October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Okay, let’s talk about that and its relation to AIDS in Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart. Breast Cancer is striking women and men constantly, and there’s so much media attention telling them to go get checked annually, do self breast exams at home, and always be aware of the symptoms of this horrifying condition. Thinking about this kind of attention that Breast Cancer is getting, I can’t help but wonder what America would be like if Breast Cancer got no more attention than AIDS did in the early years. What if women today were ignored and mistreated just because they had Breast Cancer? Imagine The Normal Heart but with Breast Cancer instead of AIDS. It’s a little hard for me to comprehend due to the fact that Breast Cancer has so much attention surrounding it. I like to think that if this were the case, that Breast Cancer got almost no attention and was ignored in the public eye, there would be uprisings and demonstrations and radical groups fighting the American Medical Association for more research to be done. The groups would be marching on Washington for federal funding to find a cure, or to at least find ways to prevent it from happening to innocent people.
While I was reading The Normal Heart, I couldn’t stop being outraged at the characters like the Mayor and Hiram, figures in power, that were doing next to nothing to help members of their community, whether or not they were gay themselves. On top of this surface anger, I was also astounded by Bruce’s character who, to me, wanted to pretend that if he ignored this disease affecting the men in his life, it would all go away. It’s absurd. I found Bruce to be arrogant and unappreciative of the work that Ned and the rest of the group were doing to try and help, potentially save, the men in their lives. I wonder how Kramer could stand it. It had to be painful to watch his closest friends not care as much as he did about getting attention.
Put Breast Cancer in the same situation, and think about the amount of public outcry there would have been if there wasn’t the funding, knowledge, and awareness that we have now. Breast Cancer seems almost less preventable than AIDS, yet there is more awareness and media attention than AIDS ever got. The general public is knowledgeable of Breast Cancer and its symptoms, whereas AIDS is trickier. Where Breast Cancer is easily detectable and curable, AIDS can lurk in the body for years before ever making an appearance if it goes unchecked by a physician. What if Breast Cancer worked the same way? Imagine Breast Cancer in its early days: women dying left and right due to some unknown and virtually undetectable disease, and by the time it is detected, the clock has already started ticking, and there isn’t much time left. How did Breast Cancer get the attention it has now, and AIDS had to go through so much trial and error? My speculation is that Breast Cancer seems to mostly affect women, despite their sexuality, and AIDS at its onset was mostly affecting gay men. Here’s my next question: how can the American Medical Association, the Center for Disease Control, and the Federal Government pick and choose which ailments to advocate for more when both AIDS and Breast Cancer affect men and women of any sexuality? This is where they went wrong. I’ve come to the conclusion that it shouldn’t have mattered what sexuality these patients leaned towards, but that both types of patients were dying at an alarming rate, and AIDS got the short end of the stick. Today we see hundreds of advertisements about Breast Cancer awareness, especially during October. During December, which is AIDS awareness month, however, I fail to see much advocacy. Somehow this needs to change, and awareness needs to be equal.
Cheers,
Patsy
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