“… your average white, heterosexual, middle-class person … their chance of getting AIDS is actually lower than their chance of either being struck by lightning or drowning in a bathtub … your typical heterosexual AIDS victim … is a black or Hispanic female who's living in the New York-New Jersey area whose steady sexual partner--we're not talking promiscuity here--steady sexual partner is an intravenous drug abuser. And for these women, they probably have a better chance of dying of AIDS than anything else … I think we're being horribly cruel when we pretend that we're all at equal risk. You're lying to people or deceiving them at any rate, and I think at the margin, people will die because we're giving them this false, `everybody's going to get it,' or `everybody's at risk' message.”
I remember I had to take an HIV test in 1988 to get a visa to study abroad in China, and the dumb woman doctor who got the test result back said, “take a look at the result here on this paper,” which sort of alarmed me (of course I was negative), but I realize now that she was caught up in the whole AIDS hysteria at the time.
