The article on the left is about sharks not getting cancer. This is Omni, after all.

As I go through old Omni magazines, I am struck by George Eliot’s dictum that history is adept at changing costume while remaining the same.¹

One of those “changes in costume” is how political correctness doesn’t just shape a conversation, it shapes policy. And like most forms of censorship, it shapes policy out of dangerous ignorance.

In today’s world of men beating up women and calling it “sports” there’s an argument about “who does it hurt” on one side and “now it’s turned deadly” on the other. But political correctness hasn’t just turned deadly today. Political correctness has always been deadly and often, just as it is today, it’s been deadly to the people it was supposed to help.

Political correctness will always be deadly, because it is specifically a form of speech control that denies reality. It reaches into scientific research and denies effective research. It bars some data from the scientific conversation—and these are, by their nature, usually going to be the most relevant data.

I recently ran across a darkly humorous news item in the November 1981 Omni:²

Gay Diseases

Two mysterious diseases are claiming the lives of homosexual men in several American cities and are baffling epidemiologists at the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta.

“We’re calling it an outbreak of decreased resistance,” says CDC investigator James Curran, “and it’s very, very serious.”

…

CDC field-workers in New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles are hunting for a reason. Since the diseases are not believed to be infectious and most of the victims don’t know one another, epidemiologists suspect something in the gay lifestyle causes these ailments.

“Inhalant anesthetics, such as butyl nitrate, are one possibility, since many gays use them [to enhance sexual pleasure],” Curran says, “but so far we really don’t know.”

“Since the diseases are not believed to be infectious” probably partly due to it “claiming the lives of homosexual men [who] don’t know one another” scientists were looking to non-infectious modes of transmission. They were looking at things in “the gay life-style” rather than behavior.

The elephant in the room was that not knowing each other, in the gay community of the seventies in those cities, did not in any way rule out infection as a transmission method.

It’s easy to treat as a dark joke that the researchers were ignorant of gay culture and so missed the very likely, obvious, and remediable sexual transmission of HIV and thus AIDS. But this is very probably not how their denial worked. It is unreasonable to believe that none of them had any inkling that the affected population had—and still has—regular sex with partners they don’t know.

It would be interesting to know if anyone wrote in to correct that article and those researchers, but had their letters rejected. Because this was not exactly hidden knowledge. I’ve also recently re-read Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. While it reads like a period piece, it was written during the era it takes place in. That is, 1978, three years before this issue of Omni and these deliberately clueless researchers. Maupin makes no attempt at hiding the extreme promiscuity among gays “in New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles”. Especially San Francisco, where the story takes place.

That behavior was obvious then. It remained obvious in the early part of this century when I lived in Hillcrest in San Diego. It is likely that most, if not all, of the researchers knew that gay culture, especially in San Francisco, thrived on regular sex with unknown, even anonymous, partners. They refused to use that knowledge; they were deliberately clueless. They didn’t use that knowledge because they had been trained to never, ever, acknowledge it in an official capacity—especially not as behavior with unwelcome consequences.

That is, rather than being a bias of knowledge, this literal ignorance was almost certainly a bias of political correctness. The anonymous promiscuity of gay culture was (and remains) one of those things virtuous people don’t talk about. If you’re truly adept at politically correct virtuosity, you don’t even think about it. It went against the narrative, a narrative so laughable that Maupin made his name skewering it, that gay romance was no different than heterosexual romance.

This deliberate ignorance meant thousands of gay men dying a lingering and painful death from AIDS when all that was needed to prevent their deaths was an acknowledgement that their behavior was dangerous.

It’s a lesson we still haven’t learned. Only a few years ago, researchers tried hard to ignore the obvious data about the so-called mpox or monkeypox virus. The initial response to mpox, as it is now called, wasn’t to target the behavior that was spreading it in specific communities, but to treat it as an international public health emergency applicable to everyone.

Targeting everyone means targeting no one. How many gay men died because the medical and political establishments pretended that mpox was not primarily spread through unprotected gay sex? How many died because research time and funding dollars went as much to destigmatizing the name—changing monkeypox to mpox—as to keeping people safe?

It isn’t just pretending that men and women are interchangeable in sports. It’s pretending that men and women are so much the same that medical research can treat results between them interchangeably, or pretending that violent behavior is just their culture if it happens between minorities.

It’s pretending that obvious disease vectors do not exist because that would be a value judgement. Even today, you have to read the official sites carefully to realize what behaviors to avoid to not catch mpox.

Censorship kills. Political correctness is censorship. It is the worst kind of censorship, self-censorship. Self-censorship is almost impossible to recover from. We still haven’t recovered from the political correctness of the eighties, let alone from the new lies of the new century.