SECRET CODE

No Time to Get Squeamish (NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, May 9, 2003, NY Times)

Most AIDS scientists are terrified these days. They describe witch hunts by neo-Puritans in and out of the Bush administration, and many are so nervous that in e-mail and research abstracts they avoid using words like "gays," "homosexuals," "anal sex" or "sex workers."

So scientists at the National Institutes of Health and elsewhere are devising their own secret code. I won't give it away, but one term stands for "gay" or "homosexual," another for "anal sex" and so on.

"I would recommend avoiding all electronic communication to any N.I.H. office," one scientist warned in one of many e-mail notes buzzing among AIDS researchers. "Phone communication does not appear tapped at this time. Even so, I am advising staff to speak `in code' unless an N.I.H. staff member indicates you can speak freely. In short, assume you are living in Stalinist Russia when communicating with the United States government."

As my Times colleague Erica Goode noted in breaking the story last month, researchers have been told by N.I.H. project officers to avoid "sensitive language" in grant applications. A University of California researcher, for example, was told to "cleanse" the abstract of his grant proposal of words like "gay," "homosexual" and "transgender."

Since his research was on H.I.V. in gay men, this was a challenge. How can scholars investigate how AIDS spreads without using words that make the religious right blush?

This is just utter nonsense. For twenty years now AIDs activists have tried to divert the public's attention away from the fact that the disease is basically behavioral--spread almost exclusively, once blood supplies were cleaned up, by gay men and intravenous drug users--because they feared that funding for research would dry up if people knew they weren't at risk and that the communities that were are both politically unpopular. Thus we had years of people like C. Everett Koop telling us all to practice safe sex, as if we were all at risk and as if it weren't known that the failure rate of condoms during anal sex made the practice something akin to Russian Roulette.

Practically the only people in America who've been willing to talk honestly about AIDs have been conservatives, like Michael Fumento in his excellent book, The Myth of Heterosexual AIDs. In fact, President Bush had a recent nominee withdraw his name from consideration for an AIDs advisory panel after there was a firestorm of criticism because he had made comments directly linking the disease and homosexuality. Who is it exactly that gets squeamish when talk turns to AIDs and the anal sex?

For Mr. Kristoff to turn around now and blame the Right--and condescend to the religious right in particular, after chastising fellow liberals for doing so--is either ignorant or dishonest. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 11, 2003 10:27 PM