The Noble Lie

As an American child of the 1980s, I grew up in the shadow of AIDS. I heard stories and watched movies about the “Free Love” 1960s and the grimy anarchic parties of the 1970s, but the culture in which I came of age was touched more by a paranoid unease brought about in part by that unique epidemic. There were posters about HIV on my elementary school walls. We watched grainy documentaries with reenactments of down and out young people in New York getting their diagnoses. We even had visits from local health officials that warned us about the dangers of picking up needles and walking barefoot in public parks.

What made the epidemic distinct, however, was that unlike epidemics of flu and smallpox, its devastation was limited to certain select demographics. As much as 95% of the hemophiliac population died of AIDS in the 1980s due to infected blood transfusions. Intravenous drugs users began filling cemeteries once the virus made it into their communities. And then, of course, the gay population experienced something that during the darkest years of the 80s must have seemed like a demographic apocalypse, especially in the coastal cities. These populations were ravaged by AIDS, while larger demographics were mostly spared. Though you wouldn’t have known this from the messaging that came from the media and the medical bureaucracy.

In the late 1980s, as HIV continued to burn through the gay communities of San Francisco and New York - and as those communities successfully made the epidemic impossible for the general public to ignore - messaging surrounding the virus shifted to an “anyone can get it” posture. Guidance from the public health institutions — notably Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes of Health — encouraged doctors and social organizations to encourage mass HIV testing, and to push the idea that the heterosexual population was at similar risk as the gay population. The information posters that made it to my elementary school classrooms — posters with little crying blond girls clutching teddy bears and the Grim Reaper sneaking up to happy families at a picnic — came down directly from this official public health approach, and were woven into wider “safe sex” curricula and other information frameworks. Network news channels ran alarmist specials about the coming “Straight AIDS Epidemic.” In 1987, U.S. News and World Report ran a cover story that declared, “The disease of them is suddenly the disease of us.” The New York Times ran a story entitled “AIDS May Dwarf the Plague,” which trumpeting the risk to the heterosexual population and cited remarks from the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The U.S. Surgeon General warned to the coming “heterosexual AIDS explosion.” Oprah Winfrey told her audience of overwhelmingly straight women in 1987, “Research studies now project that one in five — listen to me, hard to believe — one in five heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS at the end of the next three years." Not surprisingly, family physicians reported soaring increases in married middle-aged women coming to them hysterical about their HIV risk.

But this was all a lie.

The extent to which various public health officials knew it was a lie can be debated, but the messaging had clearly broken from the measured communication of health facts and had become a propaganda campaign. Books contrary to the prevailing narrative were shunned from publication, and public health officials who insisted on more realistic messaging were sidelined or fired. Though they were still figuring out the exact workings of HIV, researchers had already pegged it as first and foremost a blood-born pathogen, sexually transmissible almost exclusively through anal sex rather than vaginal sex due to the differences in mechanics and tissue vulnerability. CDC scientists including preeminent HIV epidemiologist Dr. Harold Jaffe expressed bewilderment at the hysteria surrounding an imminent heterosexual AIDS pandemic, knowing that the data had never pointed in that direction. Of course the decades since have born this out. The heterosexual AIDS epidemic never came. Not a single high profile figure has died of AIDS or even contracted HIV from heterosexual activity in the 40 years since the diseases arrived on American shores (those citing Magic Johnson may want to look a bit more deeply into his choice of parties during the late 1980s). Straight people can certainly contract HIV, but this generally happens through IV drug use or anal sex with people who contracted it through other high-risk means. Confirmed cases of heterosexual transmission, especially from women to men, are incredibly rare — and often subject to doubts regarding patient reporting.

And yet to this day the public health messaging around HIV pushes the idea of a pronounced heterosexual risk. Now that HIV has become treatable the panic surrounding it has died down, and health guidance and medication advertisements have shifted to a clearer focus on “at-risk groups.” But if you speak publicly about HIV as an issue of select demographics you’ll still be shouted down with the “It’s a disease of everyone!” retort. A lie — one spoken less often and more quietly than in the late 1980s, but a lie nonetheless.

Why is this so? The charitable reason for this deliberate deceit of the public is what’s known as the “noble lie.” The noble lie as a concept was originally described — and justified — by Plato in The Republic, where he describes it as a myth useful for providing common bond to the various social strata. It’s an inherently political idea, as it’s devised and propagated by an elite within society to maintain social harmony or advance an agenda seen to affect the greater good. It’s “end justify the means” as public policy. Again, this is the charitable take.

But we don’t live in Plato’s republic, a mostly homogenous place where friction between the classes are of paramount concern. We live in a time and place where the politics of any issue are delineated along cultural fault lines that make it impossible to effectively talk about anything unless there’s some basic trust atop which to scaffold the arguments. And it’s along those cultural fault lines that the issue of AIDS had to be dealt with the 1980s, a time where the erosion of trust in American institutions was already well underway. To that point this distrust extended primarily to explicitly political institutions, especially those at the federal level. Medicine and public health were a new frontier, and they obliged the rising tide of distrust with their own deceits, noble or not.

