The death of Ryan White produced an outpouring of sympathy. President Bush, Elton John and Michael Jackson were among the high-profile grievers. Now, a conservative monthly argues that reaction to his AIDS-related passing shows blindness to ”the practices which indirectly caused it.”
The June Religion & Society Report, a publication of the Rockford Institute, says White was duly lauded ”as the one who proved to the nation that we must have compassion for people with AIDS.”
But it discerns (correctly) a double standard of concern: If White had been a teenage homosexual prostitute, attention would have been minimal. Then it contends (less convincingly) that portrayal of White as an ”innocent victim,” who got AIDS from an infected blood transfusion, ”obscures the fact that his suffering was directly attributable to the `indecent acts` of the unknown blood donor who became infected. . . . ”
While claiming sympathy for all AIDS victims, the publication moves toward a heavily moralistic finale by comparing the reaction to White`s death with the hoopla over artist Robert Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS in 1989.
On the one hand, some members of the public and Congress reacted angrily to the latter`s work, calling for budget cuts at the National Endowment for the Arts and the shutting of an exhibition of his allegedly obscene photos at a Cincinnati museum.
At the same time, Mapplethorpe was acclaimed and staunchly defended by much of the media and some members of the federal bureaucracy.
The Rockford Institute views Mapplethorpe as a symbol of indecent acts and suggests that such attention, and designation as artist of the year by the Tribune, conveys a legitimacy to the Mapplethorpe lifestyle. It concludes that ”federal authorities and an almost solid phalanx of the mass media approve or even glorify the public display of an advocate of the practices which indirectly caused Ryan`s death.”
Unmentioned is a possibly simpler motive: support of the 1st Amendment when it comes to showing the work of artists-dead or alive, gay or straight.
(934 N. Main St., Rockford, Ill. 61103-7061).
The June Life cover story has Elvis Presley biographer Albert Goldman proclaiming a change of opinion, that Presley, the two-legged drugstore, did not merely overdose on drugs-he committed suicide. One comes away less convinced about the claim than that Goldman has found a way to goose sales when his book is reissued next year. Far better are Edward Barnes` melancholy look at Philadelphia ghetto kids whose only education is the drug trade, and Susan Sheehan`s profile of a family`s multimillion-dollar, so-far unsuccessful effort to find a matching bone marrow donor for a daughter who may soon died of leukemia.
In June American Spectator, Elizabeth Kristol chides ”the Recovery industry,” the proliferation of drug-treatment centers, and cites as bogus a trend to see all sorts of illnesses and behavior as linked to an emotional condition called ”codependence” on other, allegedly ill people. And June Texas Monthly inspects Straight, perhaps the nation`s toughest drug-treatment program for adolescents. Writer Skip Hollandsworth contends that controversy over sometimes heavy-handed methods of Straight ”underscores a dirty little secret. Our vast drug-treatment system, with its armies of therapists, medical conferences, and marketing strategies, doesn`t really know what it`s doing.” Despite claims of success, ”about 80 percent of the adolescents” who complete drug programs of any kind return to drugs within a year.
June Savvy Woman derides prime-time TV for fictional career women ”with emotional lives as flat as Nebraska,” including Rebecca (Kirstie Alley) of
”Cheers” and ”Murphy Brown” (Candace Bergen). ”Forget sex, even dates are scarce in the catatonic love lives of television`s most attractive, successful women.”
June Golf Digest has Mike Royko on golf in Chicago, including an ex-FBI agent`s tale of trying to stick close to mobster Sam Giancana when he hit the links. . . . May Campaign Industry News contends that Vietnam veteran Ron
(”Born on the Fourth of July”) Kovic decided not to run for Congress in California because he couldn`t have taken the heat resulting from past drug use and doubts about his portrayal of events in his autobiography and the movie in which Tom Cruise played him.
