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No guilty parties >> Heterosexual AIDS activist Janet Conners says she's dying of homophobia by MATTHEW HAYS
To be sure, the media's focus on those who broke the high-risk stereotype played an important role in changing attitudes towards the urgency surrounding AIDS. When the public saw that AIDS did indeed--and could indeed--infect anyone, perceptions and government policies regarding the illness changed. Janet and Randy Conners, a Nova Scotia couple who contracted the illness through tainted blood products, played a part in changing both stereotypes: first, that AIDS only struck certain groups, and second, the very idea that anyone afflicted with AIDS could somehow be guilty. In the early '90s, the couple lobbied for compensation from the government after Randy, a hemophiliac, was infected with an improperly tested blood supply and subsequently infected Janet through sex. (Their son Gus, now 18, is HIV-negative.) While many who fell into the "innocent" category were reluctant to link arms with the gay community, the Conners saw things differently. "I'm a heterosexual woman dying from homophobia," Janet Conners says now. She almost died several years ago, but has since rebounded on a protease inhibitor cocktail; her husband died in 1994. Despite activists' best efforts to break down the good victim/bad victim dichotomy, old media habits die hard. Witness this tract about the Conners, from a Halifax Daily News article printed just last year: "The discovery that an attractive, heterosexual couple could be condemned to death was shocking: a sick man killed by the agency supposedly keeping him alive; a wife sucked into the vortex because of bad medical advice, a son about to be orphaned, a family destroyed." "That attitude makes me sick," says Conners from her home in Dartmouth, north of Halifax. "What did I do that was any different? I had sex with a man who was HIV-positive. Randy stuck a needle in his arm and got HIV. Why does it matter how people get it? It matters because people want to judge you and want to stay in denial and remove themselves from the risk." Conners also blasts the argument, made largely by right-wing pundits like Claire Hoy, that AIDS research funding has siphoned money away from breast cancer, which kills in greater numbers. "That is homophobia. They're right, we don't spend nearly enough money globally on health research--so let's go back to those same people and see how much they want to cut from defense to give over to breast cancer. Nice, white women die from breast cancer. If it were mainly lesbians or black or Hispanic women who were dying from breast cancer, I doubt very much that you'd hear that argument." Janet Conners will deliver her lecture, The Changing Face of HIV/AIDS: A Personal Account, on Thursday, March 4 at 6pm at Concordia's Oscar Peterson Hall. A concert by the women's choir Choeur Maha will follow. Info: 848-4234
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From the beginning of the age of AIDS, those afflicted with the illness were neatly slotted into two categories: the guilty and the innocent. When hemophiliacs and/or heterosexuals contracted AIDS, they were referred to as innocents; the implicit logic was that, somehow, gay men and IV drug users were guilty and had asked to be infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.