Politics & Power Quote by Loretta Devine

Devine’s line lands with the calm authority of someone who’s watched panic mutate into policy. It’s not trying to be poetic; it’s trying to be corrective. The bluntness of “absolutely passed through bodily fluids” is the point: a hard stop to the era’s haze of rumor, where AIDS was treated like a moral fog that could drift off a handshake, a toilet seat, a shared glass. Her phrasing mirrors a public-service announcement, but there’s an edge of cultural fatigue in “all kinds of ways” - a shorthand for the exhausting catalog of myths that made ordinary contact feel radioactive.

The intent is triage: reduce fear, reduce stigma, and pull the conversation from superstition to science. That matters because misinformation didn’t just miseducate; it licensed cruelty. If you can “catch it” casually, then exclusion becomes “common sense,” and the ostracizing of gay men, drug users, and anyone perceived as risky can be framed as self-defense. Devine’s insistence on the actual transmission route quietly reassigns blame: the problem isn’t proximity to “those people,” it’s the social failure to communicate reality.

The context is also media-driven. As an actress, Devine is speaking from the side of culture that helps a nation rehearse its beliefs - through television storylines, talk-show circuits, charity campaigns, and the slow mainstreaming of HIV narratives beyond sensational headlines. The subtext: knowledge is not abstract. It is permission to touch, to care, to sit beside someone without flinching.