A puzzlement

I've realized something a bit peculiar about the London responses to my presentation about music and AIDS.

One of the questions – really a sweeping statement – was from someone who said they had a friend who hadn't liked to tell people he was HIV+. (Amusingly, I could figure out from his elaborate circumlocutions that he was talking about David O.-S., who obviously didn't care what people thought – he just didn't want to bother with their preconceptions and prejudices.) Somehow that seemed to the questioner a significant point: why would these musicians want to go public with HIV status, with identity positions, with emotions?...

Then I received an e-mail from another participant that asked the same question in a different way: and claimed that this would be the most significant concern for most listeners.

The question seems to me utterly beside the point: what does it prove that you know someone who does not want to disclose their status? It's clearly a personal choice, appropriate in different circumstances; and analyzing whether there are social pressures on both sides seems a bit unnecessary, as most of the psychological and social literature (and in fact practically every newspaper article or television documentary) points out the same thing. Does disclosure make these more public figures (and my own public figure) problematic, or does it discredit them, or something?

It appears that, for these Londoners, disclosure is a bit shocking, or a bit shameful, or a bit ridiculous, and needs to be explained. Faced with all this data, and all the complicated cultural and aesthetic questions that arise from it, their first response is: but why would you discuss all this in public?... and they keep returning to the question, as a dog worries a bone.

If I were back in Hong Kong, and the Chinese were asking me, I would think to myself: ah yes, a face culture, a shame culture, where public image is so important – no wonder they are bothered by this. But it seems so peculiar – this isn't, after all, Victorian or even Edwardian, it's twenty-first century London – doesn't it seem odd to you, that they can't let go of this trivial discussion?...

Comments

[blahfeme]

ABSOLUTELY. What a creepy and strange question to ask and why, frankly, should you be asked to take responsibility for whether someone else wants o does not want to go public with their status? I think, as you intimate above, what is going on here is that these questioners are using real or fake silent others to ventriloquise their own discomfort at taking about HIV and AIDS in public. You'd have though by now they would have gotten past all that wouldn't you? Sigh and sigh again.

It was a great paper, by the way.