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| MSM = Men having sex with monkeys |
Monkeypox is a "zoonosis", i.e. a virus that spreads between animals (monkeys) and humans and is most common in parts of Central and West Africa and spreads through close physical contact, including sexual intercourse.
There, can you see the problem already? I mean how does that sound to the average person?
On the one hand, to clamp down on the dreaded monkeypox you have to focus medical resources and attention on the gay community and basically admit that it came from someone presumably shagging a monkey in the Congo, and from there was spread by gay men having anal sex across the World.
On the other, if you decide to focus on "optics" and spare the "blushes" of the gay community, you have to pretend that monkeypox is just something that affects everybody and has nothing in particular to do with the gay community. That means you have to play up every case of non-gay monkeypox, and then spread the medical resources and attention further and wider, to the point where their impact is wasted.
In the first case the result will be an effective "stigmatisation" of the gay lifestyle, while in the second case you will have to take a decision to wilfully neglect gay healthcare in order to preserve the all-important "optics" of the gay community.
In fact, this self-same dilemma comes up every time there is a health issue that disproportionately impacts gay men, AIDs being a prime example. As Dr. Boghuma Kabisen Titanji (MD, MSc., PhD) an infectious disease physician and virologist at Emory University in Atlanta writes:
"The initial homophobia associated with the HIV pandemic led to rhetorical strategies that made HIV appear to affect everyone equally instead of strategies that acknowledge heterogeneity in risk and burden. This not only disappeared gay men from the global HIV responses of the 90s and early 2000s, but IT also created an understanding of the pandemic among heterosexual people that is monolithic and missed opportunities to attend to the particular needs of sub-groups among heterosexual people. It is only recently that we target women of specific age in specific geographies, for example.
Similar patterns of targeted stigma towards a specific group have emerged in the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially we saw stigma directed at people of Asian descent following reports of the first cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection from China and more recently unjustified stigma towards southern African countries following the identification of the omicron variant highlighting intersections with racism."
Yup, it's Catch-22 all over again. Either you've got to focus on the group most tied to the disease and thereby inadvertently stigmatise them (if the disease is somehow tied to their sexual practices), or else you have to adopt "rhetorical strategies" and pretend that it's just a disease that hits everyone from nuns to innocent children, and bury the gay factor altogether, effectively endangering those most affected by it.
This is not just a problem for governments and health organisations. The gay community also faces the same dilemma, and gay publication Pink News is coping hard.
Apparently monkeypox is not a "gay plague," it's just that gays go to clinics more often to be tested so, of course they are overrepresented in the stats, as this article makes out:
"One thing that we don’t know for certain yet is whether the reason we’re seeing it in gay men is because they’re going to clinics,” Dr Dewsnap tells Pink News. “It’s very common for a gay man who’s been sexually active with a new partner to think, ‘I’ve got a funny rash, it could be syphilis, it could be herpes, I’ll go to my clinic.’"
There, take that, bigot! Gays are just more health conscious! In fact, Pink News is not willing to stop there. They are also pushing the idea that it's mainly a "dirty hetero" problem. From the same interview with Dr Dewsnap:
"We need to be very careful to remember that it’s a virus that’s spread through close contact and the vast majority of monkeypox cases have been in the heterosexual community in Africa."
The vast majority! Take that you hetero perverts!
But, sadly for our already fractious society, this clever defence merely opens up a new area of potential embarrassment, namely race and the difference in sexual practices between the First and Third world.
As it happens, in African countries a large amount of male-to-male sex happens that is not classified as "gay" due to social stigma and rampant homophobia. Instead, in those countries health professionals are forced to use the term "MSM" (men who have sex with men). So, when you hear a gay outlet saying that a sexually transmitted disease, like AIDs or Monkeypox, is mainly a "heterosexual" problem in a Third World country, what they really mean is that is that there are very few openly gay men there because they are shit scared. That's all.
Pink News also has another great cope in play. This one is that even though it's an infection transmitted by sex, it's not actually a sexually transmitted infection, because the sex part is just incidental to the closeness part:
"According to the WHO, it is not yet known if monkeypox can be passed on directly through sex – the organisation says more studies are needed to understand the risk – but it’s likely that it’s simply passed on through close contact. Naturally, that means a person could still contract the virus while having sex with somebody who’s carrying it, but that doesn’t make it a sexually transmitted infection."
It looks like Pink News is ready to come down on the "neglect gay health" side of the debate, rather than admitting that the gay life has any negatives or dangers whatsoever.
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