I didn't understand the AIDS epidemic until I listened to a podcast [1] where they interviewed a gay survivor. I can't imagine my friends dying off one by one around me from an unknown specter. The government pretending you didn't exist and ignoring you because it was a "gay problem". Society demonizing you.
He said that even after it was understood that AIDS was not transmissible by touch, morgues would refuse to accept the bodies of gay men. When people knew they were at the end of the rope, they would ask their friends to throw their ashes over the fence into the white house lawn. That way as their final act, they could tell the government that their active silence was literally killing people and that even if they considered them others, they wouldn't be ignored.
It's heartbreaking, but I'd recommend anyone to listen to the interview if you don't know much about that period in history.
In 2002, I was back in my hometown after some years away. By then they estimated that HIV infection was running at 1/3 of the population. I had a job that took me most days to the local cemetery, and was harrowed by the next round of graves freshly dug, most three foot long. I imagine you can guess why they were so short. And if that sounds angry, it is anger - still - but not directed at you, OP. I went to the hospital on one occasion to see the child of a friend, a little boy called AK, draw his last breath. His name was a reference to the machine gun; a child of a revolution I didn’t understand.
I’m not sure why I write this. I never really spoke of it before. I think I found your comment deeply moving.
Sorry... Trying to understand. Are you saying that all these little kids died of aids? How did they contract it? Most kids are 3 feet tall by age three or four. Also, why so many deaths in 2002? Very effective drugs had been widely available for a long time.
> Most kids are 3 feet tall by age three or four. Also, why so many deaths in 2002? Very effective drugs had been widely available for a long time.
Effective HIV suppression is not cheap, and usually out of reach of developing countries or poor communities such as… pretty much all of sub-saharan africa, where the AIDS pandemic remains essentially unchecked.
Given mother-to-child transmission is somewhere between 15 and 45% without mitigation measures (which are unlikely to be in place in a country where a quarter of the population is infected), we're talking 5~10% of children born infected.
The Australian government's 1987 "Grim Reaper" ad gives some impression of the mood at the time. Of course, it didn't do any favours to the gay community.
Italy’s 1990 “AIDS: If you know it, you avoid it” public service advertisement is indelibly seared into the consciousness of my whole generation. Drawing purple outlines around things is still an instant reminder of that. The soundtrack is often heard overlaid over threatening scenarios much as the Benny Hill soundtrack is overload over situations to indicate they are ‘funny’.
It's one of my all-time favourite songs, since I was a kid. Italian partner looked at me oddly first time I played it at home, as her memory of it was all bundled up in grim negativity.
It's not a song that gets played much at home, when she's about :(
My mother worked in a funeral home from about 1986 to 1997. I recall when they got their first AIDS victim in 1987. They took the body and I don’t recall my Mother freaking out about it. They realized that sooner or later they were going to get remains of someone who had died of AIDS. There were few protocols at the time regarding how to prepare bodies for viewing and I think they simply used common sense. I recall my Mother describing double gloves, smocks, and face shields when dealing with the blood. Despite the times, I think the folks who work in the funeral industry at that time (mostly family run) were truly compassionate about caring for someone’s remains regardless of who they were and didn’t judge. While they had concerns about dealing with this first case, it became routine (sadly) very quickly thereafter. I’d imagine they received referrals from their handling of that first case. And very quickly they started handling all remains are handled as if they were HIV positive.
The only other thing I do recall was some concern on this first case about folks showing up to disrupt the Funeral in part because most of the mourners were from the gay community. So I think they hired the an officer from the local PD to provide security but nothing happened.
I'm sure it varied quite a bit depending on where you were.
In the podcast, the interviewee talks about how in some major cities there was only one funeral home which would serve that population. Those places have now become the only place some gay men want to handle their body when they pass as a sign of appreciation for their compassion during the AIDS epidemic.
The Randy Shilts book it is based upon is a very engaging and detailed record of the AIDS epidemic in the US. He himself sadly died of it, shortly after finishing the book.
Looking closer I found this [1] which is the guy the interviewee was speaking about. It looks like it was his ashes, not literally his corpse. I think it was referred to as his body in the podcast which is where I got it from, but I'm assuming that was in the sense of "what remains of his body". I'll update my post.
