In a few years, people will nostalgically tell their kids about the days of 2020 and 2021, “back when we were afraid to leave our houses, terrified of being infected.” Wild times!

What I suspect they will not add is: “and then we all left our houses, and stopped being afraid, and absolutely nothing happened.”

“I’ll never forget that year when children were prevented from going to school — and then went back to school, but had to wear masks that obstructed their breathing and prevented healthy socialization,” they’ll say, not adding: “to protect schoolteachers from a virus that posed no threat to them.”

“Your poor grandfather died all alone in the hospital,” they’ll say, not adding: “to protect his nurses and doctors from an illness that posed no threat to them.”

If they’re NPR donors, they will add: “Thankfully for all of us, science did its thing: the vaccine came along and stopped the virus in its tracks.”

But that won’t be true, will it?

Only 12% of Americans under 60 are receiving regular COVID boosters. And even if people were getting the boosters, it wouldn’t change much; being “fully vaxxed” doesn’t prevent a person from contracting or spreading the virus. For two short months, the shot reduces the symptomatic infection rate by about 50%; after that, barely at all. During that short window of efficacy, your chance of infecting others drops by about 30%; after that, barely at all. And nobody’s getting boosted every two months.

The shots themselves, meanwhile, cause healthy people to feel ill. (It may be years before we know how severely the MRNA shots have harmed us; I’m talking here only about the immediate aftermath — the hours and days after the shots are administered.)

I’m ashamed to say that I got both rounds of Moderna, plus the first booster. (It seems like I was a completely different person back then — that the world was different — but it was only a few years ago.) The second shot made me sick for two days. The booster knocked me out so badly — violent trembling for hours, body aches that made it hard to move around — that I considered going to urgent care. All for a brief window of slightly reduced vulnerability to an illness that turned out to be inescapable.

So the boosters, which nobody is getting, don’t work, and the virus is still circulating. We’re back to where we were in the summer of 2020. We’re defenseless.

Yet the masks have not returned. We’ve stopped hearing warnings from public health officials to stop touching our faces. The stickers on grocery-store floors, showing us where to stand, have been peeled off and thrown away. Why?

95% of Americans have now had full-blown COVID. We all realize that it’s no big deal. I myself had the scary “razorblade throat” variant. I had to miss two days of work. My elderly parents (who are not exactly paragons of health and fitness) have now had it three times each. No sweat.

Most of us have had at least two of the shots. We know that they don’t prevent COVID, and that they make us feel like we’re dying.

From our “pandemic” experience (and from the medical sciences’ recent transgender adventure), we have learned that our doctors are liars and our nurses are retards.

COVID, in the end, was just a bad flu (not the worst flu by a mile — just a sort-of-bad one). The only people who ought to have taken it seriously were elderly, morbidly obese people with preexisting health conditions.

The “pandemic” was bullshit.

* * *

For those of us who lived through the 80s and 90s, there’s been a similar half-remembering about “the AIDS crisis.”

Shaking our heads, we recall “the days when we were all so afraid of getting AIDS from our college classmates and one-night stands,” without adding: “and then we stopped worrying, and nothing happened, because we had never been at risk.”

Like the recent COVID-19 “pandemic,” the Straight AIDS disaster was basically a mass delusion. In this post, I want to talk about a few of the movies and television shows that stoked ignorant panic about HIV — and make the case that this panic was not harmless.

* * *

First, though — to be clear:

AIDS was a nightmare.

During the 80s alone, it took out about 3% of the world’s gay men, including some of our best artists and writers. Their deaths were lonely, painful, and terrifying.

The disease also killed about 170,000 junkies: less sad, but still pretty sad.

Much more horrible is the effect that the disease had on hemophiliacs. This is the forgotten catastrophe. Approximately 90% of severe hemophiliacs (i.e., nearly all of them) contracted HIV during the 1980s. In addition to these cases, an additional 12,000 people caught HIV through blood transfusions (transfusions to offset blood loss during surgery, for instance, or to flush poison out of the bloodstream).

Tens of thousands of people trusted their doctors and nurses to look after their health, and they were killed with tainted blood. All that had been needed to avoid their deaths was the pasteurization of blood, along with better screening; this began in 1984, and the rate of infection through donated blood dropped overnight to almost zero.

Terrible.

AIDS was terrible!

But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about Straight AIDS: the kind you get from a high school cheerleader, or from a one-night stand with Bill from Accounting.

Straight AIDS was bullshit.

* * *

To grasp just how hard you’d have to work to get AIDS from straight sex, here are some transmissibility stats:

If you’re a man: you would have to have unprotected insertive sex with an HIV-positive woman 2,500 times before you were likely to contract it. That’s years of Wilt Chamberlain numbers, exclusively with HIV-positive women, exclusively without condoms: 4 infections per 10,000 sexual encounters.

