I meant to talk about this last week when Michael Ausiello reported it, but apparently a dude on a prime-time drama is going to be diagnosed with HIV next season. To which I say, well...I say quite a lot.
First, this is supposed to be controversial? Designing Women had a gay character with AIDS 23 years ago. EastEnders had a heterosexual character with HIV starting 20 years ago. Pedro Zamora made his MTV debut 16 years ago, and General Hospital took up HIV infection in 1994 as well. People with HIV and AIDS have fully taken their place in mainstream American society and on mainstream American television.
Second, it is a pathetic reflection of our attitudes about HIV both that the disease is something a show can exploit as a plot device for a character who needs some sort of a moral awakening, and is something that still has so much stigma attached to it that it can be the vehicle of that awakening. This is the problem with HIV in pop culture. It always needs to be clear how significant the threat of the disease is: even with anti-retrovirals, the average time from infection to development of AIDS is 10 years, and the average survival time once a patient develops AIDS is 5 years. HIV may no longer be the automatic and immediate death sentence it once was, but delaying a disease-related death isn't remotely the same thing as curing it.
All of that said, an HIV diagnosis shouldn't bear a moral stigma. There is no behavior for which an awful fatal disease is a proportionate response, and I find the idea of using an HIV diagnosis as a tool of a character's growth semi-repulsive, at least in the abstract. If you want to have a character contemplate drug use, or promiscuity (the two logical things for which HIV could be a lifestyle awakening—I sort of doubt that a lab accident would prompt someone to reevaluate their entire life, unless there's not a lot to their life but the lab, in which case I doubt they're on a major show. In the world we live in, even lab techs are quirky.), why not have them deal with it directly? Have them take responsibility for actions they took that hurt someone else?
I'm not saying that I never want to see characters with HIV on television. Of course I want to see folks with HIV, living, working, loving, dying if it's their time. I want to see them, and to see their disease as something that they live with. I don't want to see their morality and their characters defined by it and suborned to it. And I don't want to see HIV as a simple tool. It's way too important, and way too complex for that.