It looks like the white house lawn is home to the remains of at least 18 gay men that died from AIDS.
I followed the AIDS crisis in the newspaper from Day One, starting with one-inch long columns about "mysterious purple lesions called Kaposi's sarcoma" to shrines with hundreds of photos occupying whole sections.
The similarity with corona in 2020 is that so little was known, but for years, not months. The difference was that AIDS was 100% fatal until drugs were developed, and AIDS killed a generation of young adults rather than older people.
(There were interviews with a handful of men who were immune to the AIDS virus, but had to endure all of their friends and partners dying, and had to deal with inheriting a lot of possessions that reminded them of dead people.)
Almost all hemophiliacs in North America used pooled blood products from thousands of donors, so just about all of them died. (There's a Canadian film on Youtube that covers this.)
I had no idea that he died of AIDS and that was in the 90s. It's terrifying how recent it was that he would have received public backlash for contracting a disease during a surgery.
I feel like you're leaving homophobia out of the equation. Asimov was ashamed, and there would have been a backlash, because society associated AIDS with gay men. If people had really believed that he'd got it through surgery, there wouldn't have been a bad reaction.
At the time, some pediatricians used to give moms after birth a pint of blood to "pinken them up" (make their cheeks rosy.)
Of course, that gratuitous pint gave some of them AIDS or liver disease for no useful purpose.
More and more you realize hospitals are the most dangerous place to be, emphasized by corona, but the CDC maintains a list of about 18 infectious diseases rampant in hospitals today.
Yeah- I remember being in high school biology class and we had a poster of AIDS symptoms from HIV infection (KS, along with others). Would have been mid-to-late 1980s. Fast forward to grad school- 1995-2001 and I'm working with protein structures like HIV protease and reverse transcriptase to find drugs that interfere with them. Only around 2001 did drugs start to be approved that were really effective.
I still remember that poster with KS and other symptoms on it, some 35 years later. Folks outside of biology have no idea how slow the time frames of some disease treatments can be.
>There's a Canadian film on Youtube that covers this.
Yeah it was a major scandal here in Canada. The Red Cross lost the right to handle blood a new organization called Canadian Blood Services was created.
Many people with hemophilia died but I think people at the tail end of it were around when the new drug cocktails slowed the disease.
As a teen in the 80s AIDS was pretty scary even for a straight kid with no girlfriend. It seemed like everyone was talking about it, getting it, scared of people with it, or denying it existed.
Anthony Fauci had a hard time getting Pres. Reagan to even take it seriously (sound familiar!?). Many conservatives saw it as the "gay disease" and dismissed it as irrelevant.
You know how public restrooms in the USA always have paper toilet seat covers? This dates to that era (the product existed already but was extremely uncommon).
Because of that whenever I see those I think of the bigoted attitude that lead to their deployment and won't use them.
There are more pathogens on your hands than on your butt, as you touch the whole world with your hands and keep your butt most of the time in your pants.
This reminds me of an art history class in college; amidst a lecture covering works in the '80s and '90s, the professor just broke down in tears as a lot of the artists he knew personally, and had passed from AIDS at the time...
They did absolutely nothing. Reagan didn't even say the name of the disease for FIVE years.
He did, however, relish that it affected gay men. See e.g. his comment from 1981, "maybe the Lord brought down the plague because illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments."
He finally, in 1986, allocated funds - so ridiculously low that congress allocated the five-fold amount. He tried to cut it down before passing that. In 1987, he did cut down the money allocated for research. (Which has sod all to do with drug use or sex - we didn't even know what AIDS really was)
The gay community lost an entire generation of men. Because America had a Republican administration that, during an epidemic, chose to gleefully[1] let people die instead of acting. Meanwhile, they chose to privately help their friends - Reagan helped his buddy Roy Cohn to get experimental drug trial.
The whole "they just wanted to suppress recreational drug use and unprotected sex" is BLATANT retconning. Nobody was aware how it spread, people assumed you could get it through touch, saliva, etc.
Trying to spin this blatant murder of gay people by an administration into a public health concern is frankly disgusting.
