Just a reminder to all of you that we in the LGBTQ community have had a long history of fighting for our right to be who we are and to express our sexuality and to love who we want to love.
And a further reminder that our rights are not guaranteed forever, because, if those espousing the draconian vision of the 2025 Agenda get their way, we may lose everything we've gained and then some.
The Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights was a
massive political rally in Washington, D.C. on
October 11, 1987. The movement was reaching its zenith in the 80s and AIDS was a major influence in our becoming more visible, and out, and proud.
Lesbian and Gay Rights because the Bi and Trans folks were not yet being specifically acknowledged and the term Queer was still an insult. No one even contemplated a "plus".
Approximately 750,000
people took part in the march and other events including a civil disobedience action in front of the Supreme Court.
The 1987 March on Washington
stands as an important part of LGBTQ history.
I was there with a group from Hartford, CT.
Hector*, Me, Richard, Robin, ?, Joe, ? * Hector was my co-worker at the CT Dept of Health AIDS Program. He died of HIV/AIDS
Remembering the March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights: a song by Ten Percent Review:
The focus of the 1987 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights was to demand our civil rights and to protest the government's lack of concern for HIV/AIDS.
The AIDS Quilt was displayed for the first time on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., during the weekend event.
It covered a space larger than a football field and included 1,920 panels.
I'm not absolutely sure if this picture was taken at the 1987 March in Washington, but I think it was. It was a time before digital cameras and iPhones. Can you imagine?
World AIDS Day was December 1, and I've had an opportunity to read posts here and there about those whose lives were lost and the Reagan era's completely ignoring the crisis in the 80s and, well, got to thinking about some other aspects of those years. I was recently directed to a contemporary podcast that was all kinds of positive thinking and healing and praying and I remembered Louise Hay and how so many gay men gravitated to her and her lovely, but toxic, message. Google offered this article that I will share here.
And just to be clear I am more of the mindset that "If You Meet the Buddha, On The Road, Kill Him" (reference to the Book by Sheldon Kopp)
On August 30, 2017, Louise Hay died. Hay was a
metaphysical healer who began her journey in healing at the First Church
of Religious Science in the late 1960s. Her first publication was a
1976 pamphlet that came to be called, “Heal Your Body.” She became a
best-selling author and publisher in the 1980s in the midst of the AIDS
crisis.
I became familiar with Hay’s work in 1988 when I took a second,
part-time job to survive the trickle-down economy of that era. I loved
my second job. I was a clerk in a gay-owned bookstore in the Castro
District of San Francisco called The Love That Dares. I’m not sure I
knew of Louise Hay before that moment, but it became apparent that the
store sold Hay’s material more than anything else. The customers buying
her books and cassette tapes were gay men hoping to survive the AIDS
epidemic, looking for answers or seeking hope.
Even then, Hay had her detractors. Her solutions were not scientific
and blamed disease not on viruses or cells gone amok, but on behavior
and negativity. In You Can Heal Your Life she wrote, “I believe we create every so-called illness in our body.”1
This is, of course, problematic, and carries with it the insinuation
that you are sick because you are not trying hard enough to make
yourself well.2
In 1988, Los Angeles Times journalist Beth Ann Krier interviewed Dr. Michael Gottlieb for a piece about Hay.
Gottlieb was one of the physicians who had originally identified AIDS
in 1981. He stated, “As a physician, I think that love and acceptance
and forgiveness may well be an important component of healing, but AIDS
is a viral disease caused by a virus and not by lack of love.” For Hay,
lack of self-love was at the center of illness and the center of
healing. According to “The List” of dis-eases (as she called them) first
published in Heal Your Body in 1982, and then updated for
inclusion in her other works, the probable causes of AIDS included
“[f]eeling defenseless and hopeless,” and “[s]exual guilt.”3
I have a great deal of skepticism about anything that smacks of
cult-like thinking and a great deal of anger about “cures” that blame
the victims. Of course, blaming victims wasn’t new in the 1980s; it has a
long history. In 1747, John Wesley first published a self-help medical
guide that began by blaming disease on sin. At first, man “knew no sin,
so he knew no pain, no sickness, weakness, or bodily disorder.” But
following the original sin, “The seeds of weakness and pain, of sickness
and death, are now lodged in our inmost substance.”4
For Wesley, it was not unconditional love that was the cure, however,
but a course of medicine, rest, and “that Old unfashionable Medicine,
Prayer.”5
In a self-help book first published in 1803 and entitled, Advice
to Mothers, on The Subject of Their Own Health; and of the Means of
Promoting the Health, Strength, and Beauty of their Offspring,
William Buchan placed the blame of miscarriage squarely on women’s
behavior. He advised pregnant women to “be doubly attentive to preserve
the utmost sweetness and serenity of temper … and to keep every other
unruly passion or desire under the steady control of mildness and
reason.” Pregnant women should not be ruled by fear, he cautioned. While
they might be alarmed by stories about the dangers of pregnancy, cases
of “miscarriage or of death” were rare and “owing to the improper
conduct of women themselves.”6
14th annual Lesbian and Gay Pride parade in New York, June 27, 1983. (Mario Suriani/Associated Press)
While statements like these make my blood boil, as a resident of the
Castro in the late 1980s, I also realize that people like Hay gave dying
men a rope to cling to. It is important to remember that in that era,
there was little else. The pharmaceutical giant, Burroughs-Wellcome,
patented AZT in 1985 and it was approved as a treatment for AIDS by the
Food and Drug Administration in 1987. However, for many men, AZT proved
toxic, particularly in the doses in which it was administered, and, by
itself, AZT is not enough to prevent HIV or death from AIDS.
