As the gay community suffers, monkeypox proves our government learned nothing from AIDS
As monkeypox begins to dominate headlines, I am reminded of a quote from novelist Chris Crutcher, in his 2003 autobiography, King of the Mild Frontier:
“Viruses have no morality, no sense of good and evil, the deserving or the undeserving.... (it) is not the swift sword with which the Lord punishes the evil practitioners of male homosexuality and intravenous drug use. It is simply an opportunistic virus that does what it has to do to stay alive.”
I was thinking about this when, as a member of the Sacramento Bee Editorial Board, we spoke with Sacramento County Public Health Officer Dr. Olivia Kasirye this week. First and foremost, our questions were about the looming possibility of mask mandates in California counties to the south, but also of the virality of monkeypox, which is — currently — mainly associated with the gay community.
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In fact, America is No. 2 in the world for cases right now, with 3,590 known monkeypox cases, just behind Spain’s 3,738 cases. Numbers released July 29 by the California Department of Public Health show gay people account for 91.7% of all patients who’ve tested positive for monkeypox and 5.6% of patients are bisexual. Gay men account for 98% of cases.
Kasirye confirmed that a majority of those infected in Sacramento County with the virus are men who have sex with men, bisexual men, and the transgender communities, but that health officials already know it’s possible for anyone to catch it. The virus causes lesions, headaches, and debilitating body pains.
Thanks to a limited, federal supply of vaccines — Sacramento County has received a total of about 2,000 since first identifying the virus here, she said — health officials are mainly focusing on mitigating the spread within the LGBTQ+ community.
“We’re not keeping any vaccine back, whatever allocation we get. We’re planning clinics and being able to offer that to individuals that fit our criteria,” Kasirye said. “I think that as more vaccine is made available, we will definitely talk with the state to look at being able to expand that. But right now, the vaccine is still limited.”
This limited response has drawn some criticism from a public that is just emerging from a years-long pandemic — where health care fatigue has already set in over masks and mandates.
In the wake of devastating silence from the White House, the cities of San Francisco and New York have declared their own public health emergencies in order to divert funds toward the care and prevention of further spread. San Francisco’s health officer Dr. Susan Philip said 30% of all of California’s cases are in San Francisco. WHO has declared monkeypox a global health emergency as well.
Many members of the LGBTQ+ community are relying on social media for information with no official outlet to turn to, and are rightfully angry at their leaders for yet again proving there are deep inequities in American health care for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.
I may only be 32 years old, but as a bisexual woman, I am deeply aware of the queer community’s history, and this story is starting to sound eerily familiar.
It rings of the same, lackluster federal response to AIDS just three decades ago, when that virus was first emerging in those very same, LGBTQ+ communities. Monkeypox may not be fatal, but it is debilitating and painful and causes visible lesions, which can be used to smear shame and hatred on those suffering from it.
This is just another way our federal government has abandoned the LGBTQ+ community in a time of need. History is clearly repeating itself; because more than 30 years after AIDS uncovered the silent divide in American sympathies, monkeypox is proving, once again, that we are still second-class citizens.
But viruses are amoral. They have no sense of retribution — that is of human design, to make us feel superior to one another. This virus is no mark of Cain. I see your hatred and I raise you the queer community, long strengthened by adversity and exclusion.
And I look forward to the day the heterosexual community finally realizes monkeypox is not “just a gay disease” — because maybe then our government will do something about it.