It bears repeated emphasis: if you are a straight man who has daily unprotected sex exclusively with HIV-positive women: your risk of catching HIV is slightly higher than your risk of drowning or being accidentally poisoned by an over-the-counter medication, and slightly lower than your risk of dying in a household slip-and-fall accident.

You are much, and I mean much, better off being a thin guy who has daily unprotected sex with a female AIDS patient than you would be as a sexually abstinent obese man.

Obesity is a multi-factor killer; vaginal-to-penile AIDS transmission is an urban legend.

What about male-to-female transmission? The numbers here are slightly scarier.

Women: if you’ve had 1,250 consecutive unprotected sexual encounters with an HIV-positive male partner, it’s time to get tested; the odds of a single instance of heterosexual penetrative sex transmitting the virus from an HIV-positive man to a woman are roughly 8 in 10000.

What about hummers? We were assured by our high-school teachers that oral sex is quite dangerous when it comes to AIDS. There is no such thing as safe sex.

Well: you’d have to deliver approximately a million blowjobs, while suffering from open mouth sores, to an HIV-positive dick before you’d likely contract HIV.

Ladies, you can find an HIV-positive gay guy and blow him 2,739 times a day for a full year, and you should be okay, unless you’re violently flossing your teeth before each act, and gargling the ejaculate afterward.

You will win the lottery before you get HIV from oral sex, and you’ll get hit by a bus 50 times before it happens. You couldn’t blow your way to AIDS on a dare.

* * *

Equally interesting, to me, are the fairly low rates of transmissibility between gay men who don’t use condoms.

Tops are basically free from HIV risk; the odds of the virus getting into your dick from an HIV-positive ass are 11/10,000 — very close to the risk a woman would face from penetrative vaginal sex.

We come finally to the one group at substantial risk of infection: bottoms who have unprotected sex with HIV-positive tops. Here, the risk is 138/10,000. You can roll the dice 78 times before your number is all but certain to come up.

What that stat indicates is that even gay men are at very little risk of getting AIDS unless they’re extremely promiscuous, extremely irresponsible, and bottom much of the time. (The reason AIDS transmission is even possible is that, of course, many gays are versatile in bed; they receive the virus as bottoms, and deliver it as tops.)

As we know, 78 anonymous unprotected sexual encounters per year: those are rookie numbers. Some gay guys hit 78 such encounters in a single month. (When I was in grad school, in the early days of the dating apps, I had a friend — a great guy, by the way, brilliant, funny, very nice — who was almost certainly hitting that quota. I know that he would take mid-day breaks from work or study to hook up with strangers. He’s had many health problems over the years, including a bout with syphilis.)

Canadian flight attendant Gaëtan Dugas, the notorious Patient Zero of Randy Shilts’s book And the Band Played On, continued rutting coast-to-coast even after he’d learned that he was carrying what was then called GRID (Gay-related Immune Deficiency), and even after his body was covered with Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions. Given what we know about the low transmissibility of AIDS — and given that he had only four years of superspreading between the appearance of his symptoms in 1980 and his death in 1984, it’s mind-blowing to consider how much unprotected sex he must have had at a time when he was rotting to death.

Even gay guys, then, are basically safe from AIDS unless they frequently bottom without protection with a variety of HIV-positive strangers.

* * *

Okay: back to the cheer team.

Recall your middle-school and high-school sex-ed classes. How heavily was the AIDS risk emphasized? In my suburban schools, the answer was “very heavily,” in spite of the fact that nobody I knew seemed to know someone who knew someone who knew someone who had actually contracted HIV. HIV was an urban phenomenon, limited to highly active gay guys and junkies; it had nothing to do with us.

The lessons of Health class were reinforced by the news and entertainment media we were served. Magazines and nightly news alarmed us with a steady flow of information about the lethality of unprotected straight sex.

In a space of only two or three years, characters who contracted HIV through straight sex appeared on “very special episodes” of:

* A Different World (male-to-female transmission)
* Midnight Caller (male-to-female transmission)
* Life Goes On (female-to-male transmission from a high-school girlfriend)
* ER (male-to-female transmission)
* Touched By An Angel (male-to-female transmission)
* 21 Jumpstreet (female-to-male transmission from a high-school girlfriend)
* Degrassi High (female-to-male transmission from a high-school girlfriend)

Female-to-male HIV transmission even made it into top-40 music; TLC’s ubiquitous “Waterfalls” told the story of a sexually voracious HIV-positive woman infecting her boo.

