Once Upon a Virus
AIDS Legends and Vernacular Risk PerceptionBy Diane E. GoldsteinUtah State University Press
Copyright © 2004 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-87421-587-8Contents
Acknowledgments.................................................................................................................................................................ixIntroduction Philosophizing in a War Zone......................................................................................................................................xiii1 "Tag, You've Got AIDS" HIV in Folklore and Legend............................................................................................................................12 Bad People and Body Fluids Contemporary Legend and AIDS Discourse............................................................................................................243 Making Sense Narrative and the Development of Culturally Appropriate Health Education........................................................................................554 What Exactly Did They Do with That Monkey, Anyway? Contemporary Legend, Scientific Speculation, and the Politics of Blame in the Search for AIDS Origins.....................775 Welcome to the Innocent World of AIDS Cultural Viability, Localization, and Contemporary Legend..............................................................................1006 "Billy Ray Virus" The Folk Creation and Official Maintenance of a Public Health Scapegoat....................................................................................1167 "Banishing All the Spindles from the Kingdom" Reading Needle-Prick Narratives as Resistance..................................................................................1398 Once Upon a Virus Public Health and Narrative as a Proactive Form............................................................................................................157Index to Legends and Legend Types...............................................................................................................................................179References Cited................................................................................................................................................................182Index...........................................................................................................................................................................201
Chapter One
"Tag, You've Got AIDS" HIV in Folklore and Legend
One Sunday afternoon as I worked in the garden of my house in St. John's, I was distracted by five children playing tag in the neighbor's yard. The game didn't seem to be very different from the one I had played as a child. In that game, the one whom we called "it" ran around trying to catch the others, ultimately gaining on someone enough to touch them and thereby transfer "itness." This would then free up the former "it" to run and require that the new person in that role be the chaser. When the transfer happened, the chasing child would yell, "Tag, you're it, now catch me." Because I always thought it was interesting that we were such slaves to narrating what was taking place at the moment of transfer, I moved my gardening closer to the fence where I could overhear the children. To my surprise I heard the oldest child, who was around seven or eight years of age, say, "Tag, you've got AIDS." Part of me was pleased that a seven-year-old child knew what AIDS was, that public awareness had hit even the youngest sectors of society. But another part of me was terrified to see that the stigmatization of AIDS had drifted into the popular culture of one so young.
AIDS Folklore and Disease in Popular Discourse
I had never thought about "tag, you're it" as a contagion and immunity game, but the addition of the AIDS tag line reminded me that a number of children's games are about fear of infection. We played several "cooties" games as children and created a paper fortune-teller that we called a "cootie catcher." Getting "cooties" was an enormous thing to us children, although I don't think any of us had the slightest idea what a "cootie" was. We did know, however, that "cooties" was something you caught and something you didn't want to have. Children's folklorist Simon Bronner notes that cooties came into play among children in the early 1950s, the time of the polio epidemic in the United States. Bronner goes on to say,
The polio epidemic was especially disconcerting to many Americans because the healthy and wealthy, who it was thought should be immune to such affliction because of their clean and honorable living, contracted it, and distrustful, blaming eyes turned toward lower classes. It turned out that the disease probably spread from person to person (the virus normally attaches to living tissue cells) by intimate human contact although unsanitary conditions, especially fecal and sewage contamination, could support the virus.... During the scare, children were pulled out of swimming pools in fear of contagion and told to avoid touching other children because of dread for the debilitating polio virus which could paralyze or kill its victims. The cooties complex became among children a way to playfully dramatize the dread of the disease while also bringing out social relations underlying the modern emphasis on cleanliness and appearance, relations important to adult ways of dealing with one another. (1990:107)
The historical emphasis in children's folklore on fears of infection, childhood obsessions with body parts, fluids, and emissions and concerns about diversity and conformity suggest that AIDS would quite naturally be a focus of children's play. Bronner reports in relation to AIDS games (1990:109) one played with three bowls filled with ketchup, mustard, and water, which are placed in a box. Players were to blindly reach over the box and put their fingers into one of the three bowls. If they put their fingers in mustard, they had rabies. If they touched ketchup, they had AIDS. If they touched water, they were "immune" from all diseases. Like the polio epidemic in the 1950s, AIDS affects the lives of children as well as adults, through the experience of friends and family members with the disease, through fear and prejudice expressed in and around the home, and through media coverage.