I think its possible Trumps is actually striking the tune with fellow Republicans to get their likes learning anout Reagan slow approach to AIDS - I was shocked when during last SOTU, Trump announced that within one decade we will finally find a cure for AIDS/HIV. What gives??
They did not see the problem as a black and white problem with two active solutions. They took a third option: they did nothing until public opinion had shifted and Rock Hudson, Reagan's personal friend, died of the disease.
> The first was to spend billions of dollars hoping to find a cure while certain behaviors continued to spread the virus.
And yet here we are, with governments spending billions of dollars to find a cure when we can stop the spread of COVID-19 by reducing certain behaviors.
The difference in government response to the (ongoing, btw) AIDS crisis and COVID-19 has a hell of a lot to do with the fact that COVID-19 is not seen as a “gay” disease, and is not “othered.”
Having sex is all it takes to get HIV. Once. I won’t sit here and listen to you claim it’s “selfish and destructive behavior” to have sex. Once.
Take your thinly veiled homophobia and moralizing elsewhere please. It’s not a good look, and I don’t want to hear it in my professional community.
Funnily enough, in Italy (where I grew up) there was next to no association in the public mind between HIV/AIDS and homosexuality. It was linked to drug use and sexual promiscuity, but it was drilled into us that any kind of unprotected sex (and for most people, that was automatically construed as heterosexual sex) was a risky behaviour.
I was honestly very surprised when, towards the end of the nineties and early 2000s, it gradually dawned upon me that elsewhere there was a connotation of HIV/AIDS as having been somehow associated with homosexuality ‘abroad’.
For us, in Italy, it was very much perceived as an activity-related risk, not an identity-related one. (As I dare say it should be, methinks.)
My point is that the governmental message was deliberately tailored to address promiscuity and unprotected sex, rather than single out any specific demographic or minority.
My definition of 'normal' includes men fucking each other in the butt. I hope yours does too.
Everyone who's at all serious about tackling AIDS in Africa (rather than making some kind of veiled political or moral point) is focused on reducing unprotected sex.
Transmission rates vary widely by sex act. 2/3 of transmissions in the US are between homosexual men. It's not homophobia to observe that some populations are at more risk from HIV.
You’re right. But the homophobia isn’t in the statistics (which the commenter didn’t provide, anyways). The homophobia was in the comments about “destructive lifestyles” and stating that it was because of rampant sexual partners.
As I stated, you only have to have sex once (and I don’t believe that statement is controversial) to contract HIV.
Please examine your own biases, because if your takeaway from the comment that I was addressing was “what, it’s true that gay guys are more likely to get it” then it would seem that you take the comment to readily describe “gays” writ large, which is also pretty homophobic.
It's not an act. It's not fake. An entire generation of people like me were wiped out and the attitudes displayed in the comments I'm replying to are the reasons why - homophobia.
And it is 100% homophobic to imply that gay men are reckless and risking their life, and that they're having sex orgies, or sleeping around constantly. <- All things in the comments I've replied to (not yours, of course).
And as I've said in other threads - no one is questioning that gay men are the majority of cases in the US. But that's not what I'm arguing about. It's everything else that gets said alongside that statistic - as though the one true statistic gives the rest a pass.
So it's not an act, and I don't really feel like stopping. I don't want to let harmful, homophobic statements go unchallenged here.
> Everything said in the previous comments was reported in the press of the day
As a parting note, consider that the press reporting homophobic garbage had an impact on public opinion, and ultimately contributed to the crisis. Just because it was reported does not mean it was true, nor helpful, nor good.
>But you never hear the same rhetoric about irresponsible promiscuous heteros.
We did. Sort of. Heterosexuals weren't singled out for caution about promiscuous sex, because most of the public messaging assumed heterosexual relations anyway. But the emphasis was always on promiscuity.
No, you did not see rhetoric accusing heterosexuals as a class of being prone to promiscuous behavior. Unfortunately, even in 2020, it seems to be necessary to spend paragraphs and paragraphs explaining what homophobia is until people get it. Here is an article from 1987 that does some of the work:
I am talking about sexual transmission, not transmission in general. The study you link to does not suggest that gay sex is responsible for the majority of instances of sexual HIV transmission in Africa.
>It would be inappropriate for anyone outside Africa to say how people in Africa should behave or live.
