Overview

The American public responded to the first cases of AIDS with fear and panic. Both policymakers and activists were concerned not only with stopping the spread of the disease, but also with guiding the public’s response toward those already infected. Fatal Advice is an examination of how the nation attempted, with mixed results, to negotiate the fears and concerns brought on by the epidemic. A leading writer on the cultural politics of AIDS, Cindy Patton guides us through the thicket of mass-media productions, policy and public health enterprises, and activist projects as they sprang up to meet the challenge of the epidemic, shaping the nation’s notion of what safe-sex is and who ought to know what about it. There is the official story, and then there is another, involving local groups and AIDS activists. Going back to early government and activist attempts to spread information, Patton traces a slow separation between official advice and that provided by those on the front lines in the battle against AIDS. She shows how American anxieties about teen sex played into the nation’s inadequate education and protection of its young people, and chronicles the media’s attempts to encourage compassion without broaching the touchy subject of sex or disrupting the notion that AIDS was a disease of social and sexual outcasts. Her overview of the relationship between shifting medical perceptions and safe-sex advice reveals why radical safe-sex educators eventually turned to sexually explicit, including pornographic, representations to spread their message-and why even these extreme tactics could not overcome the misguided national teaching on AIDS. Patton closes with a stirring manifesto, an urgent call to action for all those who do not want to see the hard lessons of AIDS education and activism wasted, or, with these lessons, the loss of so many more lives.

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9780822317470

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Reviews

A book of life-and-death importance on the politics of safe-sex. I can think of few other books that contribute so significantly to both cultural criticism and, in every sense of the term, public health. -Constance Penley, author of The Future of an Illusion and coeditor of Male Trouble An urgent and important work. Once again, Patton's usual brilliance is much in evidence-her irreverent and eclectic roving around different cultural and disciplinary domains, her perceptive readings of specific texts, her ear to various subcultural grounds, her wisdom based on personal history in the queer media and AIDS community movements. -Thomas Waugh, author of The Fruit Machine

An idiosyncratic and somewhat incoherent investigation into sex education in the age of AIDS. Patton (English/Temple Univ.) explores our country's response to the AIDS crisis vis-a-vis education and prevention, concluding that it is both homophobic and racist. When only the homosexual subculture seemed at risk, contends Patton, little effort was expended by US public health officials on education. Only later, when it became obvious that heterosexuals, too, could become infected with the AIDS virus, was there any concerted effort to prevent its spread. But by identifying AIDS almost exclusively with gay males, public health officials gave heterosexuals a false sense of security, failing to provide the tools they needed to evaluate and reduce their own risk of contracting AIDS. By denying that their own sons might be engaging in sex with other men or injecting drugs into their veins, policymakers did little to protect their children. They preferred to perceive them as too innocent to engage in risky behavior. And since the homosexual population was considered already at risk, little effort was put into stemming the epidemic among gay youth. Youth of color, Patton states, were also neglected by policy makers, since they were viewed as unlikely to change their behavior or escape the environment that marks them as premodern. In addition to criticizing our country's approach to sex education, Patton assaults the media for its lack of integrity. She insists, for example, that the teenage sexuality of Ryan White (who contracted HIV through a blood transfusion) was overlooked, while Philadelphia's Uncle Eddie Savitz was unfairly condemned for transmitting the AIDS virus to large numbers of teenage boys. With its painfully stilted academic prose and suffocating atmosphere of political correctness, Fatal Advice isn't likely to convince those who have seen greater complexity in the matter of AIDS education. (Kirkus Reviews)

OA book of life-and-death importance on the politics of safe-sex. I can think of few other books that contribute so significantly to both cultural criticism and, in every sense of the term, public health.ONConstance Penley, author of The Future of an Illusion and coeditor of Male Trouble OAn urgent and important work. Once again, PattonOs usual brilliance is much in evidenceNher irreverent and eclectic roving around different cultural and disciplinary domains, her perceptive readings of specific texts, her ear to various subcultural grounds, her wisdom based on personal history in the queer media and AIDS community movements.ONThomas Waugh, author of Hard to Imagine

Author Information

Cindy Patton is Associate Professor, Graduate Institute for the Liberal Arts, Emory University. She is the author of several books, including Sex and Germs and Inventing AIDS.

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