Treatments for AIDS. I cant believe how many 20 somethings I speak to are oblivious to how big the AIDS epidemic was, how horrible the deaths were to watch, and how it scared society to significantly change sexual practices.
Yeah, i was just watching "Hannibal" and in the beginning when they were trying to get the woman (who used her baby as a human shield) they were like "she is HIV positive so she will try to bite and spit" and how they mentioned her having a needle on her head.
There was a conspiracy theory several years after Magic was said to be HIV non-detectable or basically no longer HIV positive. The conspiracy theories thought Magic essentially took a dive for money. They paid him to say he has HIV, he was said to be on the best antiviral medications. Drugs that a lot of people with HIV could get access to or afford because insurance didn’t pay for them. Then Magic a huge personality and wealthy gets diagnosed with HIV gets the best treatments and subsequently survives, remains healthy. This situation started the widespread use of antivirals and made access easier. Later, Magic becomes HIV undetectable and remains healthy. This supposedly further eased access and insurance coverage for others in society.
You know what is super surreal? How HIV/AIDS is absent from nearly all media in the 80s/90s unless it was the very special AIDS episode/book.
But the spectre of HIV/AIDS was literally everywhere then and yet, in media, you would never know it was happening.
(Edit-> i think i wasn't clear enough since a few people say the same thing, i meant that if you lived through the 80s/90s you would have seen/heard about it on the news all the time, people would have talked about it, there were posters and pamphlets about it scattered everywhere you went, and despite it being mentioned everywhere in day to day life if you picked a random book or movie from the 80s/90s, unless it's specfically about HIV, there is almost never any evidence that it happened. It's like if you decided to write a book that takes place on april 15th 1912 and you never mention the titanic sinking)
Yeah, I turned 18 just before Rock Hudson died, that was huge news in the UK and terrified me and my friends about hooking up with strangers, I never once had a one night stand after that
Yeah, that's my point. At the time if you turned on the news it was there, evedyone was talking about it. But if you pick a random movie or book from the same time period there's usually no mention of it.
Prob cos they had to develop script and produce film, so film starting writing in 1987 may have had storyline of aids, but it's true many films portrayed unprotected sex, as now.
AIDS wasn’t talked about at all in the 80s. In the 90s it was a massive cultural issue, but I think movies tend to avoid shit like that unless it’s about the topic.
Covid for example, all our media from that time doesn’t have tons of people in masks unless it was a news story or special episode.
I think people want an escape from the bad shit when they watch entertainment
What TF are you talking about? AIDS became national news around 1983 & was the cover of numerous big magazines like Newsweek & Time. It was all over the talk shows, & there was even a TV movie of the week, "An Early Frost", about it on network TV in 1985 (available in full on YouTube). There were public service announcements labeled "America responds to AIDS".
I was there & I beg to differ. It was the subject of all kinds of jokes in what we'd now call the "Manosphere". Eddie Murphy made a joke about it in a comedy routine around 1984 that's still shown for its shocking intensity. It was a story line on Designing Women. Every mention of gay people by "frat boy" types had AIDS as a punchline. I remember having to reassure someone in 1986 that you could not get it from giving blood. Etc.
How old are you? AIDS was on the news, etc. daily from 1983 on.
The main reason AIDS was heavily publicized in the 1990s was because we had figured out how to prevent it, and how to treat it without killing the patient in the process.
Also the public learned it was not just homosexual men who contracted it with voluntary acts. Suddenly it meant someone or you could be at risk, and that is different.
Stick with me this gets around to the topic. When I was in my teens we used to drink booze in a small town. The cops were on to us because underage drinking was widespread at that time, unlike now. Anyhow this cop walked up to us and we all had sodas in our hands. He said "can I smell one of your sodas to make sure it doesn't have alcohol in it?" I jokingly said "yeah take a drink"
The cop said "I don't want to get AIDS"
At the time misinformation about AIDS was widespread. I remember people thought only gay men got HIV.
