The perils of viewing monkeypox as a ‘gay disease’

By singling out monkeypox as a ‘gay disease,’ we not only unfairly target minority groups but also isolate people who will hesitate to seek treatment fearing social ostracisation

There are certain questions you get asked often as a queer person—tell us your favourite queer film? Where do I begin if I want to understand popular queer history? Do I start watching RuPaul’s drag race, or attend the high-octane drag performances at Anti-Social in Mumbai or Kitty Su in New Delhi? Why are the gays perpetually obsessed with Lady Gaga and Beyoncé? Was Call Me By Your Name a problematic film that glorified grooming and gaslighting?

While these questions are innocent enough and may show the genuine interest of a non-queer person wanting to educate themselves, they often obfuscate the history of the queer movement. There are no questions asked on how black and Latinx trans women made Pride Month happen, how minorities within the queer community died a thousand deaths when successive governments across the world never bothered to treat them during the AIDS epidemic, or how big pharmaceutical companies purposefully neglected the queer population, consigning them to the murky sidelines.

This erasure may not be a conscious one but it’s self-defeating regardless. The contemporary queer culture has many experiences, each wildly different from the other. A trans woman in rural Karnataka experiences queerness that might be totally alien to a privileged gay man sipping mimosas at a beachfront property in Mumbai’s Colaba. Or, to add a swish of wordplay to the famous George Orwell quote from Animal Farm: all experiences are valid but some experiences are more valid than others. It is in this context that the labelling of monkeypox as a gay disease must be understood beyond its immediate repercussions on queer people.

“Experience shows that stigmatising rhetoric can quickly disable evidence-based response by stoking cycles of fear, driving people away from health services, impeding efforts to identify cases and encouraging ineffective, punitive measures,” Matthew Kavanagh, deputy executive director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, recently said.

Understanding monkeypox

Dr Navneet Kaur, MD in Clinical Microbiology and an Infectious Disease Fellow at the Department of Infectious Diseases in AIIMS, Jodhpur, tells The Established that there has been no evidence to support the contention that monkeypox is even a Sexually Transmitted Infection (STI) that specifically spreads among queer people.

“It’s a misnomer that monkeypox is a gay disease or that it only affects queer people,” she says. “Infection is possible only through close contact and such close contact can be with literally anyone, gay or straight.”

She explains that “close contact” can be further divided into five categories: direct contact (from someone infected by the virus), indirect contact (by coming in contact with infected blankets or clothes), sexual contact (that involves an exchange of bodily fluids), vertical contact (from mother to child) and respiratory contact (by breathing infected aerosols).

Much like COVID-19, monkeypox has certain at-risk groups, too. Such groups have again nothing to do with one’s sexual orientation. So older people or those who are immuno-compromised must guard themselves against the virus by avoiding close contact with infected people, by wearing a mask, being extra cautious with hygiene and washing hands.

“There are also two FDA-approved vaccines that are yet to be administered in India, simply because our caseload is much lower,” explains Kaur . “There are also reports that the West African strain circulating in India is more infectious than the ones circulating in Western countries, but again, it’s too early to tell.”

At the time of writing this article, India’s official tally stood at nine cases. However, reports that people might be hiding their symptoms or not getting tested fearing anti-gay stigma is fast gaining traction.

A long shadow of stigma

“The mislabeling of monkeypox as a gay disease tragically reminiscent of the demonisation gay men were subjected to when HIV emerged more than 40 years,” wrote Milka Sokolovic, director general of the European Public Health Alliance, last month.

According to multiple reports, the low number of cases reported in India can be attributed to the stigma that people might face if they were to get tested.

“We can’t make the same mistake again,” Dr Wasim Khot, an infectious disease consultant who has worked with Global Hospital and the Prince Ali Khan Hospital, both in Mumbai, tells The Established. “People will end up deluding themselves into believing that if they’re not gay, they will never get infected. This will harm everyone in the long run, apart from the stigma faced by the queer community.”

Khot said that the origins of monkeypox, apparent even in its name, are zoonotic in nature—diseases that are transmitted from animals to humans and are then spread further. Sexuality has no role to play in this scientifically agreed-upon origin story of the virus.

In the French film BPM, based on the Act Up Paris movement of the 1990s when queer activists demanded treatment and research for HIV patients, we see a cishet woman refusing to buy condoms when two protesting gay men offer her, a refrain, “why do I need it?”.

Khot fears that many cishet people might end up repeating such mistakes, and this might only lead to the further spread of the virus, well beyond the queer circles and into our drawing rooms and even the golf clubs populated by cishet men with crisp polo shirts. After all, the virus sees no sexuality; it only needs to survive and it will find any human body to incubate and multiply.

Avidesh, an HIV-infected queer activist based in Kolkata, tells The Established that as human beings, we always want to find the target group so that the burden shifts on everyone else but us.

“We don’t want to take any responsibility,” he says. “We don’t want to say that our public health system is stressed, understaffed and slow to act in times of emergency. Instead, let’s just blame the gays and the junkies and feel better about ourselves.”

Also Read: How several Indian queers are still isolated from public spaces

Also Read: Why casteism remains the Indian queer community’s Achilles’ heel

Also Read: Why biphobia remains rampant within the queer community