> I never voted for quarantine, but I am taken aback by the reaction
> on this list that the only motive for quarantine would be gay
> bashing/oppression.
I think where I disagree with Joanna is that I would assume that the government (if I was writing only for an English list I would say 'State', not 'Government', but the meaning I think is not quite right for US listers) was not to be trusted as a starting point. In the abstract there is nothing wrong with any public policy using compulsion for the greater good - except that capitalist governments in the Western world have demonstrated their default position hostility to social progress and civil rights.
And that would be my basic criticism of the AIDS awareness campaigns as well - they assumed that the government was a force for good. I would assume from the outset that it was a force for bad, and that the willingness of health authorities to get behind AIDS awareness was due to their willingness to give ground on the sanctity of the heterosexual family if they got to associate sexual promiscuity with death in the public mind. Foucault was wrong on the fact of AIDS, but he was right on the puritanical meaning of AIDS awareness.