The Poodle and the Paula

Once again The Learning Channel fails its namesake, to make way for more sensational TV shows depicting families as freak shows. Its latest creation, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, reminds us why child protection agencies exist. The show’s gay character, Lee Thompson (Honey Boo Boo’s “Uncle Poodle”), has come out as HIV-positive.

With minimal background information or evidence, Mr. Poodle explained to an Atlanta gay magazine that he was infected by an ex-boyfriend who hadn’t disclosed his status. Poodle said he pressed charges and the ex is now serving a five-year prison sentence. He said turning his ex in “was the right thing to do.”

Message boards erupted, debating Poodle’s claimed decision to make the infection a criminal case. Did he truly want justice? Or merely revenge?

A year earlier in a different kind of sensational television, Paula Deen came clean about having Type II Diabetes. She’d been teaching viewers since 2002 how to prepare gratuitous high-calorie foods; seven years later she received her diagnosis. Paula chose to keep that under wraps and continue her show of feel-good cooking that’s bad for the body.

Deen is, of course, far from being solely responsible for new cases of diabetes. But for three years she kept her diagnosis secret while promiting recipes that increased viewers’ risk. Instead of facing prison time or lawsuits, she got minor public criticism and remained America’s darling Southern cook with a golden heart of butter.

Twenty years ago, comparing Deen and Uncle Poodle would seem preposterous. But with the increasing incidence of diabetes and improvements in HIV treatment, Diabetes and HIV are now very similar kinds of diseases. Like HIV, untreated diabetes can lead to serious complications or death, but is manageable with medicine.

And much like HIV, perceptions about who’s at risk of diabetes are misplaced by superficial stigmas. HIV is still culturally associated with sexual promiscuity even though that has nothing to do with whether you’re informed and careful – and many sexually-conservative people were infected through just one incident or by a long-term partner.  Diabetes is still culturally associated with being fat even though many heavy-set people have healthy diets and normal blood sugar – while many people with diabetes are thin.

A person with HIV can be perceived as having indulged too much, in sex; with diabetes, it may mean being viewed as having indulged too much, in food. According to the “seven deadly sins,” one would be labeled lust, and the other labeled gluttony.

As an HIV-positive person, my heart goes out to those dealing with advanced diabetes, as it seems managing the disease can involve a lot a more than just taking medications. It can also involve testing blood sugar constantly, injecting insulin and keeping a close watch of diet.

Laws criminalizing HIV are from a time when the deadly nature of HIV still had the upper hand. Naïve and scared, people tried every avenue to stop HIV, even caging up those who had it. Breakthroughs in medicine have made HIV a chronic disease rather than a fatal one. But HIV criminalization laws, which vary from state to state, remain mostly as they were.

In comparing scenarios, The Paula would play the role of The Poodle’s untruthful ex-boyfriend. This is not to say that Deen should be in prison too. Instead, it raises the issue as to whether Uncle Poodle’s ex should be there. What disjuncture causes Poodle to be presented as a victim of someone’s careless secrets while Paula’s viewers don’t even consider a lawsuit?

Most people agree “consuming bad foods can lead to bad health” is universal knowledge. But where people often disagree is whether the consequent health problems are the consumer’s fault for unhealthy choices or the manufacturers’ fault for making misleading claims about their products’ risk. Responsibility is seen as a two-way street; that’s a consideration that sex and HIV don’t get – more often viewed as a one-lane highway.

When we jump in the consensual sack, the road has two lanes – no matter what our sexual partner tells us about his or her own HIV status, we still have the freedom to choose to use protection. If people like The Poodle were to punish people like The Paula, punishments should be proportional to the party’s role in the crime – not determined by outdated stigmas.

Lee Thompson said that all would have been cool if his partner had only told him he was positive – he would have known how to protect himself.  But it means he didn’t follow the most widely-recommended approach to protection: to treat all sexual partners, disclosing or not, as if they could be HIV-positive, and use protection. Romance and feelings of trust aren’t permission to throw condoms out the window.

Obviously there is shared responsibility; the boyfriend made the choice to lie about his status, and Thompson made the choice to engage in unprotected sex in trusting that lie. It wouldn’t be fair to weigh these lanes equally just as it wouldn’t to disregard one lane completely.

The two lanes of Paula Deen’s food road were perhaps too apparent.  But one lane was so skewed in Lee Thompson’s favor that one person was deemed a victim and the other an offender in ignorantly-enforced HIV criminalization laws.

For a more proportional sense of justice, Poodle could have opened a civil lawsuit. Instead, Poodle’s depiction of the situation was sensational, announcing the ex-boyfriend went to prison while The Poodle tried to collect kudos.

Today, The Paula not only continues her show on Food Network but rakes in more money as a spokesperson for diabetes treatments. Uncle Poodle’s described ex-boyfriend continues to serve out a five-year prison sentence. And by now, The Poodle himself has made more statements about wanting to be a role model for others – by, of course, having his own reality TV show.