It should not surprise us that AIDS has entered children's popular culture, not just through games, but in songs and rhymes as well. In their book on children's subversive folklore, Sherman and Weisskopf include a rhyme sent to them by the father of a sixth-grade girl, who was overheard with her friends singing the following parody of a song from the 1988 children's television show "Barney." Barney was a stuffed purple dinosaur, who opened every show with a song that said, "I love you, you love me, we're a happy family / With a great big hug and a kiss from me to you / Won't you say you love me too?" The girls sang,
I love you, you loved me Barney has got HIV Barney jumped on Baby Bop one time That's called rape and that's a crime. I hate you, you hate me Barney died of HIV Tripped on a skate and fell on a whore No more purple dinosaur I hate you, you hate me Baby Bop fucked with Barney He gave a hop and she said to stop Now they have to see the DOC. (Sherman and Weisskopf 1995:198)
As was the case with the AIDS games and older epidemic concerns expressed through children's play, the Barney parody takes its place next to a host of disease rhymes favored in children's folklore. Tuberculosis rhymes, for example, were common throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s and are occasionally still collected. In 1960 the following song, sung to the tune of "My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean," was collected from a twelve-year-old girl from Montana.
My Bonnie has tuberculosis, My Bonnie has only one lung, My Bonnie coughs up slimy green stuff And dries it and chews it for gum. Come up, come up, Come up, dear dinner, come up, come up, Come up, come up, Come up, dear dinner, come up. I'm coming, I'm coming, Though my head is hanging low. I hear those gentle voices calling (Spoken) Hasten, Jason, fetch the basin, Oops, flop. Fetch the mop. (Sherman and Weisskopf 1995:67-68)
Interestingly, adult folklore concerning tuberculosis is not commonly found in collections and archives. Sometimes called the "unmentionable disease," the "folk" association of tuberculosis with poverty and squalor created a silence that worked against the development and preservation of adult verbal traditions concerning the epidemic. Children's traditions, however, provide a special kind of insight and a special commentary on issues, which take a different form (or which are absent altogether) in adult culture. Children have license to speak the unspeakable. Furthermore, the fact that something is spoken in children's folklore suggests that an issue has truly taken hold in society. In many ways, what makes children's folklore so interesting to adults is that we recognize children as a wildly original, too loud, too truthful version of us. As children's popular culture expert Kathleen McDonnell observes, "Children don't recognize the distinction between high and low culture, they embrace it all equally" (1994:18). In this sense, children's folklore articulates attitudes and understandings internally censored by their more mature adult counterparts. In the play, in the games, and in the rhymes are expressions of health beliefs and attitudes held on some level by the children and perhaps also, despite the internal censorship of maturity, held by their parents. Complex themes of the "infecting Other," morality and illness, blaming victims, stereotypes of the correlation of economic class with illness, concerns about contagion and sanitation, and health fatalism pervade the games and rhymes of children, who in some cases aren't old enough even to have lost their first tooth.
Adult folklore contains the same themes and concerns but chooses slightly different means of expression. Our jokes, sayings, songs, stories, and even our material ways of expressing ourselves can become what illness-narrativity theorists call "illness representations." Beyond obvious referential statements, traces of explanatory models for illness are embedded in our multiple forms of discourse. To create distance from disease and illness, we "construct boundaries between ourselves and those categories of individuals whom we believe (or hope) to be more at risk than ourselves" (Gilman 1988:4). The means of distancing, the boundaries we create, the risks we construct and destruct can be read in our expressive choices.
While games and rhymes appear to be the genres of choice for such articulations from children and adolescents, adult illness representations make use of what are understood in our culture as more mature vehicles of expression. AIDS beliefs and commentary certainly appear in adult games (including risk-taking games) and rhymes (particularly in graffiti, Xerox lore, and slogan making), but by far the most vital adult forms for AIDS-related expressions are jokes and narratives. Furthermore, since tradition is dynamic, these expressive forms reflect the changes in beliefs and attitudes that come in response to new scientific developments, new understandings of transmission patterns, public health education programs, media coverage, current events, and so forth. The traditions, however, do not simply follow a specific trajectory chosen by public health or other officials but rather reflect the processing of a vast quantity of different and sometimes competing messages, all affecting disease understandings.
