I once heard a saying: “You’re more likely to see what you believe than to believe what you see.”

Tonight I watched a 2014 film, The Normal Heart, about AIDS and homosexuality. The story is set in 1981, when a disease related to the immune system began appearing in New York’s gay community. A gay writer, Ned, watches his friends die one after another while the government does nothing. So he founds a gay health organization, calling on the public and the government to take the issue seriously. The film portrays society’s reaction at the time with striking honesty. As the infection and death toll climbed, panic spread — the association drawn between “homosexuality” and “AIDS” produced prejudice and discrimination across society; gay men who had already come out began to question the hard-won sexual liberation they’d achieved, while those still halfway in the closet grew even more terrified, even less able to face their true selves.

Setting the film aside, you can still find, in plenty of reports, a certain loaded phrase: “the homosexual infection rate” — yet at no point in history have the number of gay AIDS patients ever come close to the number of heterosexual AIDS patients. So if you’re looking for where most AIDS patients actually are, you should really be looking among “heterosexual patients” (in the film, when Ned, who has spent his energy advocating for the gay community and seeking treatment for AIDS, is asked by a White House official about the number of infected heterosexuals, he has no data and is left speechless). The rumor linking homosexuality to AIDS gave rise to the so-called “gay plague.” It was later confirmed that America’s first case actually predated this period by quite a margin. Later still, a medical researcher coined the term “Gay-Related Immune Deficiency” (GRID). Though these fallacies were eventually abandoned, they reveal how, the moment AIDS quietly arrived, both public opinion and the scientific community rushed, without exception, to slap on labels. Even some gay men themselves began to waver, believing AIDS was a punishment for their own sin — a fear that conveniently aligned with the doctrines of certain religions. In 1997, even amid the news of the famous gay designer Versace’s shooting, this same lingering fear persisted — the media speculated that Versace had been killed by a vengeful male prostitute infected with AIDS…

On the other side of this blind panic, things gradually grew more rational. In 1988, public support for gay men in France kept rising. U.S. President George H.W. Bush signed the Federal Hate Crime Statistics Act, and “safe sex” quickly became a buzzword. After that, Europe and America took a far more pragmatic approach to public education and outreach — note, not education aimed at condemning sexual orientation, but education on how to prevent disease.

Looking back over a relatively short span of history, this kind of mistaken conditioned reflex eventually dissipated like a foul smell in more advanced nations. And national-level measures — laws, meaningful education — are indispensable to that process. Certain matters of personal life, like downloading adult films at home, sexual orientation, or religious belief, lie beyond the reach of any government. Should any regime try to meddle in such matters, it would amount to trying to alter human nature itself, and the effort would ultimately prove futile. The film keeps emphasizing “self-acceptance,” yet within the larger “family” that is society, if the parents won’t speak up, who would dare accept themselves freely and openly?

The “safe sex” era under George H.W. Bush left me with a great deal to reflect on, and it brought to mind Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — physiological needs, safety needs, love and belonging, esteem, self-actualization — rising from the bottom up, each level only attainable once the one before it is met. By that logic, the need for sex sits at the very bottom, among the most basic “physiological needs.” And yet, under certain societal norms, from body to soul, it is made to feel anything but safe. Sex outside of marriage is treated as something illicit, wicked, shameless; sex within marriage comes burdened with the heavy responsibility of reproduction and child-rearing — a difficult road either way.