lesbianhulk:

So this morning (at 1am) I learned that JK Rowling has confirmed the oft touted fan theory that lycanthropy in Harry Potter is explicitly intended to be an HIV metaphor. This gave me a number of feelings which I will attempt to elaborate on below. (God I wish I still had a real blog. Tumblr is rubbish for this!)

When I was a student nurse back in Adelaide in 2006 I worked on a Palliative Care Ward. Most of my patients had cancer but I cared for a couple of people with AIDS. Some of them were angry drug addicts, some of them were sad, silent & completely alone, some of them had friends & family & partners who visited every day. I was never told how they contracted the virus that was killing them – HIV is so much more insidious than a ravening beast stalking the countryside – but I did know that none of them deserved it and that NOT ONE OF THEM WAS A MONSTER.

I had one particular patient who was in some ways reminiscent of Remus Lupin – he had family & friends who loved him, he was quiet but cheerful & polite in the face of adversity and he was one of a very small number of people to notice a young person falling apart & desperately in need of help. He tried to help me, in what little ways he could from his hospital bed. He saw that I was deeply depressed & found ways to make me laugh every time I did his obs or changed a dressing, he recognised my desire to learn & taught me things well in advance of my studies (long term patients always know more medicine than all but the most senior of medical staff), he recognised that I was struggling with being gay & showed me that it was possible to be different & still be loved. His impact on my life might not have been as profound as Lupin’s on Harry’s but he was important to me at that time & in some ways he saved me even though I couldn’t save him.

But Lupin is only one of two named werewolves in the Harry Potter canon. The other, Fenrir Greyback, is described as “the most savage werewolf alive today. He regards it as his mission in life to bite and to conta­minate as many people as possible; he wants to create enough were­wolves to overcome the wizards. Voldemort has promised him prey in return for his services. Greyback specialises in children… Bite them young, he says, and raise them away from their parents, raise them to hate normal wizards.” I’m not going to go looking for specific anti-gay propaganda to quote here but I’ve seen a lot of it that reads exactly like this. The gays are after your children. They’re going to deliberately infect them with HIV. They’re monsters. And this is where your “lycanthropy is a metaphor for stigma against HIV” falls apart. Firstly, the VERY FIRST THING they teach you when you work with people with heavily stigmatised illnesses is not to fall in to the traps of making moral judgements about your patients or creating a good patient/bad patient dichotomy. Which is…actually what you’ve done here. Secondly, Greyback’s actions ARE the stigma against people with HIV (and with STIs, and with Hepatitis, and with Schizophrenia etc etc etc). In creating the narrative of Lupin as the “good patient” and Greyback as the “bad patient” you have made Lupin seem like he is something extraordinary – the One Good Werewolf (especially since the few other werewolves we hear of in the series seem more inclined toward’s Greyback’s behaviour than Lupin’s). Exceptionalism does not fight stigma.

Now obviously & slightly hypocritically, my patient above is my Exceptional Patient and obviously in fiction you can’t flesh out every side character but I feel like as an author you have a responsibility to really THINK about what you’re saying when you say “[fantasy situation] is a metaphor for [delicate real life situation]”. Because I met a lot of patients with stigmatised conditions (hell, I AM a patient with a stigmatised condition) and some of them were lovely & some of them were mean & some of them were quiet & some of them were scary but none of them were MONSTERS & I’m pretty sure none of them harboured a desire to make other people suffer like they were. I love Remus Lupin. He’s one of my top 5 Harry Potter characters. But if you want to talk about anti-Werewolf stigma like its in any way like anti-HIV stigma I hope like hell this new werewolf story is about Mrs & Mrs Batra-Nagy, their three children, & their jobs as a school teacher & a social worker specialising in werewolf peer support & community engagement. Or maybe about Sam Moyles who got bitten during the Battle of Hogwarts & just really wants to live a normal life but is really bad at remembering when the next full moon is. But I digress.

Remus Lupin is an incredible, wonderful person regardless of his “condition” & his only fleshed out counterpart is so evil as to make Lupin look like a saint in comparison. Of COURSE the reader will see Lupin as worthy of good things & as undeserving of stigma. Likewise, a paramedic contracts HIV on the job is seen as less deserving of stigma (and more deserving of treatment and survival) than a hard-partying gay IV drug user who can’t remember which city they were in when they might have come in to contact with the virus. But there are no good patients & bad patients, there are just people & in creating the Lupin vs Greyback narrative you’ve obliterated everything that stands at the heart of anti-stigma dialogue.