Bill Donohue
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is accusing the late New York City Mayor Ed Koch of mishandling the AIDS crisis and wants Koch’s name off the Queensboro Bridge; it was renamed for the Jewish mayor in 2011. But now the Marxist Muslim wants to scrub the bridge of any mention of Koch.
If anyone is responsible for AIDS, it is those who engaged in promiscuous lethal sex acts in the bathhouses. This is not an opinion. Here’s the proof. (For the citations, see my book, The New Freedom: Individualism and Collectivism in the Social Lives of Americans.)
There is no way to discuss gay liberation, and the transmission of AIDS, without mentioning the role of the bathhouse. Many gays in the 1970s and 1980s revered it. That is why they resisted closing them down, even after AIDS was uncovered in 1981. Gay writer Randy Shilts did not exaggerate when he said that bathhouses “were biological cesspools for infection.” He named the cause and the effect. “Bathhouses guaranteed the rapid spread of AIDS among gay men.”
In the mid-1980s, Bruce Mailman, owner of the four-story St. Marks Bath in the East Village, accused Mayor Koch, and others like him, of calling bathhouse owners “vile” and “merchants of death.” In doing so, they were allegedly demonstrating “a regrettable lack of sensitivity to our constitutional rights.” Where in the Constitution it ordains a right to have sex orgies in public facilities he did not say.
In a stunning admission, Mailman argued that “Closing bathhouses and other establishments catering to homosexuals will, as a practical matter, leave homosexual men with virtually no havens for assembly.” The New York Times agreed. So if we take away their beloved bathhouses, they will have no place to hang out.
A number of studies done after AIDS was discovered found that the majority of gays refused to practice safe sex. Was Koch to blame for that? Moreover, it was learned that the two categories of homosexuals who showed the least willingness to alter their sex life were the most well-educated and the bathhouse patrons.
The brainy ones believed, like Michael Foucault, the great French intellectual who frequented New York bathhouses, that AIDS was a social construct, a made-up disease designed to scare gays. He died of this “social construct.” As expected, the bathhouse patrons refused to tap their brakes and so they, too, wound up dead due to this “social construct.”
AIDS is not a social construct—it is a disease that claims the lives of irresponsible persons who refuse to exercise restraint. Ed Koch did not make these men irresponsible, and indeed if they had listened to his advice and closed the bathhouses, fewer of them would have died.
For Mamdani to blame Koch for this self-induced disease is obscene. He is contributing to the myth that those who practice promiscuous anal sex have nothing to do with their debilitating condition. That is a lie and he knows it.
Contact Mamdani’s communications director, Lekha Sunder: [email protected]