Jokes about AIDS followed slowly after the documentation of the first cases in 1981, but became gradually more popular as the disease entered public consciousness. As epidemiologists continually refined notions of who was most vulnerable to the new disease, jokes followed suit, always distancing the teller from the population currently understood as "at risk." Early jokes focused on the gay population and the association of AIDS with drugs, eventually incorporating other notions of risk groups. These initial jokes focused on what came to be known as the 4 Hs: Homosexuals, Heroin users, Hemophiliacs, and Haitians. Like most health folklore, they assigned the disease to a group understood as distant from the teller.
Question: Do you know what the hardest thing about having AIDS is?
Answer: Convincing your mother that you are Haitian.
Question: Do you know what gay stands for?
Answer: Got AIDS yet?
As AIDS affected more and more of the population, the jokes became increasingly homophobic and racist, with many focusing on famous figures known to be infected with the disease. Liberace and Magic Johnson jokes affirmed stereotypes of risk and deviance, collapsing notions of risky behaviors with notions of risky people. Like all folklore, the jokes changed as public health and public education became more refined, evolving in response to emerging understandings of the disease. By the mid-1980s it became clear to health educators that the general public was concerned about issues of casual transmission, generating fears of social contact with members of groups dubbed as "high risk." In 1988, in response to these concerns, the United States issued the Surgeon General's Report on AIDS, which, as Cindy Patton notes, "assumed that while risk reduction knowledge was nice, the general population, never imagined to be at risk, should be educated about the impossibility of contracting HIV through casual or social contact" (Patton 1994:15). Jokes again followed suit. Goodwin reports one joke involving a little boy telling his mother about the AIDS discussion in his sex-education class.
So she said, "Well, what did you learn about AIDS?" He said, "well, you can't get it from a toilet seat, and you can't get it from kissing, and you really have to watch those intersections" (Goodwin 1989: 84).
The emphasis in the Surgeon General's Report on the "facts" as they were known and constructed at the time began to move AIDS jokes into new areas of focus on risk behaviors and safety.
Did you hear about the two junkies? They were sharing needles. A friend said, "Don't you know you could get AIDS?" The junkies replied, "It's OK, we're wearing condoms."
AIDS jokes of the early 1990s (in addition to the ever-present themes of racism and homophobia) asserted fool figures, like those in the joke just cited, who were too stupid to understand safe-sex messages. The jokes were, in their own way, educational. As Patton argues, however, health educators and education projects showed little agreement on whether to decrease risk by modifying the behavior of an entire population or by targeting only those (subgroups) believed to be at the highest risk. For the most part, public health chose the targeted approach, focusing educational campaigns on "at risk" subcultures (Patton 1996). Even as the global AIDS picture began to make it clear that whole populations were at risk, public health accommodated information on the potential for heterosexual transmission through "Choose Your Partner Wisely" campaigns. These campaigns continually underscored notions of AIDS "otherness" even in attempts to be inclusive. As AIDS became more and more an issue through increasing numbers of infections and deaths, moving beyond subcultural boundaries, AIDS jokes began to drop off, becoming fewer in number and tending to flare up only in reaction to specific media events, such as new-treatment news or celebrities announcing that they tested HIV positive.
Where AIDS jokes began to drop off, narrative took over. This is not to say that AIDS rumors and legend only began to circulate in the late 1990s as the disease took hold in staggering epidemic numbers. To the contrary, stories were circulating from the beginning. But over time legends and rumors flourished, producing more than the nervous laughter or outrageous biting social commentary associated with humor. Instead, rumor and legend revealed a deep-seated sense of concern, fear, distrust, and even resistance. In some sense, while AIDS jokes focused on what was known about the disease (or believed to be known at that moment regarding, for example, risk groups and safe sex), AIDS legends focused on what was still unknown, unproven, unspoken, and, most of all, uncomfortable.
Legends were the perfect tool for dialogue. They were not personal since they tend to be stories about what happened to someone else. The risk of telling was minimal because the narratives take a "believe it or not" position, opening up discussion but not really requiring that one reveal one's own stance in relation to the narrative's truth or falsity. But the stories were not completely distanced either; they brought the issue closely into the teller's sphere through the legend's characteristic "friend of a friend" protagonist. These stories did not happen to the teller or even to anyone the teller knows. Rather, they happened to the friend of someone with whom the teller was familiar-close enough for concern, distanced enough for comfort. Legends put the issue out there, created dialogue, but allowed the teller to mask personal fear or curiosity.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Once Upon a Virusby Diane E. Goldstein Copyright © 2004 by Utah State University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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