There are two lines of thought. One is the single-factor or new-virus theory. This has always been more acceptable to the gay population because it passes no verdict and necessitates no change. The second theory is multi-factorial, the theory of immune-overload, which was immediately perceived in America as ‘judgmental’, suggesting also that the visitation of aids was not a bolt from the blue but a process or a journey. The virus — a retrovirus of a type found only in animals — has been cautiously identified. Yet it seems clear that the two theories are not mutually exclusive; indeed, they go hand in hand.
The secret may lie in an uncertainty principle, in the balance or potentia between two factors: the strength of the virus and the weakness of the host. A damaged immune system is susceptible to the aids virus, which then destroys that system, so inviting opportunistic infection. Some epidemiologists believe that aids is an ancient and world-wide disease of poverty (ineradicable by medicine alone), given passage into society at large through the incubation chambers of the bathhouses. In a sense, perhaps aids itself is opportunistic. This is the double jeopardy.
The Gay Men’s Health Crisis Centre is just off rugged Eighth Avenue; but the offices are neat, modern, positively bijou. Up on the bulletin board is a list of the day’s meetings: Volunteer Moral Committee, Care Partner Group One. There are bottle-glass partitions, basketed plants. I asked for the AIDS-information kit and was given a hefty dossier of facts and figures, dos and don’ts, posters and leaflets. The soft-voiced, tiptoeing advisers talk to the worried supplicants, like waiters in a gentle gay restaurant. ‘Win With Us’, says the slogan on the donation tin. ‘We’re Winning’, says a pamphlet, ‘ … Together. We’re winning … Through Respect’.
There are buddy programs, therapy groups, crisis counsellors, PR men. ‘Our community keeps on fighting. Keeps on caring. Keeps on loving.’ Here they are coping in the American way.
The British equivalent of GMHC, the Terence Higgins Trust, is at first as unwelcoming as its address: Block E, Room 10, number 38, on a street inaccurately called Mount Pleasant, near the Gray’s Inn Road. Once you have blundered about a bit in this old warehouse, you enter the tiny, bumf-crammed office of THT. As the outpost in a revolution of consciousness and the epicentre in the fight against a latent epidemic, the premises are not immediately reassuring. But funds, private and public, are gathering, and Tony Whitehead, Chair of the Trust, is clearly exceptionally able and sympathetic. Until a year ago he was running the entire operation from his own flat. This is the English way: under-financed, under-organised, genially yet resolutely philanthropic.
Lessons have been well taken from the American experience. There are buddy-systems here too, and they are needed: the personal complications are often drastic. aids, with its usual double thrust, attacks the brain and nervous system of the hugely stressed patient, bringing about violent personality changes. The epidemic has so far followed the American graph, though the curve is unlikely to be as steep. The bathhouses and sex clubs of Manhattan are simply illegal here; and our new generation of junkies tend to sniff the stuff rather than mainline it. Even so there could be 10,000 cases by the end of the decade. And the THT will itself be the size of a hospital.
The DHSS withstood a lot of criticism, here and in America, when it took on powers to detain and quarantine aids sufferers. John Patten, the junior Health Minister, was quick to dismiss any fears of official panic or overkill. ‘Good God, the last thing we want to do is start rounding people up.” The new ruling has been invoked only once: in Portsmouth, where a distracted aids patient was haemor-rhaging in the street. Patten is addressing his task in discreet and avuncular fashion; he seemed quite unaware of gay sexual realities (believing, for instance, that ‘fisting’ was some form of spanking); but it is not the British way to look too closely at these matters, nor to sanitise them with the jargon of toleration. We shall all muddle through. One thing we do have (for the time being anyway): we have the National Health.