Here's a thought: it also might not be appropriate for straight people to tell gay people how to live.
Understood. But Covid is of course a different disease, and different in many ways. No consent is required to obtain it from another person. No time spent in private naked. Just be near someone in line at the bus stop and a sneeze. So there's that.
Of course it is. And really, one of the things that gets me fired up is that comparing HIV to the current pandemic is that it’s just so lazy, and inaccurate!
And yet, here we are. It’s a tempting comparison for a lot of people because it’s the worst thing in recent memory.
And that leads to the other thing that gets me fired up - people trivializing HIV as “not as bad” or even sometimes as an example of a “good” public health response. It’s just so different in almost every respect that it’s inevitably insulting.
(Of course this is not directed at you, I’m vehemently agreeing with you I believe. :)
> Of course it is. And really, one of the things that gets me fired up is that comparing HIV to the current pandemic is that it’s just so lazy, and inaccurate!
God, please tell this to my coworker. He's a biology teacher at a high school for God's sake, and he's going around saying that we should go back to school because we don't shut down for HIV, and that the novel Corona virus isn't any different. The kicker is he, of course, still wants his soccer team to practice and be able to play their games and such. And he's, sadly, likely going to get his wish. But, seriously, the man is a biology teacher arguing this. It's so damn frustrating, especially as the school won't do anything about it.
I wouldn’t expect every biology teacher to be an expert on disease, of course... but wow. I would indeed expect a biology teacher to grasp the fundamentals of disease transmission.
I wasn't paying much attention when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s. Probably I was reading Tom Clancy novels about Jack Ryan. White privilege, etc.
> I have to say, you are really good at calling people names when you don’t agree with their views. You’ve made a terrific straw man out of the poster above. Obviously, they were referring to reckless, unprotected sex with many, many partners. Yet you chose to interpret it as a single sex act.
You misread my comment. I'm well aware that the poster was referring to reckless, unprotected sex with many, many partners. What I'm yelling about is the assumption that all gay men do that, which was a statement they explicitly made. No reading into necessary.
> Yet you chose to interpret it as a single sex act
A strawman involves setting up an argument that wasn't made, and then knocking it down. Ironically, that's exactly what your statement does. I didn't interpret their statement as referring to a single sex act, I reminded them that HIV transmission is not only through rampant, unprotected sex.
> You’ve gone all through this thread calling people out for having views that are different than yours. Maybe try practicing the tolerance you preach?
I don't know if it's cliche to quote the paradox of tolerance yet, but I can't stand by while people make ugly comments about my community under the guise of rationality.
> and like the lockdown protestors today, the AIDS protestors of the 1980's were upset by the need to social distance, although the gay jokes probably contributed
You have to be trolling. You can’t honestly believe that people protesting the lack of government action around HIV in the 80s were upset only that they had to “social distance?”
They protested because they had next to no information about the disease, testing was inadequate (and slow), stigma was rampant, and at the end of the day the government was content to let them die rather than search for a cure.
This is an incredibly reductive and insulting take. Don’t make rational arguments at the expense of normalizing what was an extremely cruel response by the Reagan admin.
The stigma from the police was horrific. I attended many an ACT-UP protest in NYC in the 80s. And I was assaulted by people during peaceful protests while cops stood by and did nothing.
>"It's been one of the top priorities with us, and over the last 4 years, and including what we have in the budget for '86, it will amount to over a half a billion dollars that we have provided for research on AIDS in addition to what I'm sure other medical groups are doing." He also remarked, "Yes, there's no question about the seriousness of this and the need to find an answer." Annual AIDS related funding was $44 million in 1983, 2 years after he took office, and was $1.6 billion in 1988, an increase of over 3,600 percent.
You cherry-picked the end of the statement, but you left off the beginning. It says a lot:
> Although AIDS was first identified in 1981, Reagan did not mention it publicly for several more years, notably during a press conference in 1985 and several speeches in 1987. During the press conference in 1985, Reagan expressed skepticism in allowing children with AIDS to continue in school
Reagan waited years, and a generation of gay men died. Better late than never, I suppose, but he didn’t do nearly enough and his response to the crisis is not worthy of honor or respect.
