By Ken Davis
On May 17, more than 2000 people took part in Sydney's commemoration of the ninth world AIDS memorial. Several blocks of Oxford Street were filled with the silent mass of people, holding candles in memory of dead friends.
At Hyde Park, hundreds of names were read — only a fraction of those who have died of AIDS in Sydney. The Gay and Lesbian Choir sang, and Justice Michael Kirby read Dylan Thomas poems and eloquently condemned discrimination and prejudice.
Feelings of sadness and anger were mixed with feelings of hope, community and pride generated by the gathering. There was a sense also of determination and resistance: the procession came at the end of a weekend of mass media attacks on gay men and their response to the epidemic.
Two days before, the Doctors' Summit on HIV wound up its debates at the Airport Sheraton. Fred Hollows, without winning support from the conference participants, was repeating his charges against "the reactionary gay lobby" in newspapers across Australia.
The summit ("AIDS — Have We Got It Right?") was convened by arch-reactionary Bruce Shepherd as part of his campaign for regaining leadership of the Australian Medical Association. Three years ago a similar summit was held, again in proximity to an AMA election, and again focussing on AIDS; it featured San Francisco surgeon Lorraine Day, who was demanding compulsory HIV testing of all patients.
The gathering was also positioned to destabilise the negotiating of a new national HIV strategy. The strategy inaugurated in 1989 under federal health minister Neal Blewett ends in early 1993. A section of the medical establishment wants to reassert medical control over AIDS policy, at the expense of people with HIV, education programs, the community organisations working in AIDS and social researchers. At stake is the balance of resources allocated to AIDS care and prevention for the rest of the decade.
Officially AIDS is bipartisan; federal government policy has active support from the dwindling "wet" wing of the Liberals and passive support from the leadership of the Coalition. To attain government at the next elections, the Coalition may need to break bipartisanship on AIDS, as a way of signalling that it is prepared to outflank the right-wing Keating administration, making even more aggressive inroads in destroying preventive and public health.
Leading clinicians and social scientists, as well as people with HIV and AIDS Council workers, attended the summit, hoping to prevent the proclaiming of a right-wing coalition against responses. This was in part successful, at the cost of dozens of AIDS workers being held hostage to the offensive ravings of an odd collection of ill-informed reactionaries.
Contrary to prior publicity, the summit was not "a vote on AIDS strategy by doctors Australia-wide"; very few attended. Questions to presenters were dominated by extremist media commentators on AIDS, such as Frank Devine (Australian) and Lucy Sullivan (Bulletin), or by Festival of Light-aligned retired doctors, such as Claire Isbister. Every version of conspiracy theory got a nod.
No dialogue was established. Hollows, having arrived at the end of a presentation of behaviour change data by one of Australia's leading AIDS researchers, called her an imbecile. Hollows referred to a recent conversation with General Giap in Hanoi, and compared the Vietnamese struggle against colonialism to the long war against HIV, implying that people with HIV in Australia were like the French and American invaders of Vietnam. Leo Laden, formerly a sexually transmitted diseases doctor from Perth, portrayed patients as stupid, deceitful and psychopathic.
The overall thrust of the conveners was to call into question the success of Australia's cooperative and liberal strategies against HIV and to demand a return to "traditional public health measures". Despite very low rates of new infections among gay men, Hollows, Shepherd, Laden and Dr Julian Gold (of Sydney's Albion Street outpatient HIV clinic) dispute that safe sex can prevent HIV transmission.
Counterposed to promotion of condoms were calls for campaigns to stop all anal sex, and all sexual activities by people with HIV. Since people cannot be trusted, this requires the closing of gay venues, the banning of the Mardi Gras and the compulsory isolation of some or all people tested positive for HIV.
Hollows contradicts the AIDS education messages promoted by Aboriginal health workers. A recent video from the Aboriginal Medical Service, Where Eagles Fly, shows how a rural family takes care of a young gay man dying of AIDS. Hollows demands that tribal elders exclude people with HIV from their communities.
While traditional public health measures require the isolation of people with temporarily contagious infections, HIV, with its many years of infectivity prior to illness, and its very limited means of transmission, requires the long-term empowerment and solidarity of affected communities.
The conservative doctors allege that social scientists and educators working in AIDS are not accountable or subject to independent evaluations of their work, implying that non-medical expenditure in AIDS should be cut.
Despite the 1.5 million voluntary HIV antibody tests performed in Australia each year, the conservative media allege that mass testing does not occur, that existing HIV prevalence figures are fudged and ng is needed.
Julian Gold, when asked by a summit participant for a simple explanation of which sexual activities were safe for HIV transmission, gave a confused answer, focussing on the potential dangers of deep kissing. Behind this confused discussion lurks a lack of confidence by certain Sydney doctors in the safe sex strategy.
The summit threatened to make an uneasy alliance between those conservatives who want to portray HIV as more easily spread than it is, and those who wish to deny the possibility of heterosexual transmission in Australia, despite the knowledge that hundreds of women in Australia have been infected through unsafe sex with men.
Another area of incoherence was the suggestion by certain doctors that they gave credence to the theories of US biologist Peter Deusberg, who denies that HIV is the cause of AIDS. Investigations of factors and infections that may interact with HIV in damaging the immune system are becoming more important, but this research is hampered by the public and illogical insistence by a tiny group that HIV is irrelevant to AIDS. The idea that deviate lifestyles, rather than an infectious agent, cause AIDS is extremely attractive to many reactionaries.
Professor Ron Penny, one of Australia's leading immunologists, and HIV clinicians denounced media debate on such theories as irresponsible, and called on the federal government to exercise leadership on this and other questions to prevent the undermining of public confidence in AIDS education.
The exorbitant profits of the pharmaceutical multinationals were not challenged at the summit, but one plank in the anti-gay manifesto that the conference wanted to issue was to be provided by the insurance industry. Peter Ramjan of FAI Life Insurance alleged that gay "lobby groups continue to threaten the very essence of life insurance business, resulting in the financial viability of life companies being destroyed".
He also alleged that 80% of all AIDS claims paid may be the result of deliberate deception by "at risk" customers. The solution is to tighten discrimination by Insurance companies, primarily against gay men.
The most vicious anti-gay diatribe of the summit was launched by Jack Rush, a lawyer who has worked on compensation cases of people with medically acquired HIV. Rush portrayed a "small powerful lobby" who have consistently elevated gay rights over the right of "innocent patients", and who had always persecuted any opponents who entered public debate. These lobbyists were responsible for blocking "common sense" actions by blood banks in 1983 (before the virus was discovered). "Hundreds will die" because of this.
Rush went so far as to revive the 1985 media charges that gay men were deliberately poisoning the blood donation system as a way of taking discrimination.
The fact that the conference failed in congealing a coherent right-wing coalition against current AIDS strategy did not prevent several mass circulation newspapers from running editorials and major features on "the hijacking of the AIDS debate by the gay lobby". The communities most burdened by the epidemic, and which have made unprecedented contributions to public health in Australia, are continuing to be pilloried by the press.
If the conservative doctors and journalists succeed in disempowering the front-line communities, the relative success of this country in dealing with HIV will evaporate.