Voldemort and the AIDS epidemic.
Originally posted July 30, 2004:
A friend and I were discussing the disparity between the gay sex culture of the 70's and the way sex culture is presented in most Marauder-era slash fics--that is, the hedonistic, free-love mentality is rarely dealt with. My friend remarked that this culture was perhaps drastically different for the wizard culture than it was for muggles, which got me thinking in turn about the drastic changes forced upon the gay community in the 80's by the rise of AIDS, changes motivated primarily by fear and confusion, and the sheer catastrophic numbers of people dying.
Then it struck me that by the late 60's and 70's, a number of parallel changes might have been self-imposed upon wizarding culture due to Voldemort's reign of terror.
Then I started thinking about Voldemort's reign as a parallel to the AIDS epidemic.
Immediately there are 4 key points that leap out at me when you look at Voldemort's reign from this perspective:
1) The same mass paranoia, fear, and confusion seems to characterize both "reigns of terror." They even have similar monikers: the wizarding world refers to Voldemort's reign as "the Dark Years;" members of the GLBT community call the Reagan Era "the Silent Years." Both of these periods are characterized by a catastrophic number of deaths, an overriding sense of fear, paranoia, and panic, and above all a sense of helplessness. No one knew what to do or how to fight AIDS, and very few people were talking about it. The parallels to Voldemort are obvious.
2) The ineffectiveness of the government. Not only do you virtually
never hear anything about what the Ministry of Magic was doing in those years to fight Voldemort, but you basically
only hear about the actions of a few people: Dumbledore and the Order of the Phoenix. On this scale, Dumbledore and the 32 members of the Order are roughly equivalent to Don Francis and the team of 12 staffers at the Centers for Disease Control, or Larry Kramer and the founding 6-member board of the Gay Men's Health Crisis. These groups, teamed with approximately 20 doctors, scientists, and legislators around the country, made up the entirety of the front line against the AIDS epidemic in the heaviest years of the fight--by all accounts a number roughly equivalent to the number of people we have on record as working against Voldemort during the Dark Years.
3) The silence. Not only could you not get anyone in power to
stop labeling AIDS as "a gay disease" when they talked about it, it was virtually impossible to get them to talk about it
at all until Surgeon General C. Everitt Koop finally broke the government silence about the epidemic in late 1986. Throughout his entire term as president Reagan refused to utter the word "AIDS." It was the disease-that-must-not-be-named.
4) The denial. The Ministry's long-term denial about Voldemort's potential return to power quite pointedly parallels the denial of the gay community, the Reagan administration, and the National Institute of Health, about various aspects of the disease throughout the early phases of the epidemic: the potential death toll, the ways the disease was transmitted, the things that must be done in order to prevent it, and above all the likeliness of the disease to effect "the general population." Throughout the first stages of the epidemic and still even today, many obituaries of AIDS victims read that the patients died simply of "pneumocystic pneumonia," "skin cancer," or "mononucleosis," or some other unlikely disease. In
And the Band Played On Randy Shilts writes that AIDS might be the first deadly epidemic from which no one actually died.
The parallels between the gay community's refusal to close the bathhouses for years into the epidemic, and the refusal of New York and San Francisco's health commissioners to voluntarily shut them down, is chillingly like the ministry's refusal to take action against Voldemort's rise to power until after the breakin at the Department of Mysteries. By waiting until the outcry and fear became so intense that the bathhouses were virtually out of business anyway, their stance caused thousands and perhaps millions of people to become infected. Likewise, the sheer indifference of the blood bank industries to the disease, and their refusal to test their blood doners for Hepatitis B, the disease that most closely paralleled the AIDS infection at the time, meant that hundreds of people received the disease through blood transfusions that were supposed to cure them. What is perhaps most disturbing of all, though, is the reaction of gay civil liberties groups to the possibility of mandatory blood testing for all donors: they were so worried about being discriminated against that they refused to support action which could have saved lives. The following passage is taken from Chapter 36 of
Goblet of Fire:
"You fool!" Professor McGonagall cried. "Cedric Diggory! Mr. Crouch! These deaths were not the random work of a lunatic!"
"I see no evidence to the contrary!" shouted Fudge, now matching her anger, his face purpling. "It seems to me that you are all determined to start a panic that will destablize everything we have worked for these last thirteen years!"
13 years is almost exactly the time between 1969, when the Stonewall Riots began the gay rights movement as we know it, and 1981, when the very first cases of AIDS were discovered in New York and San Francisco. Fudge here could be any one of the many gay rights activists who opposed closing the bathhouses on the grounds that such drastic lifestyle changes would impact the hard-won sexual freedoms of the gay sexual liberation movement. Those members of the gay community who attempted to sound the alarm early on, those who called for the closings of the bathhouses and accountability from the blood banks were ostracized by the community at large. In particular, the reaction of the gay community to playwright and GMHC/Act Up founder Larry Kramer was to brand him as an alarmist, much as Fudge attempts to brand Harry as alarmist and mentally unstable:
Fudge still had that strange smile on his face. Once again, he glanced at Harry before answering. "You are prepared to believe that Lord Voldemort has returned on the word of a lunatic murderer, and a boy who... well..."
