by James Vayda
Wednesday, Mar. 24, 2004 at 12:28 AM
THE public health experts - and their amen corner in the media - owe Helen Gurley Brown an apology.
The legendary Cosmopolitan editor was vilified in 1993 when she published a piece called "The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS." But she was right.
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STRAIGHT AIDS MYTH SHATTERED
New York Post
March 19, 2004 --
THE public health experts - and their amen corner in the media - owe Helen Gurley Brown an apology.
The legendary Cosmopolitan editor was vilified in 1993 when she published a piece called "The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS." But she was right.
Eleven years later, Details is asking: "Whatever Happened to AIDS and Straight Men?" The article states, "A disease-free man who has unprotected sex with a drug-free woman stands a one in 5 million chance of contracting HIV."
The story by Kevin Gray also cites a joke that made the rounds of the New York City Department of Health as statistics came in showing that the predicted spread of AIDS to heterosexuals wasn't happening: "What do you call a man who got HIV from his girlfriend? . . . A liar." "I feel somewhat vindicated," Brown told PAGE SIX.
Michael Fumento, who wrote the original 1990 book titled "The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS," said, "I'm not waiting for an apology. It's not going to happen."
When Basic Books published Fumento's tome, "Distributors refused to handle it," he says. "Stores refused to carry it. And at many stores that did have it, clerks left it in the basement."
Celia Farber, who wrote an AIDS column in Spin magazine, was routinely attacked because she refused to rehash the propaganda put out by AmFAR and other groups.
"Everybody who was wrong got journalism awards. Everybody who was right got all but driven from the profession," Farber said.
Farber exposed the conspiracy between profit-hungry drug companies, researchers who wanted more funding, homosexuals who didn't want the disease to be known as "the gay plague," and conservatives who wanted to turn back the sexual revolution.
"They believed in what they were doing, not what they were saying," Fumento said. "They knew it was lies. They felt the end justified the means."
At a recent editorial meeting at Seed, the new science magazine, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Laurie Garrett supposedly threatened to quit when a colleague suggested a story about Peter Duesberg, a leading retrovirologist.
Duesberg lost his funding, his laboratory, and his students when he announced in 1987 that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. "He lost everything," said one insider. Duesberg switched to cancer research, and is now touted to win a Nobel Prize.
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