to grow around it. But I couldn't have predicted the hysteria that
was to surround it. Even at that early stage I doubted many things,
especially the lethal message of aids. A detoxified body with a healthy
mind could always cure itself I had learned, so I knew my body would not
be affected by this unknown lethal virus. When later I obtained a job as
Hiv Educator with the Aids Council of New South Wales I set out to do my
own research. As a so-called positive person I was given lip-service but
nothing more when I stated that in the US and in London, Rethinking Aids
(as it then was) and Continuum were expressing something which I had
always suspected to be true. Along with a few other aids activists I could
not convince the Australian establishment to the alternate view and my
twenty published articles and letters to gay magazines and mainstream
newspapers remained virtually ignored. But the struggle is far from over
and I know we have the means to win. The writers for Continuum and
Reappraising Aids and HEAL are justifiably more confident than ever. It is
through one-on-one information that word will pass along. I believe that
there are enough people out here who want to live healthy lives and who
doubt the truth of the medical establishment, who will change the course
of the epidemic and restore sanity to the gay population: the hysteria has
to stop sometime.
This then, is my lust of life. In Australia I hope to find more people who
are prepared to join the peaceful ranks of informing everyone who wants to
know the truth about this false and entirely stoppable epidemic, an
epidemic which has to end sooner rather than later. Its end will not be
with a magic bullet but with the simple realisation that the minority
group of gay men, the ones most targeted in this fight, can, by educating
themselves about their physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health,
get out of the Aids Zone and begin to make positive and powerful decisions
about their future. If they do this their lives will be longer and
healthier and hopefully filled with love that for such a long time they
may have been unable to give or receive. This is a future to which we all
have a right and we must grasp it with both hands.