>, and unprotected sex with large numbers of sexual partners, which is particularly widespread among homosexual males.
The continuing pathologization of homosexuals reduced their access to medical services, which prevented them from being educated about responsible sexual behavior. See e.g.:
I live in DC. We have voted overwhelmingly to fund needle exchanges and have one of the highest rates of HIV in the country. The republican congress intervened into our local budget to prohibit us from allocating any of our local tax dollars to needle exchanges.
Particularly relevant given that he's the VP - but Pence notably slow-walked allowing a temporary needle exchange in southern Indiana in 2015 (state law forbade one at the time), and then immediately signed a bill into law that increased criminal penalties for carrying needles without a prescription: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/02/how-mike-p...
Taken together, I'd argue that counts.
That article also talks a little about background, and links off to other relevant articles that might serve your reading interests.
Declining to include Federal funding in his budget is not "banning".
Funding bills originate in the House. The House was Democrat controlled for Reagan's entire tenure. The Speaker or Ways and Means could have added that funding at any time. There was never a line-item veto mechanism.
I wish I had the option to downvote, because thinly veiled homophobia is really a disgusting thing to see on a supposedly enlightened site.
As if straight people don’t sleep around and have drug-fueled sex parties. And my god, swingers were and are a thing - as if gay men have a monopoly on getting laid.
The behavior is not rampant in the gay community; “they” do not have drug-fueled sex parties and fuck for days; they do not promote hyper sexuality at the expense of their health and “they” most certainly did not “just get their freedom”. If you think LGBT rights are all fought and won in the US, then you haven’t looked much into anti-discrimination laws.
You are not tolerant; and I take issue with you claiming to be tolerant. This is thinly veiled, disgusting homophobia, straight out of the moral majority’s playbook (seriously, it’s straight outta the 70s).
There is no rational conversation to be had here because what you said is wrong and disgusting and I hate seeing it on this site.
I am shocked reading some of the replies in this thread.
The average commentator here definitely tries to hide their socially regressive views behind some ideal of being "rational", but even then I truly thought that commentators here were above this.
If you grew up in the church I did, you could have the pleasure of hearing those comments as recently as ... checks calendar at least 2006! (I left after so who knows if they kept that line of rhetoric going).
It’s surprisingly common to hear this stuff today, still.
I wonder if this language and demonization was prevalent in, say, 1934. I can imagine it by the 60s, and certainly heard it in the 70s and 80s, but unsure if this was a trope much earlier (certainly there would have been other anti-gay tropes).
Dude, i dont have those views of gayness. How about you go to a spa with your kids and unawares you see a gay orgy. I didnt say a thing because of my kids and because i didnt want to to be the gay hater you’re talking about. But yeah, use that bigot label carelessly and it will mean nothing
> So, some of that stuborness in behaviour is something rampant in the gay community. They have for example, drug fueled parties and have continuous sex for days. The gay scene is doing itself a disservice by turning a blind eye on this and promoting hypersexuality at the expense of its health. I understand it’s found its freedom recently but they gotta get their shit together
That is the problem with your comment and the subject of all the replies. I don't think anyone here takes issue with you being upset that you stumbled onto an orgy, my friend.
I extend the same tolerance to you even though one time I saw a homeless man having sex with a homeless woman on a public riverbank. I try very hard every day to not assume everyone is homeless. Kind of my way of keeping a chipper attitude for the sake of the kids.
Please don't break the site guidelines regardless of how bad another comment is. That only makes this place even worse.
Also, please don't feed egregious comments by replying—a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls. That's also in the guidelines.
Instead, flag the comment by clicking on its timestamp to go to its page, then clicking 'flag'. Other users did that and the comment was killed. If you had done that instead, then the comment would have been killed sooner.
He said that even after it was understood that AIDS was not transmissible by touch, morgues would refuse to accept the bodies of gay men. When people knew they were at the end of the rope, they would ask their friends to throw their ashes over the fence into the white house lawn. That way as their final act, they could tell the government that their active silence was literally killing people and that even if they considered them others, they wouldn't be ignored.
It's heartbreaking, but I'd recommend anyone to listen to the interview if you don't know much about that period in history.
[1] https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/shame-on-you/e/66787240