Union Cook with AIDS Not a Threat

Someone fetch me my smelling salts! The Crimson has bumbled yet again, this time making little 'ole me crimson both in rage and embarrassment: In the May 19th issue, Mr. Stephen Frank wrote a story whose eye-catching headline proclaimed: "HDS Food Safety is Questioned: Cook Died of AIDS." This tabloid-like text reeks of the spirit of the illustrious Mr. Hearst who, as we all know, had a particular penchant for yellow--journalism, that is.

Such diabolical discursiveness coerces the reader into concluding that the contaminated cook knowingly placed the defenseless "general public" at risk for HIV infection simply by doing his job.

And when we sink our teeth into the meat of this article we discover that Mr. Frank's journalistic jabberwocky is not only mostly gristle but barely half-baked! All this in an article deemed a "news analysis." Unfortunately, Mr. Frank's rhetorical and seemingly gratuitous deployment of Mr. Burke's HIV-infected body as the "source" of possible communal corruption is nothing but old news.

In what appears to be a sick voyeuristic obsession with that deteriorating body, Frank quotes "eye-witnesses" who claim that Burke "continued to prepare food while he was deathly ill" and "appeared gaunt and sickly in the months preceding his departure" even though he never disclosed his HIV status. One cannot help but wonder whether Mr. Frank believes that AIDS becomes an issue only when it is "visible."

Well, I have some news for Mr. Frank--what you can't see can and will hurt you! In a more comical moment, Mr. Frank reports that Burke didn't always wear plastic gloves "even on one occasion when he had an open blister on his hand." Irresponsible, uneducated statements such as these fuel the flames of AIDSphobia which spread like wildfire and legitimate the tactics of lunatics like William F. Buckley and Jerry Falwell. This blatant disregard for the actual modes of HIV transmission is a slap in the face to those, like myself, who have devoted their lives to making sure people know the "facts" about HIV and AIDS.

How many times do we have to say, "HIV is not spread by casual contact" for certain people to believe it? AIDS educators promulgate such crucial facts not simply for their own health but for the health of those uninformed individuals like Mr. Frank. Furthermore, in the second decade of this pandemic, Mr. Frank's abysmal failure of AIDS-101 is nothing less than despicable, not mention egregious, deplorable and unconscionable.

In closing, I would suggest that in the future Mr. Frank leave the use of chimerical coloratura to the opera divas because opera, as we all know, is a genre of the make-believe, unlike ethical journalism. Paul B. Franklin   Bisexual, Gay and Lesbian Issues Tutor   Winthrop House