AIDS cards: just another child's plaything?

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

Cat made it sound quite aboveboard. Purely educational. AIDS Awareness Trading Cards, featuring people with AIDS, hotline numbers, plus a condom instead of bubble gum in each package, she explained long distance from Eclipse Comics in Forestville, Calif., were designed to educate people and to help stop AIDS.

Cat edited these cards, and she's proud of them. There are 110 in all and they sell for just 99 cents for a pack of 12. They don't just feature people who've died of AIDS. There are AIDS Facts cards, and AIDS Myths cards, and cards showing the Demographics of AIDS, the effect of AIDS on the world, descriptions of other sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis and herpes, as well as the AIDS hotline numbers for 25 major U.S. cities.

They are not, as you can see, kid's play.

And yet that's exactly what they are. Who buys trading cards, anyway? Kids do. Who collects them, no matter what kind they are - sorting them, trading them, flipping for them? Kids.

Trading cards are toys. A few grow in value like other old toys and become collectors' items. But most end up not being worth the paper they're printed on. And then where do they go? Right into the trash.

Well, maybe not always. A million years ago when I was a child, the nuns, as a way to teach us about saints, would sometimes give out holy cards, which had a picture of a saint on the front, and a prayer plus a short biography on the back.

You didn't trade these cards or throw them up against a wall and loose them on a toss. You cherished them. You kept them inside your daily missal. You looked at them every day. Or you tucked them in a Bible. You never, ever, threw them away.

But these trading cards are not holy cards. The same company that makes AIDS Awareness cards, makes True Crime trading cards (featuring mass murderers like Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer), and Hollywood Scandals trading cards, and UFO trading cards.

Don't those who have died of AIDS deserve better?

Cat said the cards will teach kids exactly what AIDS is, how it's transmitted, which doctors are doing research on AIDS, and how to put on a condom. She said there are even two fact-filled cards on safe sex, from the very safest on up to the most risky. She said that these Medical Facts cards will save lives.

Did you get permission from the families to use photos of their loved ones on these cards, I asked, knowing that if I were Kimberly Bergalis' or Alison Gertz's mother, I would not want my daughter's face on these cards.

Permission wasn't needed, Cat said. All the faces on all the cards have appeared before somewhere in the news. So they are public property. "These cards are not, in any way, intended to be ghoulish," she quickly added, explaining that the pictures were beautiful portraits of the dead when they were healthy, not when they were ill. "We're pointing out these people's death for only one purpose: We need more funding for research for the disease, because it's a preventable disease if we can just get a vaccine."

But it is a preventable disease right now, without a vaccine. There are so many other diseases that are not preventable: muscular dystrophy, cystic fibrosis, multiple sclerosis, all kinds of cancers. Why, if this is just a plea for funding, is Eclipse Comics not putting out trading cards for every disease?

Because AIDS is a moneymaker, that's why. Because AIDS is in the news. Eclipse has promised to donate 15 percent of the profits from the cards to a New York-ased nonprofit HIV group. That leaves 85 percent of the profits for Eclipse.

Each card has about 270 words of text on the back, which means the entire set runs about 30,000 words. "When you put all the cards together and read them in order it's like reading a long article in The New Yorker," Cat said.

But these cards aren't like the New Yorker at all. They have no dignity and they strip the dead of theirs. They prey on the young and they use the dead for profit. Worst of all, they lie to the living by handing out cards that say everything but what they should say: that condoms break and safe sex is a lie.