Paul Garner comes across as a Louise Hay of the 21st century. Way back in the 1980s Louise told early AIDS sufferers they could cure themselves. Hay's ideology was that people created their own diseases, and could cure themselves by thought and by self love. Hay's ideology was not benign, it was full of blame, held out hope, but induced the guilt of failure.
'How Louise Hay’s Spiritual Pseudoscience Harmed a Generation of Gay Men'
'... The reality of, say, having acne because of hormones, or getting cancer because of environmental or hereditary reasons, did not interest Hay. There was no place for viruses.
And there was no place for the virus that caused AIDS. Which is ironic, because it was the advent of HIV that thrust Hay into prominence in the mid-1980s. Her exploding popularity was fueled by the explosion of a disease of the immune system that had no known cause, for years had no treatment, and still has no cure.
It’s hard now to imagine the extent of the fear, paranoia, and ostracism in the early years of the epidemic. People with AIDS were absolute pariahs. To health professionals, they were hopeless cases, to be offered palliative care and denied hope. To a scared society, they were disease vectors, to be condemned for their disease and, if they were gay, for their sexuality. For their families, they were often embarrassments, to be secreted away when they returned home to die, or else cast into the wilderness, thanks to what writer and activist Sarah Schulman has defined as “familial homophobia.” ......
...... Enter Louise Hay. As Schulman has pointed out, certain figures of the early AIDS era like Louise Hay slipped into the role that many mothers of children with AIDS had shirked. When Hay emerged, there was little love and care, maternal or otherwise, to be found for people affected by AIDS—especially from any institutional or spiritual authority .....
.....To these desperate people Louise Hay offered open if judgmental arms; emotional group encounters known as Hayrides; teddy bears to cuddle; mirrors in which you could affirm your worth no matter how bad your Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions; a simulacrum of science; and spiritually nutty notions. Certainly some people found in Hay the support, recognition, and nurture that they couldn’t find elsewhere.
But others were wounded by Hay’s subversively pernicious judgment, rooted as it was in a tragically fatuous view of the body that made the medieval science of humours look like third-year Harvard Medical School. The last thing people with AIDS needed to hear was that they had caused their own illness.
Some of Hay’s disciples, believing they had failed to follow her dicta well enough, died ashamed, disempowered, and betrayed. Many AIDS survivors and caregivers have testified to the tragic personal cost of Hay’s philosophy, and what some have called her brutal dismissal of actual people with AIDS, including the poor and people of color, as well as her willingness to profit personally through the pain of the sick, the psychically unsettled, and the terminally ill.
Hay faded out of prominence among people with AIDS—as people with AIDS and health care activists built their own systems of support, care, spirituality, and political action. The most vital of those communities was centered around organizations like ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, which used direct action to seek an end the AIDS crisis—challenging the government, demanding new drug protocols, protesting the Catholic Church and religious fundamentalists for their organized hatefulness, and generally bringing people together for a cause that was life-or-death to each of them but that transcended the personal to become a common urge toward justice'
https://slate.com/human-interest/20...ce-harmed-the-aids-generation-of-gay-men.html
