An idiosyncratic and somewhat incoherent investigation into sex
education in the age of AIDS. Patton (English/Temple Univ.)
explores our country's response to the AIDS crisis vis-a-vis
education and prevention, concluding that it is both homophobic and
racist. When only the homosexual subculture seemed at risk,
contends Patton, little effort was expended by US public health
officials on education. Only later, when it became obvious that
heterosexuals, too, could become infected with the AIDS virus, was
there any concerted effort to prevent its spread. But by
identifying AIDS almost exclusively with gay males, public health
officials gave heterosexuals a false sense of security, failing to
provide "the tools they needed to evaluate and reduce their own
risk of contracting AIDS." By denying that their own sons might be
engaging in sex with other men or injecting drugs into their veins,
policymakers did little to protect their children. They preferred
to perceive them as too innocent to engage in risky behavior. And
since the homosexual population was considered already at risk,
little effort was put into stemming the epidemic among gay youth.
Youth of color, Patton states, were also neglected by policy
makers, since they were viewed as "unlikely to change their
behavior or escape the environment that marks them as premodern."
In addition to criticizing our country's approach to sex education,
Patton assaults the media for its lack of integrity. She insists,
for example, that the teenage sexuality of Ryan White (who
contracted HIV through a blood transfusion) was overlooked, while
Philadelphia's "Uncle Eddie" Savitz was unfairly condemned for
transmitting the AIDS virus to large numbers of teenage boys. With
its painfully stilted academic prose and suffocating atmosphere of
political correctness, Fatal Advice isn't likely to convince those
who have seen greater complexity in the matter of AIDS education.
(Kirkus Reviews)
The American public responded to the first cases of AIDS with fear
and panic. Both policymakers and activists were concerned not only
with stopping the spread of the disease, but also with guiding the
public's response toward those already infected. Fatal Advice is an
examination of how the nation attempted, with mixed results, to
negotiate the fears and concerns brought on by the epidemic. A
leading writer on the cultural politics of AIDS, Cindy Patton
guides us through the thicket of mass-media productions, policy and
public health enterprises, and activist projects as they sprang up
to meet the challenge of the epidemic, shaping the nation's notion
of what safe-sex is and who ought to know what about it. There is
the official story, and then there is another, involving local
groups and AIDS activists. Going back to early government and
activist attempts to spread information, Patton traces a slow
separation between official advice and that provided by those on
the front lines in the battle against AIDS. She shows how American
anxieties about teen sex played into the nation's inadequate
education and protection of its young people, and chronicles the
media's attempts to encourage compassion without broaching the
touchy subject of sex or disrupting the notion that AIDS was a
disease of social and sexual outcasts. Her overview of the
relationship between shifting medical perceptions and safe-sex
advice reveals why radical safe-sex educators eventually turned to
sexually explicit, including pornographic, representations to
spread their message-and why even these extreme tactics could not
overcome the misguided national teaching on AIDS. Patton closes
with a stirring manifesto, an urgent call to action for all those
who do not want to see the hard lessons of AIDS education and
activism wasted, or, with these lessons, the loss of so many more
lives.
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