Cultural Anthropology

 “The End of Intimacy” - A Study on the Relation Between HIV and COVID-19

Essentially, this article touches on the topics of COVID-19 and the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and the fact that these two crises are similar in a hypocritical way. After both COVID-19 and the AIDS epidemic (for gay men, specifically), intimacy and closeness was a bit of a taboo topic, and could no longer be taken for granted. However, concerning HIV, predominantly gay men struggled with intimacy and proximity, HIV was often taken as an opportunistic excuse for implied homophobia against the community. If they were to be intimate, they would likely get sick, and many people outside of the community would say it was “karma” for being gay, or it was their own fault and they deserved it. Now, during the COVID-19 pandemic, all people, regardless of sexuality and gender, are advised to spatially distance themselves from each other while maintaining closeness relationship-wise with each other. Now, (or during the peak of the pandemic in 2020), it was/is frowned upon, disdained, even feared, to be in close proximity to someone else. The physical distance between strangers, or bubbled isolation between kin, cannot be reduced to signifying the absence of consideration for the other. In this pandemic that everyone is facing, a multitude of the population have protested, criticized, and denounced these precautions in place. Meanwhile, to the gay men that were affected by and lived through the AIDS epidemic, this is almost a repeat of what they endured in the past, but now everyone is experiencing it on some scale and complaining about how hard they have it. Many being the same people who believed that gay men that died of HIV “had it coming”. In this article, the author points out that “Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, I began to experience a kind of cognitive whiplash as nearly everyone I met reflected on the politics of contagion and risk in ways that gay men—especially those of us who are HIV-positive—have had to think about for most of our lives.” So the question is, will the COVID crisis create a more sympathetic stigma around the AIDS epidemic or will it not affect people’s sympathy? Will the moral message taught throughout the COVID pandemic also be applied to HIV? It is noticeable that every comment on COVID-19 has become a “fretful allegory of HIV” However, this article discussed the surprising fact that during the HIV crisis, liberals advocated for gay men to not have to quarantine, while they are now the ones pressing for COVID-quarantines. Is this because of the demographic that it affects? The article used the word “schadenfreude”, which is a good word to describe the way many people felt when Donald Trump contracted COVID after not wearing a mask. Pleasure, one might say, derived by someone’s misfortune. Many people felt schadenfreude as they felt he deserved what he got since he didn’t follow precautions, but this raises an unstated implication: by placing this moral connotation to situations in COVID-19, it resuscitates the old, harmful idea that people with HIV, and those that died in the AIDS epidemic, got what they deserved.