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The most heated exchange came when Abraham [the District Attorney] and city Health Commissioner Robert K. Ross refused to say how many teenage boys had reported having sex with Savitz.
Officials vowed they would never say whether any of those teenagers were found to have contracted AIDS…. Ross said it is difficult to ascertain how many teenagers engaged in highest-risk activity—unprotected anal sex with Savitz.
As reporters tried to get Ross to pinpoint how many youths might have been put at risk of AIDS by their contact with Savitz, the questioning was cut off and Ross was escorted from the podium …
Before he left the podium, however, Ross continued to insist that the potential health threat was not as great as officials, including Abraham, had suggested.
It is easy to start an AIDS panic.
Existing societal fears and stereotypes quickly amalgamate with misrepresentations of medical and sociological facts. Once started, AIDS panics take on a life of their own. Although we might believe that information can offset the public's fears, cultural narratives of perversion and contagion seem endlessly capable of turning apparently interpretation-proof facts into ammunition for panics and discrimination.
Panics are most volatile when a class of “innocent” victims can be constructed. But in the context of a largely sexually transmitted disease, the very notion of innocence is itself constituted by fears and convictions that have little to do with any actual possibility of transmitting an aetiologic agent. I want to use the media coverage from a recent AIDS-panic to unearth at least some of the cultural logic about sexuality which fuels rather than quells fears of large-scale contagion.
On March 25, 1992, “Uncle Eddie” Savitz, a Philadelphia