Timing, babe.

Today, Andrew Sullivan's blog has a lengthy post about the AIDS plague:

People forget that HIV decimated the immune system - but people actually died from the opportunistic infections. These "OI"s were something out of Dante's Hell. So many drowned to death from pneumocystis. Or they would develop hideous KS lesions, or extremely painful neuropathy (my "buddy" screamed once when I brushed a bedsheet against the tip of his toes), or CMV where a friend of mine had to inject himself in the eyeball to prevent going blind, or toxoplasmosis, a brain degenerative disease where people wake up one day to find they can't tie their shoe-laces, and their memories are falling apart. Within the gay community, 300,000 deaths amounted to a plague of medieval dimensions. Once you knew your T-cells were below a certain level, it was like being in a dark forest where, at any moment, some hideous viral or bacterial creature could emerge and kill you. And for fifteen years there was nothing to take that worked, just the agonizing helplessness of waiting to die, and watching others get assaulted by one terrifying disease after another.

In this immense catastrophe, you had an almost epic tale: no sooner had a critical mass of gay men actually come out, established themselves in urban ghettoes, and finally celebrated their humanity and sexuality than they were struck down in droves. But the next part of the story is the most amazing.  We could so easily have given up in shame or self-hatred or exhaustion. But somehow, we found the internal resources to fight back. We knew that the federal government would refuse to react as they would have had this disease occurred anywhere but among homosexuals. And so we were almost a model of self-help, activism and empowerment. We had nothing to lose any more - and that unleashed a kind of gay power that is the most powerful reason, in my view, for why we have made so much progress so quickly since.

Thanks Andrew*, for helping walk back the Will and Grace myth. 

I think if we weaned ourselves from this celebrity spokesman culture, we'd not only have more attention to the little people out here who help the world go-round day-to-day-to-day, bringing about incremental change, but we'd have better art as well...

Nevermind the separation of Church and State.  Let's work to separate the link between celebrity and substance.  People spend their lives working in their fields.  Celebrities ought to acknowledge that just because they can act, sing, or play ball --  and have a huge influential following -- they might not be the best educated spokesperson on intellectual, scientific or political issues. 

A little deference to the "little people" working permanently in those fields, instead of a swoop-in temporary expertise on all issues by the good-looking and the popular, might go farther in advancing the cause.  Some do stick around and work the issue through, when all the popularizers have moved on to the latest "hot" cause of the day.
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* When you write about what you know, you can't be beat. 
Plus, sometimes less writing is more... less of the substance gets lost in the nonsense posts.