Reba McEntire’s ridiculous “She Thinks His Name Was John” warned country gals about the likelihood of their being infected from a one-night cowboy ride:

A chance meeting, a party a few years back
Broad shoulders and blue eyes, his hair was so black
He was a friend of a friend you could say
She let his smile just sweep her away

And in her heart though she knew that it was wrong
But too much wine and she left his bed at dawn
And she thinks
His name was John

Now each day is one day that’s left in her life
She won’t know love, have a marriage or sing lullabies
She lays all alone and cries herself to sleep
‘Cause she let a stranger kill her hopes and her dreams

And all her friends say, “What a pity, what a loss”
And in the end when she was barely hanging on
All she could say is she thinks
His name was John

Salt-N-Pepa dedicated an entire track, “Let’s Talk About AIDS,” to disseminating AIDS misinformation (all emphasis added):

Now, you don’t get AIDS from kisses, touches, mosquito bites, or huggin’
Toilet seats, telephones — stop buggin’
You get it for sex or a dirty drug needle
Anal or oral now, people!

Women can give it to men and
Men mostly to women!
There ain’t a cure
So you gotta be sure [...]

You see a nice, kind face
You think you’re safe?
I’m sorry, that’s just not the case
There’s no debate
Conversate with your mate
And don’t wait until it’s too late!

* * *

When it comes to Straight AIDS cinema, four movies stand out.

• Reality Bites (1994; D: Ben Stiller)

This is a fun Gen-X time capsule with a famously good soundtrack CD. (It’s cool to see Houston in the 90s; I’ll have to make a post at some point about my favorite Texas movies.) It was regarded even at the time as a laughably mercenary attempt to mine “Lollapalooza culture” for anodyne romantic comedy. Bridget Phetasy recently posted an entertaining video about the movie. I agree with most of what she said, so I’ll let her summary stand in for mine.

I revisited Reality Bites recently and got sad thinking about how young people, including all of my friends, used to be. Certain things you forget, like the way that everyone chain-smoked all the time. Mostly, what I notice in the movie, and then remember, is how apolitical people used to be. Even in the 2000s, I couldn’t get any, and I mean any, of my friends to care about the Iraq War or the Abu Ghraib torture scandal; today, those same people are all cultists who call me a Nazi because I don’t believe that teenage girls should be getting cosmetic double-mastectomies or shearing flesh off of their thighs to create monstrous neophalluses.

The movie’s relevance to this post comes from Janeane Garofalo’s storyline. Supposedly, she’s a nympho — although she was probably chaste compared to the hypergamous Tinder hoes of 2025. At the beginning of the movie, she finds out that a male partner has tested positive for HIV (which would be possible only if he were both bisexual and reckless, but I digress). The movie supposes that it is likely, if not certain, that her encounters with this guy have infected her. A major point of suspense involves her HIV test (which, in a nod to realism, comes back negative).

The kids of Reality Bites are everyXers — the movie is a slice of life — and the Straight AIDS scourge is presented as another feature of modern life. Typical of this sort of movie is the fact that the gay character, played by Steve Zahn, is not the one involved in the AIDS plot, even though it would have been a more plausible, dramatically interesting storyline for him.

• Boys On The Side (1995; D: Herbert Ross)

This is basically the movie adaptation of the Reba McEntire song. An AWFL played by Mary-Louise Parker (she’s a real-estate agent) falls ill during a girl-power road-trip; at the ER, she finds out that she’s got Straight AIDS. For the remainder of the story, she supplies as much Beaches-style terminal-illness melodrama as the movie requires: collapsing dramatically, dying beautifully in a way that ennobles the characters assembled around her.

I don’t have much more to say about this movie, which is dumb and bad, but it’s striking that this one doesn’t settle for an AIDS scare; the pretty white lady actually gets the bug and dies.

Which, of course, is making you think of:

• Forrest Gump (1994; D: Robert Zemeckis)

Gump is, of course, one of the landmark Boomer abominations. We’ve all seen it. Recently, the online discourse has focused on what an absolute piece of shit Forrest’s great love, Jenny, really is.

But we can absolve her of at least one of her sins: exposing sweet stupid Forrest to HIV. As we know now, there is essentially no chance of a man getting AIDS from insertive heterosexual sex.

On the other hand: it’s not only true that she exposed Forrest, Jr. to a 45% risk of contracting HIV — she in fact did give him AIDS, according to the lore! Gump screenwriter Eric Roth’s sequel script was to focus on the tragicomic story of AIDS patient Forrest, Jr.

In the movie, it’s made clear that Jenny is a whore, but it’s not clear how she got Straight AIDS. Presumably from a pansexual male flower child or down-low Black Panther? In any case: Gump, like Reality Bites, is a story-of-us movie that posits Straight AIDS as a generation-defining reality.

• Kids (1995; D: Larry Clark)

There’s so much that could be said about Kids, and about its hall-of-fame-degenerate director, Larry Clark.

