Gay Men and the Stigma of a Cancer Diagnosis - Onlogy Nurse Advisor

Contents:

• REMEMBERG THE EARLY DAYS OF 'GAY CANCER'
• 1980S. HIV/AIDS: WHY WAS AIDS LLED ‘THE GAY PLAGUE’?
• CANCER FACTS FOR GAY AND BISEXUAL MEN
• HOW THE EARLY ’80S CHANGED GAY WRG FOREVER
• AS A GAY MAN, THE '80S CRIPPLED MY INTY
• GAY MEN AND CANCER
• GAY MEN AND THE STIGMA OF A CANCER DIAGNOSIS

REMEMBERG THE EARLY DAYS OF 'GAY CANCER'

Rememberg the Early Days of 'Gay Cancer' Commentator Joe Wright spent more than 10 years dog AIDS muny work San Francis. And bee the first people diagnosed wh the new syndrome were gay men, some people started llg the disease Gay Cancer.

Soon after he was diagnosed wh KS, he spent time troducg himself to men the Kaposi Sara clic wag room, vg them to the Shanti Project Gay Cancer support group. Medilly, Bobbi Campbell knew that his so-lled gay ncer was very different than the kds of ncer that most of his patients the hospal had. Doctors New York and California have diagnosed among homosexual men 41 s of a rare and often rapidly fatal form of ncer.

1980S. HIV/AIDS: WHY WAS AIDS LLED ‘THE GAY PLAGUE’?

But the doctors who have ma the diagnos, mostly New York Cy and the San Francis Bay area, are alertg other physicians who treat large numbers of homosexual men to the problem an effort to help intify more s and to rce the lay offerg chemotherapy sudn appearance of the ncer, lled Kaposi's Sara, has prompted a medil vtigatn that experts say uld have as much scientific as public health importance bee of what may teach about termg the of more mon typ of ncer. But the recent s, doctors at ne medil centers New York and seven hospals California have been diagnosg the ndn among younger men, all of whom said the urse of standard diagnostic terviews that they were homosexual. Friedman-Kien, the reportg doctors said that most s had volved homosexual men who have had multiple and equent sexual enunters wh different partners, as many as 10 sexual enunters each night up to four tim a of the patients have also been treated for viral fectns such as herp, cytomegalovis and hepatis B as well as parasic fectns such as amebiasis and giardiasis.

''The bt evince agast ntagn, '' he said, ''is that no s have been reported to date outsi the homosexual muny or women. A versn of this article appears prt on, Sectn A, Page 20 of the Natnal edn wh the headle: RARE CANCER SEEN IN 41 HOMOSEXUALS. Jack Kg reflects on s July 1981, 26 s of Kaposi’s sara, an exceedgly rare ncer, were intified exclively gay men by doctors New York and California.

CANCER FACTS FOR GAY AND BISEXUAL MEN

This me some weeks after a report was published by the Centre for Disease Control and Preventn scribg how five prevly healthy gay men had been diagnosed wh pnmocystis pnmonia.

HIV had been spreadg, untected, through Ameri’s gay populatn sce around the early 1970s, a rult of sexual transmissn among a mographic whose promiscuy was not only a nventn of queer sociabily but a revolutnary polil act the wake of the 1969 Stonewall rebelln.

It was not until 24 September, 1982 that the CDC would e the acronym Aids; medil practners had up to that pot signated the novel vis Grid (Gay Related Immune Deficiency), or more lloquially ‘gay ncer’, or ‘gay plague’ – the implitn beg that this was an exclively gay disease. The play, which premiered off-Broadway May 1985, viscerally chronicl the earlit stggl faced by the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the first Aids support clic the US, -found by Kramer New York 1982. Havg begun his reer as a Hollywood screenwrer before movg to wrg for the stage, Kramer, who died May aged 84, had never nceived of himself as a gay activist – fact his 1978 novel, Faggots, a sthg crique of the then norms of queer promiscuy, had ma him persona non grata New York’s gay muny the early 1980s.