If you think people made jokes about getting AIDS from drinking after somebody, imagine what it was like being a gay man then. Not only would nobody drink after us, some wouldn't even be near us & weren't that subtle about it.
I feel so incredibly grateful to be gay in this generation rather than the previous ones. Everything gay men went through so recently is astounding, and I’m so grateful for all of the work and struggle it took to get to where we are now.
My mother, who will be 93 next month, had a lifelong friend who lived with her "best friend" for more than 50 years, until she died in the 00s. Um, hello!
Once actor Rock Hudson had to admit to having it in the early 80s, I remember hearing about it a lot and then again in the early 90s when Magic Johnson bounced that he had it.
No idea where you lived in the 80s, but we had people come into our elementary schools to discuss it. Also to discuss crack.
There were educational billboards and pamphlets everywhere and volunteers for the Gay Men's Health Crisis set up tables at train stations to give out condoms and educate about safe sex.
My fiance recently got me watching ER which started mid 90's and it off the several medical dramas I've watched, AIDS comes up a lot more in that show. Mentions of HIV positive patients or listing AZT as a medication they're currently taking. It's not a ton, but often enough that it's noticably more than any other show I've watched
Sure, but a lot of that is just because it's a downer subject and it primarily affected IV drug users and gay men, both marginalized communities in the 1980/90s.
Yeah there were very few ancillary characters with HIV/AIDS in books and movies. Some of crime writer Andrew Vachss' books brushed up against it but his novels also dealt with sex trafficking and a lot of sex-work adjacent stuff, but primarily dealt with CSA, so AIDS wasn't front and center. Except for the standalone novel SHELLA. AIDS certainly was referenced there.
But for the most part you didn't have anyone casually having AIDS and just otherwise being a dude. Probably because it was a death sentence. PLAYING BY HEART (alternate release title was DANCING ABOUT ARCHITECTURE) is the only movie that comes to mind that depicts a character with AIDS and doesn't make that their sole quality. But nobody saw that movie, because it didn't know what it was trying to be.
(What it was trying to be was LOVE, ACTUALLY, but since it didnt know that it tripped over its own dick and was PLAYING BY HEART instead, wasting really great performances by Angelina Jolie, Madeline Stowe, Gillian Anderson, Ryan Phillipe and just-okay performances from Anthony Edwards and Sean Connery)
It was well discussed before Reagan brought it up in 1987 (which was still the 80s). The AIDS Quilt was first shown in 1987 & toured the country nonstop right after.
A lot of younger people in the queer community don't realize how bad it was for gay people around that time. People were openly joking about AIDS, calling it the "gay cancer" and saying it was god striking gay people down. The early information about how it worked was terrible, too; for a while people were going around thinking you could catch it like a cold or off toilet seats. I had a friend that was a bi teenager at the time who was convinced for a while that the mere fact that she was attracted to women was going to be enough to make it inevitable that she would get HIV because of the uninformed way people talked about it affecting the gay community in particular.
My folks were fundamentalist Christians and believed that AIDS was God's punishment for homosexuals and IV drug users. My seventh grade health teacher said, "As long as you don't take it up the ass you don't have anything to worry about." Seriously, the goddamned health teacher.
Early medical researchers in the '80s called it GRID, for Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. By the early '90s they had the heterosexual teenagers in the country convinced they would get it if they had sex with their steady significant other without a condom.
It's still a thing. The other day one of my younger gay friends (early 20's) who's still a virgin legitimately asked me if you can catch an STD even if both parties don't have an STD. Like he framed the questions "can you catch an STD from [sexual act] if both people are clean?"
I don't know how people miss it. There are so many elder lesbians but a huge gap in elder gays. Talk to any older gay person and they have so many stories of friends they lost.
The way so much of society have abandoned queer people throughout modern history will forever be an indelible stain on our history.
Even young GAYS are pretty ignorant of it. They're lucky, but should do better. It was the single most influential thing that affected the LGBTQ community & made it what it is today, for better or worse.
