The AIDS Cult is the title of a book of collected essays edited by John Lauritsen and Ian Young.* The ten essays in this collection focus on the psychological and social aspects of AIDS. Here we have included two pieces from their collection and borrowed the title for the cover page of our expanding collection of insightful and often bizarre evidence of the cult-like manifestations of "AIDS".

* The AIDS Cult 1997, ASKLEPIOS/Pagan Press
For info on book contact: john_lauritsen@post.harvard.edu or visit Ian Young Books

The AIDS Cult and Its Seroconverts
An essay by Ian Young - from The AIDS Cult, 1997
Anxieties about gayness, and about intimacy, now frequently express themselves as fear of viral contamination, providing an ostensibly rational reason to avoid what has always been problematic. When HIV is identified with feared (and unconsciously desired) homosexual intimacy, the result is a powerful draw toward seroconversion. The uninfected men interviewed ... repeatedly express the view that HIV Positives live richer, more complex, more "authentic" lives, get more attention, are better able to take risks - including, significantly, the "risk of intimacy" - and that only with such risk-taking can life be meaningful and full. This perceived link between HIV Positive status and emotional fulfillment is just one among many factors now propelling gay men toward seroconversion. These pressures emanate from the AIDS Establishment's group assumptions about gay men, assumptions which are more and more clearly reflected in the ghettoized gay community itself.

Something Wicked This Way Has Come
Ian Young talks about the Psychic Origins of AIDS.

The Group-Fantasy Origins of AIDS
By Casper Schmidt - reprinted from the Summer 1984 Journal of Psychohistory in The AIDS Cult, 1997
The June Bug Epidemic? The Phantom "Anesthetist" of Mattoon, Illinois? Some strange premonitions here. The author says, "It is my contention that the mechanism of 'killing the shamed' is one of the most powerful, though deeply repressed, dynamics of the AIDS epidemic: that which is enacted in real murder in tribal cultures becomes a more sublimated but nevertheless equally venomous outpouring of death wishes towards drug addicts and homosexuals."

The psychohistorical Origins of AIDS
An Interview with Casper Schmidt By Ian Young - from The AIDS Cult, 1997

Voodoo Death
By Wade Davis - Excerpt from The Serpent and the Rainbow
If faith can heal, fear can kill. Feelings of depression, hopelessness, or despair do not cause diseases, but somehow they make us vulnerable. Psychologists label this the "giving up/given up complex." According to this view, the victim of voodoo death becomes caught in a vicious cycle of belief that indirectly kills him, perhaps, as some suggest, by making his body susceptible to pathogenic disease. His psychological state can be imagined. He is doomed to die by a malevolent curse that both he and all those around him deeply believe in. He becomes despondent, anxious, and fearful. His resignation is both recognized and expected by other members of his society.

AIDS and the Voodoo Hex
By Matt Irwin, MD
"Most people have heard of Voodoo hexing, where a hexed individual succumbs to a chronic illness that often results in death, exactly as predicted. Most people are not aware, however, that some of medicine's leading researchers and physicians have studied this phenomenon. In addition, most people have not considered how this might relate to AIDS." Matthew Irwin MD, a family practice resident from the USA, reviewed the literature.

My client decided to die of AIDS
The Toronto Star 2002-05-05
One of the most emotionally challenging experiences of my professional or even my personal life occurred during an appointment with a client. He was gay. He had never been intimate with a woman. He was rich. And he had decided to die of AIDS.

I am Kasper Klotz By Sky Gilbert I am Kasper Klotz is a joyous and amazingly revealing read, which exposes all of the psycho-social issues that every gay men has to deal with and challenges conventional AIDS "wisdom" with wit and grace. I loved it! - Michael Ellner

More cases of mass hysteria predicted
Outbreaks of mass hysteria, including fears of poison gases in the air, may be on the rise, and traditional efforts to combat them may only make them worse, an article in today's New England Journal of Medicine says.

Mass Psychogenic Illness:
Role of the Individual Physician
By Timothy F. Jones, M.D.
The circumstances and social pressures that can lead to outbreaks of "mass psychogenic illness" or "epidemic hysteria" sound a lot like the circumstances surrounding gay men in the early 1980's. Although the article does not mention AIDS specificly, the syndrome has many of the hallmarks of mass psychogenic illness. This article clarifies concepts underlying the thesis of Schmidt in The Group-Fantasy Origins of AIDS.

GENERAL IDEA The AIDS Project & Fin de Siècle Tour the notorious Toronto triumvirate's dialectical obsessions about AIDS. -just follow the logos

Cocktails for One
AIDS Treatment as a Social Sacrament
By Ian Young

A Crisis is a Turning Point
Interview with Michael Ellner and Bud Weiss of HEAL (New York)
"People get a shot of terror. They mobilize themselves to survive. But survival is not enough. It's only the first step. You've got to move outside yourself and be concerned with your community. That's why organizations don't work. They're only into survival, to survive no matter what! They'll kill in order to survive."

BUY THIS DIAGNOSIS! The ad buster that Adbusters magazine refused. A gallery of advertising images with a disturbing resonance.

"Everywhere, on billboards, in the newspapers, on the screen, we encountered the revolting and insipid picture of ourselves that our suppressors wanted us to accept." -- Jean-Paul Sartre / The Republic of Silence

MAKING KITSCH FROM AIDS
A disease with a gift shop of its own.
By Daniel Harris
AIDS has been sentimentalized in tasteless gift items and sympathy cards, advertising campaigns, rap songs, and media depictions. AIDS patients are the marketing targets of New Age fads. Even the AIDS Memorial Quilt has become a form of AIDS kitsch.

QUEER ADVERTISING
From Poppers to Protease Inhibitors
By John Lauritsen
The marketing of butyl and isobutyl nitrites, "poppers", to gay men was one of the most brilliant advertising campaigns of all time. Within only a few years hundreds of thousands of men were persuaded that poppers were an integral part of their "gay identity". The ads conveyed the message that nothing could be butcher or sexier than to inhale noxious chemical fumes. Gay publications in the U.S. no longer carry ads for poppers. Their place has been taken by AIDS commodities...

"The Life of Bryan"
A love-hate relationship with Crixivan. Bryan's adbuster illustrations are worth more than a 1000 words.

Crackpot Ideas
In this article from Mother Jones Katharine Greider argues that the same psycho-social forces Schmidt describes in The Group-Fantasy Origins of AIDS are driving the "crack baby" phenomenon.

Picado en Los Antros
From a psychohistorical perspective, one phase of diseases of hysteria is the depressive phase. In this phase those affected are typically obsessed with being penetrated, either emotionally, by needle, sexually or as victims of physical violence. AIDS fits the paradigm of epidemic hysteria in this respect. The Mexico City gay community experienced an outbreak of needle stick paranoia in 1998. Rumours circulated warnings of phantom assailants with HIV tainted needles and Club Los Antros posted an alarmist report on their web site. When the reports were investigated it all turned out to be unsubstantiated. Their were no reliable firsthand reports of people stuck with needles.

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