In mid-May, 1988 – thirty years ago now – I was sitting in a dark, air-conditioned theater in musty Washington DC, at the hearings of the US Commission on Civil Rights:  “Civil Rights Issues in Controlling the HIV-AIDS Epidemic.” On stage were the Chief Commissioner Clarence Pendleton, my boss William Allen, and a half-dozen other USCCR commissioners. A few hundred invited witnesses filled the theatre – spokesmen from the medical associations, the transfusion-decimated hemophiliacs, gay lobbies, hospices and epidemiologists.

            At the back stood dozens of uninvited demonstrators from the radical ACT-UP, wearing rubber pig-head masks. Much photographed, they whooped and hollered until the unflappable “Penny” Pendleton told them that they could stay only if they quieted down. So, petulantly turning their backs to the proceedings, they mostly did.

            The medical associations testified that the pillars of epidemiology were well-known and worked:  screening the infected, restraining recalcitrant carriers, and closing known loci of infection – like Typhoid Mary’s laundry or gay bathhouses.

            The hemophiliacs testified that gay blood donations were killing them, but we had found out too late.  And the hospice operators – generally Christian – testified that, in whatever manner AIDS victims ended up on their door-steps, they could still have a happy death.

            Gay activists testified that AIDS was stoking the age-old prejudice against homosexuals, and it was no more than rank bigotry, treating homosexuals as if they were contagious.  And from the back, ACT-UP heckled indignantly about their right to anonymous bathhouse promiscuity. Medical researchers should have found the cure for AIDS, and if they hadn’t, that was only was because nobody in this gay-hating society really wanted to cure the disease.

            I still remember the president of the Texas Medical Association, stating into the public record, in complete bewilderment, “This is a disease with a lobby.”

            At a distance of thirty years, it’s plain that HIV-AIDS proved a decisive victory for homosexual – or polymorphous pansexual – identity politics. A decade earlier, the gay lobby had righteously mau-maued the American Psychological Association’s annual convention into removing homosexuality from their diagnostic manual. And now, what was permitted in the 1960s and declared normal in the 1970s became a positive right. Conservatives expected a slam-dunk cultural victory, not realizing the terms of the debate had slid out from under them.

            No-one (except tiny, much-publicized Westboro Baptist Church) wanted gays dying in the street. The issue wasn’t homosexuality. The issue was public endorsement of promiscuity. Gay journalist Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On had already documented the three-a-night bathhouse culture, a colonic Petri dish for any virulent microorganism. So conservatives assumed that AIDS was proving gay public promiscuity to be a public health disaster.

            On the other side, antibiotics had already proven that the “natural sanctions” for immoderate behavior — i.e., STD’s — could be beaten, like sugar-free soda. Hence ACT-UP’s certainty of a cure.  No-one foresaw that the medical research industry and its public patrons would naturally buy into ACT-UP’s demands – the alliance of Modern technocracy with Post-Modern Imaginism.

            Conservatives never realized that the real debate was the fundamental nature of human happiness. Through my student years in the 1970’s, many of my best friends were gay, and back then, they didn’t believe their sexual attractions were particularly healthy. They thought they had compensatory strengths, in music, art or academics, from living on the “fringe,” and there may have been something in that. But they were tragic in their sexuality.  And they accepted that as such, with some measure of real personal pride.

             Then in the 1980s, the Neo-Marxist Left began promoting a lunatic theory of human happiness:  happiness is found in unleashing our most powerful and obsessive appetite. In over 3,000 years of civilization, no one ever seriously proposed such a delusional, self-destructive theory – not until Marcuse, Foucault and Derrida.

            Until the Woodstock Generation, everyone always understood that Eros is a tyrant – like the Everly Brothers, “Love Hurts.” There were always a few in every generation who lived tyrannical eroticism, but no-one ever proposed it as a workable cultural norm. Ordinary people always understood that happiness needs friendship, and friendship obliges us to control our most basic appetites. So conservatives went into the AIDS debate, assuming that (almost) everyone saw the necessity for the sacrifices of epidemiology:  restraints on the freedom of the contagious – and if necessary, mandatory restraints. But by 1988, half the country no longer believed that voluntary sexual restraint was even possible, and the establishment preferred to enable a sub-culture validating their own immoderation.

            Today, appetite liberation dominates our public discourse, attempting to enforce a moral calamity.  Had alcohol activists seized the media, education faculties and medical establishment, and then codified alcoholism as an “identity” and Navy Rum as essential nutrition, the results would have been no less disastrous for ordinary alcoholics and the culture at large (aka, the Common Good).  Since those hearings, and the public refusal to implement normal epidemiological measures, over 500,000 more Americans have died from AIDS. Roughly 15,000 now die yearly, and 50,000 are newly diagnosed.  “The revolution eats its children.”

            Promiscuity activists successfully hijacked homosexual victimhood, but the real issue wasn’t ever homosexuality. The issue was and is still promiscuity. It didn’t matter to the Common Good whether medical research beat the bug. It didn’t matter what gays did in the privacy of their homes.  The issue was whether our culture could still teach a workable definition of happiness, promoting sexual restraint for the sake of stable friendships and families.

            We didn’t. Thirty years later, the result is the lonely Millennial, of indeterminate sexual inclinations, struggling to imagine a life-long commitment to another person and the life-long project of a family. Sure, all sorts of other factors played a part, like cell-phone texting and internet porn; but the real cultural disaster was this lunatic theory of happiness. It is a testimony to the resilience of nature, that the Millennials still want what their grandparents had.