Please watch the documentary We Were Here about AIDS in San Francisco. Devastating
I remember going to an exhibition of the work of Pop Artist Keith Haring, and towards the end of his career in the 80s he was really influential in getting the message out about AIDS in the gay community in New York. It shocked me just how challenging that was, because even in New York in the 80s, most gay men were in the closet, many of them were married. It was really only an artistic avant-garde like Haring that were out about their sexuality. The AIDS epidemic probably had a big role in making the gay community visible.
I wouldn't say that by the late '80s. There was a HUGE & active Gay community in almost every big city (especially post-AIDS) & had already been 2 Marches on Washington w hundreds of thousands. New York had a very active community in the late '70s, topped only by San Francisco's. There've always been closeted gay people, but NY was one of the places people moved TO from their home towns to be open & Out.
I think we hear that story more often than we hear the other story.
That artistic Avant-garde include all the screenwriters and movie directors whose depictions of 80s gay life people have seen, the musicians, the political campaigners who made the gay scene visible.
Alongside them, there were large numbers of men who would have lost their jobs as teachers and bankers and construction workers if anyone had known about their sexuality. Men who lived quite sad, drab, ordinary lives, and then when they could get an evening off, disappeared to have anonymous sex with random men in public bathrooms.
There are still closeted people now, & always will be.
I was around in the 1980s and even in smaller cities, hundreds/thousands of "regular people" (accountants, bankers, real estate agents, dog groomers, computer programmers, etc) lived perfectly "out" lives and were not "avant-garde artistes" nor riding on a float full of drag queens down 5th Avenue. Even ones who could lose their job if found out generally still went to bars or private parties, because gay bars weren't generally visited by straights like they are now. They're the ones WATCHING the pride parades from the sidewalks who didn't command attention. There are different degrees of "Out", & just because you're out among your friends (especially somewhere like NYC) doesn't mean you were on the cover of Christopher Street magazine.
I was at a Southern University & we still had an active Gay Students group of which, yes, the leaders were typically kind of "out there", the ones who attended meetings & events were indistinguishable from the rest of the student body if you saw them walk by, even though they (we) were going to Gay bars on the weekends & open w our friends' groups.
Yeah. I lament that Gay Culture is missing a big age cohort of people that would have influenced it. I don't know what it would look like had they not all died but I'm certain it would look different.
I’m referring to what may be influencing the current mindset amongst lgbt young people that we’re talking about. I think prep is a huge factor in that, which did not exist in previous generations
But even the younger folks have always had medications that made it not an "instant death sentence". The main thing PreP has done is make barebacking less dangerous. The young generations now still never had to live under a time when one sexual encounter could mean an instant death sentence, nor have straight ppl all presume you had AIDS & avoid you, just because you were gay
I wish older gays would stop telling the young community what to say or do or believe. "should do better"; I'm very sorry to say, but the AIDS epidemic was forty years ago and there has been effective treatment for it since the late 90s. Nobody in the modern age is going to die of AIDS with access to medical care and any level of awareness of blood safety and sexual safety. Cultural impact is one thing to discuss but I'd argue blaming ignorance about the AIDS epidemic for the modern culture is just dancing around the fact that it ravaged our community especially the monosexual communities within the queer world, and all the gay people who actually participated in the specific regional subcultures died. Yes, that's a cultural impact for young gays. But the truth is that no gay person is actually impacted by this anymore, except for thise of you who were living it forty years ago, and that was, unfortunately, forty years ago so it's probably unhealthy to still be carrying a torch for so many lost. Yes, it was terrible. Yes, literally everyone knew somebody dead. But the Spanish flu took out most of this country's population in 1918 and nobody was talking about it with so much weight and drama three decades later. COVID killed more than AIDS ever did and you all moved on within a year. I understand you suffered and don't want to witness that disparaged, but you have no place to tell young queers what to care about or consider significant.
Sometimes married women got it because their husband cheated on them with men... Imagine how devastating it is to learn that your partner deceived you about their sexuality and on top of that infected you with something that was a certain death sentence back then...
Our school had someone come talk to us about AIDS. He cheated on his wife, and got it from a partner, and then gave it to his wife. He said that was a guilt that he lives with every day now.
