When did you stop caring about AIDS? I mean, really caring about AIDS? Was it around the time the "cocktail" started saving lives? Or maybe shortly after you tested negative for the virus? Are you old enough to remember a time when ACT-UP meetings were literally filled to capacity--standing room only? Remember how people said they wouldn't stop fighting until a cure was found? And until everyone had access to this cure? Do you remember chanting that slogan: "Health care is a right"? Let's face it, the gay community has stopped caring about AIDS. It's almost as though we don't want to be associated with it. Because AIDS turns sex upside down--making sex a potentially deadly act. For thousands of years gay sex has been labelled "sinful" partially because it is a non-reproductive act--the only reason to do it is to have fun. The popularity of birth control rendered this argument moot. It is a bitter irony that at this point in history AIDS arrived on the scene. Thus a new argument was formed: Gay = AIDS; AIDS= Death. Then came the "cocktail" and gradually the condoms disappeared from the bars, information about safe sex became much harder to find. Gays stopped talking about AIDS. Politicians stopped talking about AIDS. Will and Grace never once mentioned AIDS. Admit it. You are just a bit bummed that a heterosexual geek like Bill Gates is doing a lot more about AIDS now than you are. Or anyone you know. Or anyone who knows anyone you know. You probably have been following the cast changes for The Color Purple a lot closer than you've been following the AIDS crisis in Africa. It's time to smarten up. And the woman who will help you is named Nicole Itano. She spent five years in Southern Africa so you could better understand what is going on there. Ms. Itano's writing style is flawless. I don't know when I have read a more technically correct manuscript. She writes from her heart and she isn't afraid of getting too involved. She occassionally finds herself giving people food and even money. She's passionate. And in her own quiet way an activist. The Africa she projects isn't Born Free. This part of Southern Africa--Lesotho--is literally dirt poor. Food is cooked on a fire lit against a wall on the outside of the house. More affluent families have propane cookers inside. Luxury is Kentucky Fried Chicken. It is shockingly sad that this deprived area--an apartheid era creation--should be so badly hit by the AIDS crisis. Ms. Itano describes in detail the one sector of the economy that by the year 2004 was booming: the funeral industry. And yet for all the despair, this is a surprisingly hopeful book. The Gates Foundation and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are making visible progress. No one can deny that people with AIDS in Lesotho have far more treatment options than they did--say--four years ago. But the crisis that Ms. Itano describes won't be entirely over until health care is a right. Remember that slogan?
Nicole Itano's
No Place Left to Bury the Dead
is published by Atria Books.
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