is for Kitsch.  While all terminal illnesses are prone to sentimentalization, AIDS propaganda has been particularly heavy-handed because of the unusual circumstances in which activists were initially forced to raise money to pay for the enormous costs of research, treatment, and education.  In the absence of federal support in the earliest stages of the epidemic, doctors, as well as leaders of the gay community, had to convince the private sector to bear the financial burden of hospital costs, a task they undertook by devising representations of AIDS that appealed to the broadest possible audiences. Because the American public was at best ambivalent, at worst actively hostile, to the first casualties of the disease, it had to be wooed, seduced, and placated with kitsch which activists used as the detergent in which such forbidden topics as anal sex, promiscuity, "bodily fluids," and recreational drug use were laundered.  The need for kitsch was a direct consequence of the need for funding, and the more money that was needed, the kitschier the disease became.  By packaging the epidemic in cliches, activists reduced potential donors to a state of maximum susceptibility to the plight of the disease's victims, who were paraded before us like mistreated animals at a carnival.