Fudge shot Harry another look, and Harry suddenly understood.
"You've been reading Rita Skeeter, Mr. Fudge," he said quietly.
...
"For heaven's sake, Dumbledore--the boy was full of some crackpot story at the end of last year too -- his tales are getting taller, and you're still swallowing them--the boy can talk to snakes, Dumbledore, and you still think he's trustworthy?"
Compare the two previous passages with the following passage from
And the Band Played On:
"You're a sexual Nazi."
... (Bill Kraus's) essay calling on gay men to change their life-styles and redefine gay liberation had been printed in the Bay Area Reporter that hit the streets that afternoon. Bill had tried to be positive in the article, advancing the idea that "we gay men can transform this epidemic into our finest hour." Nevertheless, the reaction was swift and nasty. Bill was called an "anti-sex" brownshirt, out to destroy the community with his talk about not going to bathhouses. ... Rather than define their own battle lines, many gays adopted (issues of promiscuity and bathhouses) as their front line of defense. By acknowledging defects in the old gay life-style, Bill had strayed to the enemy camp, as far as many of his critics were concerned. They started whispering the ultimate psychological insult, that he hated himself because he was gay, that he suffered from "internalized homophobia."
We typically compare Voldemort to fascism and his reign of terror to the Halocaust; but considering that Dumbledore defeated the dark lord Grindelwald in 1945, it would seem more likely that we are meant to compare Voldemort to a new, more modern threat, one that can be understood in the terms and experience of our generation. AIDS fits that description pretty neatly. Consider the imagery of Voldemort's reign of terror: Death Eaters who raid a town in the night and wipe whole communities out suddenly, which is what AIDS did to Fire Island and the Castro; the Dementors' kiss, which parallels remarkably the illness of someone who is suffering from brain damage caused by the virus in the last days before dying; even the Dark Mark itself: to the wizarding world, it is a universally recognized calling card of death, designed to strike terror into the hearts of those who see it. What could strike more terror into the heart of someone in the gay community than the sight of the unmistakeable purple skin lesions that announce the presence of Karposi's Sarcoma, one of the first visible indicators of the presence of HIV in the body?
The stigma of AIDS as "a gay disease" was crucial in the way that it was presented to the public. Again and again you heard fears of AIDS "crossing over" to "the general population"--even after it had already expanded outside the gay community and begun devastating poor members of the Haitan and drug-using inner-city communities. The way that it was looked upon as a classist disease by both government and health officials closely parallels the way that the ministry chooses to define who is at risk from Voldemort's supposed return to power, and what ought to be done about it:
"The second step you must take--and at once," Dumbledore pressed on, "is to send envoys to the giants."
"Envoys to the giants?" Fudge shrieked, finding his tongue again. "What madness is this?"
"Extend them the hand of friendship, now, before it is too late," said Dumbledore, "or Voldemort will persuade them, as he did before, that he alone among wizards will give them their rights and their freedom!"
"You--you cannot be serious!" Fudge gasped, shaking his head and retreating further from Dumbledore. "If the magical community got wind that I had approached the giants--people hate them, Dumbledore--the end of my career..."
As in the AIDs epidemic, concerns about the politics of associating with societal outcasts in order to more effectively fight the threat stymie the Ministry's effectiveness in fighting that threat from the outset. The fear that AIDS would spread to "the general population" reminds one strongly of the fear that Voldemort would attack Muggles once he had gained full control over the wizarding world--which if gone unchallenged he certainly would, just as the specter of the AIDS epidemic dictated nearly every aspect of gay life in the mid-to-late 80's.
Obviously, Rowling has set the stage for a coming-together, a forming of alliances that supercede cultural prejudice in order to defeat Voldemort: the wizards, giants, and house elves must join together to fight. Likewise, until the muggles and the wizarding world come together--until muggles learn to accept wizards without burning them at the stake and wizards learn to give muggles respect and equality, they will never be able to defeat the prejudices that allowed Voldemort to come to power. The wizarding community has a daunting challenge ahead of it: both to serve as a warning to and work with a much larger, intimidating culture that has ostracized it for centuries.
By the same token, the gay community in the 80's served as a warning to the larger populace and is still seeking both to teach its lessons and learn to work with it to fight the disease. Fudge, throughout his tenure as Minister, sees Voldemort as a problem that affects
others--be it those of the past, or those of the immediate present with whom he would rather not choose to associate. Dumbledore's message to him is simply that evil cannot be contained: Voldemort is a universal problem, not a local one. JKR's message to us is unmistakeably clear in this context: if we are to win our fight, we must lay our prejudices aside, and depend on each other. Until gay men and women have legitimacy, until their lifestyle choices aren't looked at with prejudice, until AIDs can be spoken of and thought of as a
universal disease, rather than one which picks and chooses who it would like to kill off based on their lifestyle habits, AIDS will continue to be a misunderstood epidemic that kills people through ignorance, prejudice, and fear.
Unlike the wizarding world, we have no Harry Potter to sacrifice himself for us--but we can certainly take the lessons he teaches to heart.