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 pan