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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, APRIL 15, 1983
PAGE 11
"We don't know" remains the frustrating answer to almost all
questions about AIDS. We don't know what causes the disease, we
don't know how to treat it and we don't know whether the epidemic
is about to level off or race through the population like a
forest fire. For the moment, reports CDC's Curran, with three to
five new cases reported every day, "there are no signs of any
slowdown." But most researchers believe that outside of the homo
sexual community, the AIDS curve will rise much �slowly.
The same issue of NEWSWEEK took a sympathetic (naturally) view of the
impact that AIDS is having in the corrupt gay world. It said, in part:
The four young men sat in the semi-darkness of the deserted ward
waiting for their weekend shot of interferon at New York's
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. They tried not to look
at the fifth man, the law professor. His face was swollen and
disfigured by purplish Kaposi's sarcoma (KS) lesions: his frail
body, wracked for months by pneumonia and other recurring infec
tions, weighed no more than a child's. He was beyond hope, be
yond terror. They fought not to see their fate in his. And again
they fought the old fears and doubts. Their life-style wasn't
sinful. AIDS was not a gay plague sent down upon them. "God
doesn't do things like this," said Alan, a quiet Southerner
who
works in a bank and sings in church choirs.
"I'm not being
a unished for anything. It's bad luck or fate or something I have
one that-ii'as caused this to happen.''
The nightmare rumors that swirled through the homosexual communi
ties of New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles almost three
years ago have become a cruel fact. The dire warnings in the gay
press were well founded.
Suddenly, everyone seems to know an
AIDS victim. The disease's drawn-out incubation period has thou
sands of gay men sweating in terror....
An infectious agent
loose in the hothouse environment of a gay bath, where some men
have as many as 10 anonymous sexual contacts in one night, would
spread exponentially. Ironically, the freedom, the promiscuity,
the hypermasculinity that many gays declared an integral part of
their culture have come to haunt them. "Isn't it something that
what brought most of us here now leaves tens of thousands of us
wondering whether that celebration ends in death?" said Randy
Shilts, a San Francisco Journalist.
The shared wisdom in the gay community these days is that you
"change your life-style, not your sexuality" [meaning that steady
partners are now in vogue]. But as Dr. Weisman points out in
L.A.:
"Some gays don't want to change and continue playing
Russian roulette." Still, many more say tentatively that they
have moved beyond shock and fear and anger to a feeling of relief
that they finally have a medical reason to slow down their lives.
If ever there was a built-in penalty for breaking God's Law, confirming the
truth of Romans 1: 27, "AIDS" is it: "Likewise also the men, leaving the
natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another•••and re
ceiving in themselves the penalty of their error which� due" (R.A.v.,-:-
--Gene H. Hogberg, News Bureau