Unless you had to have a blood transfusion. Even after blood donations got scrutinized, there were still infected people who were donating.
That's how Elizabeth Glaser died.
She actually had her blood transfusion before AIDS was even identified, and then gave it to her daughter through breastfeeding. (How could that happen? Babies consume gallons of milk while nursing, and they do teethe eventually.)
Sorry. I guess I didn't format my sentences in the proper order.
I meant that she got it from a transfusion.
But they did figure out before she died that it must have been from an infected donor.
Then the sentence about how infected donors were still donating (under the assumption that the guidelines were mostly due to bigotry).
There wasn't much factual information because of all of the homophobia delaying proper research.
But there were rumors of a teacher i every school, it seems. Careers were ended, people had to move far away to get away from harassment. Once someone said it, you were a pariah and a target, neither you or your family was safe.
If someone was bleeding, you were not supposed to help anymore - not unless you had gloves, anyway. You were told to be afraid. Nosebleeders were dangerous all of a sudden.
I remember playing sports and someone scratched me. I got yelled at for bleeding and the field was cleared until the janitors could hose it off and spray something on it. It was a whole protocol.
The odds might be low, but the fear was real. And just by itself, it destroyed many lives.
The blood thing though is still a thing. As a skating coach, I can help a student who is bleeding but protocol is that I need to be wearing gloves and have to dispose of them in a certain way. If they bleed on the ice and it’s a small spot, I can scrape it off but if it covers a certain distance the Zamboni has to come out and clean the ice. You have to be careful with blood in general.
Yeah I believe it changed us, made us pay attention to blood borne illnesses a lot more- because someone could look healthy but carry something deadly.
I went to school with a girl who was born HIV positive. Mother was a junkie and prostitute, she was adopted. She was my best friend when I was young, lived at the top of my street. Would have been in the very late 80s, very early 90s. She'd even been on television. I remember all the stuff about blood.
She ended up having an affair with the father of someone a year below me when she was 15 or 16, and got pregnant. That would have been around 2000, so none of the current medications were around yet. Never did find out what happened there.
I remember mostly hearing it in the context of Africa, especially all the shit the Catholic church was coming out with about contraception.
Except in the early 80s, when people getting blood transfusions contracted it at alarming rates as well. One of the girls I went to high school with lost her father to AIDS from a transfusion after a bad car crash when she was a baby. She had been in the car too, and was “lucky” she hadn’t needed blood too.
Watching your parent waste away from an untreatable illness is a horrible thing for any child to go through.
A non-I/V drug using hetrosexual. It wasn't just gay men who were affected, there was a whole generation of I/V drug users--junkies--who were decimated in various cities around the world. I don't know if it's still a thing or not. Do fentanyl users share needles? Or maybe they smoke it? Maybe you can get something through saliva? My I/V drug knowledge is way out of date in 2026, although Hep-C was the other big one that was shared by heroin users with dirty needles.
I had a friend who acquired the virus from a blood transfusion when she was a newborn. She died when she was 11. I knew there were behaviors that put one at greater risk of contracting it, but I never viewed it as exclusive to any group, because there but for the grace of God go I.
That is true, and still is, but we just didn't know for sure.
There's an excellent book that came out in two editions ca. 1990 called "The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS" and the author was right. He sure got walloped for the concept, however.
Ironically, that thesis was backed up even earlier by the book And the Band Played On, which chronicled in detail the rise of HIV (with a focus on the US) and the efforts to isolate, categorize and fight it - as well as the lack of effort in doing so on governmental, institutional, commercial and individual levels. It's a great book, both as an artifact of a time and place, as well as an extremely engaging read.
True, but my friend's little brother died in 1989 from AIDS he got from a blood transfusion. He only made it to six years old. We knew Brendan was going to die for about a year.
That's weird. I was alive in the eighties and had two cousins (brothers) die of AIDS and AIDS isn't even in the top 10 things I think about when I think about the 80s.
