Document:AIDS Cult introduction
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Toronto
October 1996
As this book goes to press, one of its editors is preparing to go to Washington, D.C. for what may be the last display (in its entirety) of the massive Names Project "quilt". The Quilt's panels (how many thousands are there now?) commemorate some of those – mostly gay men – who have died of "AIDS", a disease which, in America at least, is always written in capitals.
Spreading the whole quilt is becoming more and more difficult, simply because the Republic is running out of public spaces vast enough for all the lovingly-crafted memorial panels to be displayed together (like the Nazca Lines, they can only be seen in their entirety from a helicopter). Casper Schmidt, who was one of the first to investigate "the group-fantasy origins of AIDS", compared the Quilt to a tzompantli, the Aztec hill of skulls laid out for the gods to witness. Perhaps the New Mexico desert will be the next quilt stop; Bill Clinton did promise a "Manhattan Project for AIDS."
The eight contributors to this collection have varied backgrounds and different vantage points. All of them agree that the orthodox view of our protracted health crisis – as a highly infectious contagion from without – has been found wanting, and that we must seek the causes of this and other medical dilemmas in our own society, our own assumptions, our group-fantasies, our regiments, our recreations, and our rituals.
What really causes AIDS? A virus from Africa? Or our own neglect – or worse – of whole categories of our population? We live in a materialist age, and materialist science has become our religion. But communism is only the first of its churches to collapse. Another – colossal, seemingly impregnable, defensive, tottering – is the gigantic, ramshackle (and expensive) edifice that is orthodox, allopathic medicine. Influenced by the Orient, we are beginning a return to a more holistic approach, one that considers mind as well as microbes. But the sacrifice has not yet ended; the number of panels in the quilt continues to grow.
The AIDS Cult shows how a number of different beliefs, group interests, and social forces conspire to make us "sick". This is not a conspiracy in the sense of a conscious plot, but in the original, more profound, sense of a "breathing with" – breathing the same mental atmosphere, sharing the same assumptions, mutually benefitting and so, collaborating, toward an unconsciously desired result. If we are to analyze our situation properly, we cannot afford to ignore these crucial factors. If we are to solve the case, we must investigate all the evidence.
The essays in The AIDS Cult offer a fresh, radical view of what the poet E.A. Lacey called "this spell" – the health crisis of our society, as manifested in the gay community. The contributors propose that we reexamine our assumptions about AIDS and terminate the mass sacrificial ritual we have been enacting.
It's time to break away from the dogmas and fantasies that have impeded our understanding, and to recognize what we are doing.
Stop the sacrifice.
Burn the Quilt!
© 1997 by Ian Young
