Do not sleep with Steven Thrasher: a warning
If we are to believe what Dr. Steven Thrasher wrote in his book, The Viral Underclass, Dr. Thrasher should not be considered to be an honest individual and his credentials should be drawn into question. Thrasher is currently claiming that his tenure at Northwestern University is being denied due to his leftist stances. Thrasher considers himself to be a serious individual and an ally, but an ally to who? If you read his work, Thrasher portrays himself as a regressive individual who uses political movements in order to further his own ends. His empathy towards the blight of others stops where his romantic and personal interests do.
The most notable argument in The Viral Underclass is Thrasher’s claim that HIV informed consent laws are racist and should be removed. Thrasher draws from his own experiences, noting how regretful he is that he told a potential partner of his that he wishes to practice safe sex. Unbeknownst to him, the individual was HIV positive. The individual felt that Thrasher had crossed a line and left without informing Thrasher he was going to do so. Thrasher abstracts his guilt over this conversation over the course of the entire book. Thrasher becomes fascinated with an HIV positive individual who lied about his status and knowingly infected multiple partners with the disease. Thrasher puts the guilt of these lies onto the victims themselves as they did not appropriately negotiate sex, despite all of the victims asking the individual whether or not he was HIV positive.
Thrasher considers himself a social epidemiologist despite not knowing anything about epidemiology. Typhoid Mary was warned by health officials that she had unknowingly spread disease to the people she was working for and was banned from working jobs which would put other individuals’ lives at stake. Typhoid Mary acknowledged this and then continued to work, spread disease, and killed innocent individuals. Mary was arrested for her actions. Thrasher claims that Mary’s real crime was being a single woman.
This is not Thrashers only erroneous claim about public health. Thrasher states that folks infected with Ebola should be allowed to go about their day-to-day activities without stigmatization. Deidentified information is racist as it reduces individuals down to a number. If a traceback analysis of disease spread found that an individual was Korean and a tutor, the analysis may be racist as the fictional movie Parasite shows that Korean tutors can be persecuted. Thrasher notes that he has never been to South Korea, but he has done marijuana in Thailand.
It is important to note that when Thrasher discusses individuals with HIV having sex, he is not referring to individuals with low viral counts. Individuals on anti-virals can practice safe sex, even if they are HIV positive. Thrasher is opposed to the general notion of informed consent and considers said laws to be anti-black. Thrasher argues that a white gay man less likely to spread HIV to another white gay man than a black gay man is to a black gay man because black men are more likely to be incarcerated. Not having sex while infected with a communicable disease is not selfish, Thrasher says, as sex is as important to the human condition as breathing.
To this extent, Thrasher is not an ally to the queer community as Thrasher does not believe that asexuality exists. Thrasher’s view of medical misogyny and anti-trans healthcare policy derives from an experience he had at a student health center. The receptionist told Thrasher that they did not expect an individual his age to be at the student health center, to which Thrasher responded that he in fact teaches folks older than himself. Thrasher thought about this experience and concluded that it would have hurt if folks had assumed he was a woman. By itself, it is good that Thrasher used this experience to broaden his world view. However, Thrasher critiques white people for doing the exact same thing later in the book. Thrasher is not allied with the LGBTQ+ community, he is allied against personal inconvenience.
Thrasher jumps through hoops in order to make it morally permissible to knowingly spread disease. Working at McDonalds while sick is equivalent to a Jewish girl hiding from the Nazis. The bombing of Hiroshima and the 9/11 attacks are the same in Thrasher’s mind because they can be reduced down to instances in which people died. Similarly, unknowingly spreading a disease which no one knowns anything about is equivalent to the entirety of the moral panic around HIV and the anti-queer rhetoric which arose during the Reagan administration. To Thrasher, one person unknowingly infecting others is equivalent to genocide; both should be morally permissible.
Thrasher alleges that he was denied tenure as a result of pro-Hamas activities on campus post October 7th. Thrasher cannot envision a world in which he denied tenure because he is bad at his job. Thrasher hides behind claims of queerphobia and racism while not adhering to the principles he claims to have. This very evident in his claims surrounding the “myth” of “my body, my choice”. Thrasher claims anti-vaxers using the phrase do not understand that individuals owe a certain debt to society. Thrasher does not see the irony in stating this in a book in which the central claim is that is should be legal to coerce people into sex while lying about your HIV status.
In a book called “The Viral Underclass”, Thrasher does not talk about the widespread issues of poverty. Discussion surrounding poverty are framed only to focus on marginalized groups so that he can make the claim that white people as a whole believe that they cannot become infected with any type of disease. To Thrasher, whiteness is a form of conceptual prophylaxis similar to installing indoor toilets in South Africa in order to reduce the sexual assault of women. Thrasher reduces individual’s lives down to baser characteristics.
When Dr. Thrasher contemplates whether or not he is privileged, Thrasher deflects by complaining that the healthcare he has could be better if we were not living in a capitalistic society. Thrasher cannot discuss poverty as an issue because it undercuts the very long sections of the book in which he discusses jet setting around Europe and Asia. Thrasher is educated enough to use leftist jargon, but does not have the empathy to understand what he is saying. Thrasher does not discuss the horrors of living with HIV unless it involves individuals not being able to have casual sex.
Thrasher does not believe in personal accountability if the issue does not directly involve race. In one passage, Thrasher describes how an individual gave their partner, who had become blind due to an HIV infection, a hand job. This is a tender moment. It is also one of the few times in the book in which Thrasher discusses how debilitating HIV can be. At no point in the book does Thrasher reconcile that folks who knowingly lie about their HIV status put others into potentially fatal situations. To Thrasher, any type of discussion around the ramifications of the disease is problematic as it may lead to stigmatization. Thrasher believes this because discussion of the disease scared him into avoiding having sex until later in his life. Other individuals have been informed about the dangers of HIV and have still had gay sex, but those people are not Steven Thrasher.
Steven Thrasher is a journalist without any type of professional ethics. He hops from issue to issue in order to build notoriety and his own credentials. He wants to weaponize social movements in order to continue to live a lifestyle which puts himself at the top. He does not care about the people below him and wants to see the disease burden marginalized communities bare go up. He cares more about eating pastries in France than he does about your livelihood. If Thrasher were to become infected with HIV, he would lie to your face in order to sleep with you and then would object to the notion that he had done anything wrong.