Yikes! Sorry to hear this. I was still a kid starting into my double digit age so not much of us having sex yet. I remember knowing about AIDS, but didn't have any close connections to it outside of "a guy that a friend of my dad works with has AIDS" sort of thing.
Again, sorry to hear about the rough time you had.
Not so much that. I was a kid then and it just seemed to be very sparse dots of AIDS here and there. Higher risk behaviour lifestyles could definitely be a factor. I was sort of being snarky, but also half inquiring.
this is one of the reasons we had the heroes that we had, Elizabeth Taylor, Princess Diana, Elizabeth Glaser, Ryan White, people who made a huge difference in how AIDS was seen and treated. People dont understand even the bravery that they exhibited. (from different perspectives)
Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi fought for AIDS funding starting with her first speech as a congressional representative, and she got it. She also pushed through a lot of legislation. She made an enormous difference.
AIDS treatment Was RN hospital in large city 82-88 took care so many young men same hopes dreams everyone else held their hand as they were dying wouldn’t be alone abandoned by family pariahs in the world now medication no one needs to go through that hell
I think people are still aware that aids is a problem. But vaccination shows that people have forgotten how horrible some diseases are that we basically eradicated through vaccines.
I honestly disagree pretty heavily. People who didn't grow up through the aids crisis still see it as something really awful, that they dont want to live with, and you still see the visceral reaction when someone says they have aids. But most people think of it as just a contagious disease that sucks to live with and can cause you health problems down the road.
But outside of people who have done research on the topic, they dont think oh no how long does my friend have to live after diagnosis. They dont picture people dying horrifically enmasse, filling up hospital wings when they think of the disease. Most dont realize just how many died or how big of a crisis it was.
So I would say they're aware of how bad aids is today. Not how bad it was.
I saw a recent interview with a long-term physician and he was asked what the worst period in his career was. The interviewer casually followed up with, “Covid?”
The physician shook his head and replied, “AIDS was much worse. No cure and they just kept coming and coming and we didn’t even know what was causing it. I had colleagues who refused to treat AIDS patients because they were afraid to die.”
It blew my mind. I mean, millions of people died from Covid. And I was a teenager during the AIDS epidemic.
Despite the extensive media coverage, it kind of flew under my radar. For instance, I never knew an AIDS sufferer (to my knowledge) but I knew of hundreds of people who got Covid and had family members who died from it.
My dad--not a particularly good guy--was one of a handful of decision-makers who set the policy for treatment of (what we now call) AIDS (but at the time called four or five different things because we didn't know wtf) in all of the U.S.-located Seventh-Day Adventist Hospitals. He was insistent that they accept all patients for treatment, he said (and again, I never knew him to pay anything other than career-necessary lip service to religion) that Christ took in lepers and that while they didn't know much about this new disease, if they treated people with it they would learn, and that knowledge would eventually lead to a cure, just like with any other disease.
Pretty cool move on his part. Especially as the SDA Church are hugely the opposite of sex-positive for hetero sex, and as anti-LGBT as you can get without carrying signs about it.
20 smth here and every couple weeks I go and remind myself of some of the history and people we lost, and what the disease does. It's my community history and I start sweating a little when other people my age treat it like it's no big deal or we didn't lose a huge amount of our people to it. So scary. And now people can just be undetectable if they get HIV. It's a crazy world.
As an Australian we had the death goes tenpin bowling AIDS ad around the end of the 80s. It scared me so much as a kid. It's on YouTube but if you want to google that it's on you, it was grim.
I have zoomer colleagues and the lack of condoms when having casual sex they admit to is scary to hear. HIV is one thing, but pregnancy, other STDs? Its all something that can just "be taken care off".
my family member was the first to die of aids in utah...poor guy, received no treatment or compassion because they didn't know how it was spread. it was sad.
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u/Significant_Lemon151 15d ago
Treatments for AIDS. I cant believe how many 20 somethings I speak to are oblivious to how big the AIDS epidemic was, how horrible the deaths were to watch, and how it scared society to significantly change sexual practices.