Official GBS feedback thread v 2.1 (now with more self-ownage!)

The Something Awful Forums > Main > General Bullshit > Official GBS feedback thread v 2.1 (now with more self-ownage!)

UKJeff: May 17, 2023; by vyelkin

Rust Martialis posted:

It's been a homophobic slur from the 80s. Having been alive and known about it as I was studying microbiology and the outbreak of weird diseases like Kaposi's and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia in young, healthy gay males where it was first called GRID - Gay-Related Immune Disorder. The politics of getting the Reagan administration to fund research into HIV because it was literally "a gay disease"... you can't just handwave away decades of the history of the term. If you're okay with calling something "gay" as a slur then I suppose calling it "totally AIDS" or the like is not a problem.

Before someone says it's no different from calling something "cancer", doing so is just profoundly ignoring the history of linking AIDS with gay men for decades, versus the utter lack of cancer having the same history.

That there's an article on Discrimination against HIV

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination_against_people_with_HIV/AIDS

I don't think cancer comes with anything like this stigma. Although Sontag wrote on cancer link

Edit: I should say anyone young enough to have missed the history of HIV in the 80s and 90s and thinks nothing of casually using the term should educate themselves about it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_in_the_United_States#Public_perception