Additionally, government on all levels was largely ignoring the AIDS
epidemic because of the stigma of a disease predominantly presenting
itself among gay men and intravenous drug users.
In 1983, Pat Buchanan, then communications director for Ronald Reagan, had called AIDS
“nature’s revenge on gay men.” Only six years into the AIDS crisis, in
June 1987, had President Ronald Reagan’s administration finally
established a presidential commission on HIV/AIDS, while still largely
shying away from public discussions of the disease. In 1988, on the
floor of the Senate, Jesse Helms defended an appropriations bill
amendment that kept funding from AIDS education by stating, “You have got to call a spade a spade, and a perverted human being a perverted human being.”
Add to this neglect and hatred by government, the neglect and hatred
of society. Discrimination against gay men was the societal norm and
many families disowned their sons when they came out as gay or bisexual
and HIV+. Those who survived that era recount that neglect. In a 2003 interview with Mark Harrington,
one of the leading members of the New York AIDS Coalition to Unleash
Power’s Treatment and Data subcommittee, Sarah Schulman asked, “[W]ere
people surprised that people could suffer and die and their families
never show up?” Harrington replied, “I was. But, I also — remember, the
context of ACT UP was also this incredible homophobia of the Reagan
years, and this incredible, sort of, hatred and disgust of gay people.
So, given that all those things were going on in the broader society,
those parents were part of that hatred of gay people.”
In the midst of this neglect and hatred, many of the men I knew who
were infected with HIV looked in many directions for a solution. My
friend Phil, one of the members of the affinity group to which I
belonged, and with whom I protested in front of the U.S. Supreme Court
on October 13, 1987, was a member of a macrobiotic society. Phil swore
that the combination of coming out to his family and a macrobiotic diet
was making him better. In one of our affinity group’s first meetings, he
told us that the thrush from which he had suffered had disappeared, and
that he felt healthier than he had in years.
While Hay blamed the ill for their illnesses, she also preached love.
“Louise Hay, an advocate for unconditional love and forgiveness during
the height of the AIDS crisis, died peacefully Wednesday morning of
natural causes,” is the first line of Hay’s obituary in the LGBT Los Angeles Blade. In a blog called, “My Fabulous Disease,”
Mark S. King wrote that Hay’s “message of self-love and unconditional
acceptance—of our lives and other people—resonated like a beacon to the
frightened gay men of Los Angeles.”
It was in Los Angeles in 1987 that the Hay Rides started, gatherings
of people with AIDS, mostly gay men, looking for an answer or, at the
very least, loving human contact. Some came away from the Hay Rides in
despair, but others came away with self-love that was hard to find as a
gay man in the 1980s. As Hay wrote, “Often what we think of as the things ‘wrong’ with us are only our experiences of our own individuality.”7 This message, alone, was a powerful one.
The End, but Not the End I Meant to Write
Over the last two months, I have thought a lot about Louise Hay and
her legacy. When I conceived of this piece, I thought my conclusion
would be a mixed one: that blaming the ill was harmful, but that,
perhaps, for some of the sick and dying the good of being loved and
touched in an era marked by hatred and loathing outweighed that harm. I
was almost finished writing and thought I would ruminate over the
conclusion while I walked the dogs, coming back mid-morning to write
that there was bad and good.
Before heading out the door with my furry companions, I checked
Facebook. In response to a righteous rant from a young friend of mine,
there was this reply, “I believe the words ‘sexual assault’ and ‘sexual
harassment’ are thrown out way too loosely. Victim mentality is the
problem and that’s the real issue. You can only be a victim if you allow
yourself to be one. Regardless of who you are. Man, woman, gay,
straight, etc.”
Reading those words, so stark on my screen, I thought: No. Louise Hay
did more harm than good. Building an industry on the message that
“DIS-EASE CAN BE HEALED, IF WE ARE WILLING TO CHANGE THE WAY WE THINK
AND BELIEVE AND ACT!” perpetuates the cultural belief that harm is chosen, consciously or unconsciously.8
People have AIDS because of denial of self. Brain tumors are caused by
refusing to change old patterns. Women are raped because they act like
victims. For decades we have tried to rid ourselves of those ideas with
little, or no, success.
Less than a month after Hay’s death David Groff published a piece for Slate entitled, “How Louise Hay’s Spiritual Pseudoscience Harmed a Generation of Gay Men.”
Although Groff acknowledged that Hay “offered open if judgmental arms,”
he concluded that, “The last thing people with AIDS needed to hear was
that they had caused their own illness.”
My friends who lived and died before the era of effective treatment
reached for visualization, meditation, diet, vitamins, and snake oil. In
some cases, they survived the early years of the plague, and in others,
they did not. There were no magical outcomes. Those who caught the
virus are not to be blamed for their illness. Those who did not survive
are not to be blamed for their deaths. There is still stigma, but
activists and medical health professionals have worked to rid our
society of that. Perhaps some of the dying needed Hay’s love in the
1980s. If only she could have offered it without blame.
Notes
Louise L. Hay, You Can Heal Your Life Gift Edition (Hay House, 1999), 151. Return to text.
William Buchan, Advice to Mothers, on the Subject
of their Own Health; and on the Means of Promoting the Health,
Strength, and Beauty, of their Offspring (London: T. Caddell and W. Davies, 1811), 31-32. Return to text.
Hay, You Can Heal Your Life, 101. Emphasis in the original. Return to text.
Ibid., 239. The shouting caps are in the original. Return to text.
So many young people probably never heard of Dr. Matilda Krim, but her name was a gay household word back in the 80's, especially among those of us who were intimately involved in the AIDS arena and/or public health. She championed science over judgement, compassion over discrimination and activism over status quo.
