Tenn. Senator: ‘AIDS Came from the Homosexual Community,’ and Anti-Gay Bullying is a ‘Lark’

If there were a bingo card for homophobic falsehoods, listeners of SiriusXM’s OutQ radio show last Thursday would all be winners.

Host Michelangelo Signorile invited the notoriously anti-gay Tennessee Sen. Stacey Campfield onto his show and Campfield accepted, demonstrating a flagrant disregard for truth along the way. The invitation was in response to Campfield’s continued introduction of the controversial “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which would prohibit teachers from mentioning any orientation besides heterosexuality—even if a student prompted the discussion.

The bill was defeated last year, as it has been each of the last seven years. Campfield told Signorile that he thought the legislation was important to represent “parental autonomy,” but upon further questioning claimed that homosexuality was unnatural, unsafe, and not subject to notable persecution.

In doing so, he repeated some pernicious homophobic myths—that homosexuality was at all comparable to bestiality, that AIDS is a gay disease, that homosexuality results from “sexual confusion,” that gay people have shorter lifespans than heterosexuals, and that there is a particular “homosexual lifestyle.”

“I think there’s a glorification of the homosexual lifestyle,” Campfield said. He continued, saying that homosexuality “happens in nature, but so does bestiality.” Furthermore, Campfield claimed that anti-gay bullying was unimportant and that children needed to be protected from exposure to homosexuality, not from the bullying that confronts non-heteronormative students.

Later in the program, Campfield asserted, “most people realize that AIDS came from the homosexual community—it was one guy screwing a monkey, if I recall correctly, and then having sex with men. It was an airline pilot, if I recall."

The existing science suggests that HIV was transmitted to African hunters via blood contact in the early 20^th Century; from there, it circulated in heterosexual populations before quick modern transportation allowed the virus to spread unnoticed throughout the world. (The airline pilot Campfield mentioned is Gaetan Dugas, who was suspected of being “Patient Zero” in North America before scientists proved that HIV predated him.) 

Campfield also stubbornly defended his characterization of AIDS as a “gay disease.”

“My understanding is also that it is virtually—not completely impossible—it’s virtually impossible to contract AIDS … through heterosexual sex,” he said.

As Signorile pointed out on the radio and in the Huffington Post, the vast majority of new AIDS cases worldwide are contracted through heterosexual intercourse, according to the Center for Disease Control.

The more that public figures parrot these inaccuracies, the more they become ingrained in the minds of the populace. And these myths are of course damaging: Not only do AIDS myths harm efforts to control the virus, but Campfield’s falsehoods justify the marginalization of gay people (making them particularly damaging when believed by someone with institutional power). The HIV/AIDS epidemic went unnoticed and unmentioned in America for so long because of perceptions that it was a gay disease; American homophobic rhetoric has been implicated in the persecution of gay people as far away as Uganda.

In a modest paradigm reversal, Campfield was refused service at a Knoxville restaurant this weekend as a direct result of his anti-gay views. “I went in there and the lady started calling me names and wouldn't serve me,” Campfield told BuzzFeed.

Campfield still stands behind his homophobic canards, which he touts despite overwhelming proof of the contrary. Yet as gay rights advocates have known all along, viewpoints grounded in ideology rarely yield to factual evidence. 

Shay O'Reilly is a staff writer with Campus Progress. Follow him on Twitter @shaygabriel.

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