HOW THE EARLY ’80S CHANGED GAY WRG FOREVER

The play h me like a tsunami – Craig LusThe roman-à-clef rells the first years of the North Amerin Aids crisis om the perspectiv of a rag tag group of gay activists, together formg the Gay Men’s Health Crisis agast a backdrop of polil actn; the play’s protagonist, Ned Weeks, is a thly veiled analogue for Kramer himself.

Kramer’s portra of what a generatn of gay men suffered renrs Ameri ak to a warzone, where the rps of victims are refed ath certifit and left to llect dt oversized refe bags, and funerals bee so equent as to be social events. The central difference is that Aids was perceived to be a gay-only disease long to the 1980s by an unsympathetic public, so there was ltle-to-no prsure on Reagan to rpond, his polil pal unthreatened by his silence. At the same time, the notn that he himself was a homophobe is disputed: some argue that he was privately sympathetic to those livg wh Aids, regardls of his admistratn’s polici.

That he was surround by bigots, however, is a matter of historil rerd: Pat Buchanan, who served as the Whe Hoe Communitns Director om Febary 1985 to March 1987, scribed the crisis as nature “exactg an awful retributn agast gay men” a 1983 op-ed for the New York Post; the Whe Hoe Prs Secretary Larry Speak, scribed as “the public face of the Reagan Era”, repeatedly sparred briefgs wh journalist Lter Ksolvg on qutns of Aids, oft wh the pejorative implitn that the latter was gay. In one scene, Ned’s brother, Ben, a lawyer for a major New York law firm, ref to s on the board of the GMHC, which Ned tak as not only a tac nouncement of the anisatn’s attempts to save gay liv but of his own queerns. ” It may seem that that day has arrived for those livg the Wt, where gay people are by and large afford unprecented legislative rights and privileg, the great project of assiatn havg largely succeed.

AS A GAY MAN, THE '80S CRIPPLED MY INTY

However the popular memory seems to erase the fact that Aids ntu to claim the liv of 13, 000 Amerins every year, disproportnately gay men of lour the US South.

As for the ‘gay’ nnectn, there is no doubt that AIDS was first tected gay men and, for a brief perd, sperate rearchers examed the so-lled ‘gay liftyle’ for clu as to atn. But GRID was only adopted om early 1982 until July 27th 1982, when the Centers for Disease Control realised, amongst other thgs, that there’s no such thg as a universal “gay liftyle”. For example, The Atralian was one of the first newspapers to e the term (‘”Gay plague” epimic sweepg US’, 17th July 1982).

In the UK didn’t appear until ne months after the CDC had abandoned the term ‘GRID’ (“What killed gay plague man? But then ntued relentlsly, wh headl such as the Mail on Sunday‘s “Bra threatened by gay vis plague” (6th January 1985) ntug to the late 80s. There is a tailed study of the early days of HIV/AIDS, cludg the te epimlogy and a study of how the Prs reported , my eBook Gay the 80s.

GAY MEN AND CANCER

It’s difficult today’s culture of creased awarens, improved treatment and advanc preventn to properly nvey the vastatg impact of the epimic on the gay muny to those who hadn’t lived through themselv.

Origally intified as Kaposi’s Sara and later gay-related immune ficiency, the Center for Disease Control began g the term AIDS late 1982. In rponse to the epimic, activists formed Gay Men’s Health Crisis, cludg Pl Popham, Edmund Whe, Pl Rapoport, Lawrence D.

GAY MEN AND THE STIGMA OF A CANCER DIAGNOSIS

“If what you’re hearg don’t roe you to anger, fury, rage and actn, gay men will have no future here on earth.

After sentially creatg queer media studi wh his book The Celluloid Closet 1981, Vo Rso was one of the founrs of GLAAD, then an acronym for Gay and Lbian Alliance Agast Defamatn.