so i send a friend of mine several MRSA-related links, including one for the above map that’s been making the rounds lately, and the follow-up conversation goes pretty much like this:
him: oh, this is complete bullshit—the breeders are always blaming us for everything. MRSA has been around in hospitals and prisons for years and athletes get it all the time.
me: look at the map.
him: and who came up with this data anyway? i’ll bet it’s skewed somehow, or at least not all that accurate--and besides that, of course more gay men in metropolitan areas are gonna get it, more of them being immune-suppressed and all. doesn’t mean shit.
me: look at the map.
him: and just look at all these other stories on this—the lurid headlines, the fucking christians going apeshit with their tired “wages of sin” routine, calling this the new gay plague—well, i got news for them: vaginas are just as much a breeding ground as assholes and there are straight people who screw around just as much as we do, and furthermo--
me: LOOK. AT. THE. GOD. DAMN. MAP.
* * * * *
i submit this conversation for your consideration not only because it's representative of several i've had concerning this issue, but because it reflects the way many of the blogs i read are dealing with it as well. i know that everybody’s got their own axe to grind and it’s entertaining to watch the various factions slanting the story to suit their own purposes as it unfolds, but that’s all secondary to me.
see, several years ago, i got a small cut on the outside of my right calf, which was healing normally until one day it wasn’t—it became sore and inflamed in a way that it hadn’t been even when it was fresh, and then little red spider legs of infection began pushing their way outward from the wound.
at the emergency room, the first doctor who examined me did something i thought at the time to be very un-doctorly: he took a ball-point pen from his pocket, bent over my leg and outlined the redness surrounding what was by now an abscess, and said he’d be back in a few minutes to cut the infection out. when he returned, he pointed out to me that the redness had overgrown by almost an inch in every direction the outline he had drawn only half an hour earlier--and told me that, had i waited another day i’d have probably lost the leg. as it was, i was bedridden on powerful iv antibiotics for almost a week, with a month of oral antibiotics after that, and left with a shallow, scarred crater the size of a quarter on my right calf as a memento of the experience--and i'm one of the lucky ones.
so, while i’m all about calculated risk and cost/benefit analysis—and god knows i’ve skated along one edge or another for most of my gay life— the prospect of coming into contact with this shit gets my attention in a way that hiv never did. and when I look at that map, with its big red blotch at the epicenter of san francisco’s gay community radiating outwards into surrounding areas, it’s a lot like looking down at my leg in the ER that day.
you want to get caught up in all the finger-pointing and mudslinging surrounding this issue, fine—knock yourself out, but to me that’s all diversionary. the handwriting on the wall i'm seeing is that the sluttier you and the people you fuck around with are, the more (and ever-increasingly) likely it is that you’re gonna come into contact with MRSA. god’s judgment on fags? hell, no—just one more little reminder by mother nature about the consequences of excess.
yours truly,
larry kramer
see, several years ago, i got a small cut on the outside of my right calf, which was healing normally until one day it wasn’t—it became sore and inflamed in a way that it hadn’t been even when it was fresh, and then little red spider legs of infection began pushing their way outward from the wound.
at the emergency room, the first doctor who examined me did something i thought at the time to be very un-doctorly: he took a ball-point pen from his pocket, bent over my leg and outlined the redness surrounding what was by now an abscess, and said he’d be back in a few minutes to cut the infection out. when he returned, he pointed out to me that the redness had overgrown by almost an inch in every direction the outline he had drawn only half an hour earlier--and told me that, had i waited another day i’d have probably lost the leg. as it was, i was bedridden on powerful iv antibiotics for almost a week, with a month of oral antibiotics after that, and left with a shallow, scarred crater the size of a quarter on my right calf as a memento of the experience--and i'm one of the lucky ones.
so, while i’m all about calculated risk and cost/benefit analysis—and god knows i’ve skated along one edge or another for most of my gay life— the prospect of coming into contact with this shit gets my attention in a way that hiv never did. and when I look at that map, with its big red blotch at the epicenter of san francisco’s gay community radiating outwards into surrounding areas, it’s a lot like looking down at my leg in the ER that day.
you want to get caught up in all the finger-pointing and mudslinging surrounding this issue, fine—knock yourself out, but to me that’s all diversionary. the handwriting on the wall i'm seeing is that the sluttier you and the people you fuck around with are, the more (and ever-increasingly) likely it is that you’re gonna come into contact with MRSA. god’s judgment on fags? hell, no—just one more little reminder by mother nature about the consequences of excess.
yours truly,
larry kramer
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