"After It Happened" Controversy
In an episode entitled "After It Happened" (1988), a bisexual man is depicted as an AIDS carrier who deliberately infects straight women. As originally conceived, the man is gunned down in a vigilante murder by one of the women he infects, and a medical team in full Hazmat suits comes to take his body away as hero Jack Killian comforts the distraught shooter. In the broadcast version, the victim is stopped before she can kill the carrier.
Coming in the early years of the AIDS epidemic in the US at a time when public understanding of the disease was quite low, the proposed episode was immediately criticized as sensationalistic, biphobic and scientifically inaccurate. Protests were launched by GLAAD, BiNet USA and BiPAC among others. Additionally ACT UP pickets disrupted the show's filming.
Eventually, the tone of the episode was softened to one of tolerance for all people who are ill and a heightened awareness of the need for safe sex practices by all. However, it was still considered controversial among AIDS activists and the bisexual community. Then-NBC affiliate KRON-TV in San Francisco ran a disclaimer before the show with an AIDS hotline number and aired a half-hour live special, Midnight Caller: The Response during which activists and public health officials aired their grievances.
Read more about this topic: Midnight Caller
Famous quotes containing the words happened and/or controversy:
“I happened to find
Your picture. That picture. I stopped there cold,
Like a man raking piles of dead leaves in his yard
Who has turned up a severed hand.”
—William Dewitt Snodgrass (b. 1926)
“And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)