By the 1980s, the cause of gay rights had become fully integrated into the general liberal platform, especially in the political machines of the coastal cities. A population long pressed into the shadows of society to one extent or another had emerged as a powerful cultural and political force in places like New York and San Francisco in the 1970s, and the acceptance of gay people in public life had seen an incredible spike. So when a novel plague arrived the following decade and began devastating these communities — and summoned bitter enemies of the Left such as the evangelical Christian right that trumpeted AIDS as deserved punishment — the liberal establishment and the bureaucracies that it had created or conquered attempted to mitigate the catastrophe. But with this came an imperative to deny, ignore, or downplay cultural and behavioral differences between the gay and straight communities that made one a much more potent hunting ground for the HIV virus.

The gay population in the United States had taken the sexual liberation of the 1960s and run with it. The bathhouses of cities like San Francisco where the American AIDS epidemic began would run through hundreds of visitors on an average weekday during the 1970s. It’s wasn’t that uncommon for gay men to report annual partner counts of over a thousand. Some prominent figures within the gay community, like Bill Kraus in San Francisco, advocated for moderation and for a monogamous standard even before the arrival of AIDS, but without much success. Sexual activity had changed throughout the American population during the 1970s, but the sheer scale and velocity of action within the gay communities in the urban centers left every other group in the dust — and it left the door wide open for a sexually transmitted blood-born pathogen to detonate like an atomic bomb. Various gay organizations, clubs, and fraternities were almost completely wiped out by the disease in the days before effective treatments. Gay men in the cities reported going to three or four funerals a week during the height of the epidemic. Evangelical firebrand Jerry Falwell may have spoken with nasty glee when he called AIDS a “gay plague,” but in many ways that’s what it was, at least in the United States. Remove the moralistic judgment from the framing, and there is still the lingering fact of cause and effect, of differences in behavior accounting for differences in outcome. In the case of AIDS, to deadly effect.

It was against men like Falwell — along with the rest of the Raegan-era backlash to 60s and 70s moral anarchy — that the liberal establishment mounted its noble lie campaign. The Left saw AIDS as a potentially potent weapon with which its enemies could roll back some of its gains in the ongoing culture war. The American Left and the Democratic Party were in the early stages of shifting from a “workers” coalition to a “coalition of the fringes” as changes to the demographics of the United States sped up to warp speed. Fighting against the Raegan Coalition — and the core American “silent majority” it represented — on behalf of one of its new protected classes and in defense of the continued erosion of sexual mores more generally surely seemed a worthy cause, and a cause for which spreading a noble lie was justified by the ends. And they had the tools to do it. Reagan controlled the White House, but by the late 1980s the Left already had firm control over most of the bureaucracies, including those of public health. Not to mention the messaging power of the entertainment industry.

Some have claimed that funding for AIDS research and treatment programs for demographics targeted by the diseases depended on expanding the perceived threat of that diseases to the broader population. This may well have been true. But again, the cost is institutional credibility and trust, which prove immensely valuable if you do have a crisis that threatened that broader population. It took a while for that day to come, but in 2020 it came. In the meantime the emergent technocracy controlled by the liberal bureaucratic establishment — now staffed my multiple generations of products of the post-1960s universities — had become a malignant machine at the heart of American governance. More powerful than the White House, intertwined with the military, utterly lacking in humility, and steadfast in its belief that it possessed a trust it had not earned.

It has not been lost on me that many of the same people who staunchly attacked anyone perpetuating the stigma of AIDS — a disease now almost entirely preventable by avoiding certain generally uncommon activities — were for a long time casting venomous judgment at people who contracted COVID-19, one of the most easily contracted pathogens the world has ever seen. So long as those people were perceived to be their political enemies. The public health bureaucracy that still perpetuates the myth of a heterosexual HIV epidemic made sure to gather their “public health experts” and publish a joint letter during the summer of 2020 that justified the George Floyd protests from a public health perspective. The letter declared, with quasi-religious conviction, that these gathering of tens of thousands of people in cities all over the country did not constitute a threat of spread, and even if they did, the plague of racism was more dangerous than the virus for which they’d shut down the country just months before. This after a spring in which church services had been raided by police to prevent “super-spreader” events. “Public Health” is very different from “Science,” and to color any doubt about the former’s messaging as “stupid” or “dangerous” out of hand is to reveal oneself as imprisoned in a poisoned frame. Even if intents are noble and information is generally true, distrust has been well earned. And I’m not always so sure about the first parts of that statement.

Again, we’re being charitable here on the “noble” part. Though it seems that every day that passes, the world is in a less charitable mood.