I snuck into this movie when it was in theaters — it was rated NC-17 — and, as with Reality Bites, had its excellent soundtrack album (Folk Implosion, Daniel Johnston) on loop for a while.

The critics of the day hilariously lauded Kids as a searing, morally responsible look at the out-of-control yutes. (They would do the same nine years later with the very similar Thirteen.)

Kids bravely depicts a group of New York skate rats (including Rosario Dawson and, in her first role, Chloë Sevigny) screwing and getting stoned for 90 minutes. One skate rat, Telly, specializes in “devirginizing” 12-year-olds; he has turned it into a kind of sport.

As we discover early on, Telly has contracted, and is energetically spreading, Straight AIDS. The movie is structured as a kind of odyssey: Sevigny’s character searches the city for Telly; she has tested positive, and wants to warn him. While she chases him, he roams the city deflowering and Straight-AIDSing more preteen girls.

In the final scene, Sevigny is passed out drunk. Another teenage boy, happening upon her unconscious body, impulsively rapes her, as white yutes tend to do. We viewers shake our heads sadly — recognizing, as this young man does not, that he has taken Straight AIDS into his urethra, and will soon be dead.

Larry Clark would play the moral visionary in a few other movies, like Bully (which ripped the mask off of teenage bullying) and Marfa Girl/Marfa Girl 2 (which ripped the mask off of West-Texas anti-migrant bigotry).

In reality, Clark was just a pervert who was good with a camera. He first came to fame for his gritty art photographs of nude, erect, horse-hung teenage boys shooting heroin in collections like Tulsa. All of his subsequent work, including his movies, indulge his obsession with adolescent male bodies.

As time went on, Clark stopped pretending to take a social or anthropological interest in troubled yutes. In one of his later movies, The Smell of Us, Clark films himself masturbating while a teenage boy rubs his feet all over his face. (”Fuck my nose with your toes,” Clark yells.) A plot point in his rarely-seen Ken Park involves the size of a high-schooler’s penis, which a friend’s married mother assures him is much bigger than her husband’s. In a documentary segment of the omnibus Destricted, Clark recruits a young man to shoot an anal porn movie with a MILF; the eventual sex, which becomes messy, is included in the movie.

The idea that Kids was meant as, or could function as, a “wake-up call to American parents” is so dumb that only someone with a humanities degree could believe it.

It’s worth noting that Kids didn’t just begin the film career of Larry Clark; it also launched the career of its 19-year-old screenwriter, Harmony Korine. (The two met when Clark, then 51, was skulking around an NYC skate park taking pictures of boys.)

I’ll lose a few of you with this take, but I really like Korine. His Vice Magazine/Dash Snow shtick — rich hipster slumming among the Diane Arbus Set, exploiting their poverty and strangeness for exotic thrills — sounds obnoxious, but the reality is that Korine is one of the more original filmmakers of the last 30 years. Unlike Clark, he never pretended that Kids had some sort of social message, and he’s certainly made no such claim for the dreamlike, funny, sleazy movies he went on to direct, like Gummo and Spring Breakers.

Sevigny, after contracting Straight AIDS in Kids, went on to perform an unsimulated blowjob on Vincent Gallo in The Brown Bunny and get an Oscar nomination for Boys Don’t Cry. She tends to pop up in good movies: Trees Lounge, The Last Days of Disco, American Psycho, Demonlover, Dogville, Shattered Glass, Zodiac. She briefly dated Jarvis Cocker, which is a mark in her favor. She’s supposedly an observant Catholic. I would say about her the same thing I would say about Korine: she’s the sort of person I hate, but I like her.

* * *

It was inevitable that Hollywood would make hay out of AIDS. It sits at the intersection of sex, tragic premature death, and horror.

On the other hand, there’s never been a huge mainstream market for gay sex, so it was also inevitable that Hollywood would try to de-emphasize Actual AIDS and focus on its mythic variant, Straight AIDS.

The result has been another of those classic black-hacker/white-pimp inversions; AIDS was presented as being, and is today misremembered as having been, a mortal threat to normies. As Salt-N-Pepa told us: you can get HIV from oral sex, and women can give it to men. Nobody is safe.

Today, the West is in a birth rate crisis. And while it would be lazy to argue that this is because the kids of Gen X were forced to look at STD slide-shows, or to watch their fat schoolteachers put condoms on bananas, I do think that this stuff played a role: alienating us from our bodies, turning sex into something clinical, medical, unmagical, unromantic.

At exactly the moment that wages stagnated and white masculinity (but never black and brown masculinity) was demonized, a generation of suburbanites was taught that sex kills.

Kids of my generation understood that the worst thing that could happen to them was pregnancy. The second-worst thing, obviously, was missing college.

But the third-worst thing, Straight AIDS, was never far from our minds.