Once Upon a Virus explores how contemporary, or "urban," legends are indicators of culturally complex attitudes toward health and illness. Tracing the rich tradition of AIDS legends in relation to current scholarship on belief, Diane Goldstein shows how such stories not only articulate widespread perceptions of risk, health care, and health policy, they also influence official and scientific approaches to the disease and its management. Notions that appear in narratives of who gets AIDS, how and why, are indicators of broad issues involving health beliefs, concerns, and needs.
Once Upon a Virus
AIDS Legends and Vernacular Risk PerceptionBy Diane E. GoldsteinUtah State University Press
Copyright © 2004 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-87421-587-8Contents
Acknowledgments.................................................................................................................................................................ixIntroduction Philosophizing in a War Zone......................................................................................................................................xiii1 "Tag, You've Got AIDS" HIV in Folklore and Legend............................................................................................................................12 Bad People and Body Fluids Contemporary Legend and AIDS Discourse............................................................................................................243 Making Sense Narrative and the Development of Culturally Appropriate Health Education........................................................................................554 What Exactly Did They Do with That Monkey, Anyway? Contemporary Legend, Scientific Speculation, and the Politics of Blame in the Search for AIDS Origins.....................775 Welcome to the Innocent World of AIDS Cultural Viability, Localization, and Contemporary Legend..............................................................................1006 "Billy Ray Virus" The Folk Creation and Official Maintenance of a Public Health Scapegoat....................................................................................1167 "Banishing All the Spindles from the Kingdom" Reading Needle-Prick Narratives as Resistance..................................................................................1398 Once Upon a Virus Public Health and Narrative as a Proactive Form............................................................................................................157Index to Legends and Legend Types...............................................................................................................................................179References Cited................................................................................................................................................................182Index...........................................................................................................................................................................201
Chapter One
"Tag, You've Got AIDS" HIV in Folklore and Legend
One Sunday afternoon as I worked in the garden of my house in St. John's, I was distracted by five children playing tag in the neighbor's yard. The game didn't seem to be very different from the one I had played as a child. In that game, the one whom we called "it" ran around trying to catch the others, ultimately gaining on someone enough to touch them and thereby transfer "itness." This would then free up the former "it" to run and require that the new person in that role be the chaser. When the transfer happened, the chasing child would yell, "Tag, you're it, now catch me." Because I always thought it was interesting that we were such slaves to narrating what was taking place at the moment of transfer, I moved my gardening closer to the fence where I could overhear the children. To my surprise I heard the oldest child, who was around seven or eight years of age, say, "Tag, you've got AIDS." Part of me was pleased that a seven-year-old child knew what AIDS was, that public awareness had hit even the youngest sectors of society. But another part of me was terrified to see that the stigmatization of AIDS had drifted into the popular culture of one so young.
AIDS Folklore and Disease in Popular Discourse
I had never thought about "tag, you're it" as a contagion and immunity game, but the addition of the AIDS tag line reminded me that a number of children's games are about fear of infection. We played several "cooties" games as children and created a paper fortune-teller that we called a "cootie catcher." Getting "cooties" was an enormous thing to us children, although I don't think any of us had the slightest idea what a "cootie" was. We did know, however, that "cooties" was something you caught and something you didn't want to have. Children's folklorist Simon Bronner notes that cooties came into play among children in the early 1950s, the time of the polio epidemic in the United States. Bronner goes on to say,
The polio epidemic was especially disconcerting to many Americans because the healthy and wealthy, who it was thought should be immune to such affliction because of their clean and honorable living, contracted it, and distrustful, blaming eyes turned toward lower classes. It turned out that the disease probably spread from person to person (the virus normally attaches to living tissue cells) by intimate human contact although unsanitary conditions, especially fecal and sewage contamination, could support the virus.... During the scare, children were pulled out of swimming pools in fear of contagion and told to avoid touching other children because of dread for the debilitating polio virus which could paralyze or kill its victims. The cooties complex became among children a way to playfully dramatize the dread of the disease while also bringing out social relations underlying the modern emphasis on cleanliness and appearance, relations important to adult ways of dealing with one another. (1990:107)
The historical emphasis in children's folklore on fears of infection, childhood obsessions with body parts, fluids, and emissions and concerns about diversity and conformity suggest that AIDS would quite naturally be a focus of children's play. Bronner reports in relation to AIDS games (1990:109) one played with three bowls filled with ketchup, mustard, and water, which are placed in a box. Players were to blindly reach over the box and put their fingers into one of the three bowls. If they put their fingers in mustard, they had rabies. If they touched ketchup, they had AIDS. If they touched water, they were "immune" from all diseases. Like the polio epidemic in the 1950s, AIDS affects the lives of children as well as adults, through the experience of friends and family members with the disease, through fear and prejudice expressed in and around the home, and through media coverage.
It should not surprise us that AIDS has entered children's popular culture, not just through games, but in songs and rhymes as well. In their book on children's subversive folklore, Sherman and Weisskopf include a rhyme sent to them by the father of a sixth-grade girl, who was overheard with her friends singing the following parody of a song from the 1988 children's television show "Barney." Barney was a stuffed purple dinosaur, who opened every show with a song that said, "I love you, you love me, we're a happy family / With a great big hug and a kiss from me to you / Won't you say you love me too?" The girls sang,
I love you, you loved me Barney has got HIV Barney jumped on Baby Bop one time That's called rape and that's a crime. I hate you, you hate me Barney died of HIV Tripped on a skate and fell on a whore No more purple dinosaur I hate you, you hate me Baby Bop fucked with Barney He gave a hop and she said to stop Now they have...
