News :: GLBT
AIDS at 25 :: The Path Ahead by David Foucher
EDGE PublisherSunday May 21, 2006 In 1978, when gay men in the U.S. and Sweden began to show signs of opportunistic infections that previously preyed on weakened immune systems, the world ignored it. On June 5th 1981, when three gay men in Los Angeles were diagnosed with Pneumocystis Carinii Pneumonia (PCP) in fairly rapid succession, the CDC produced an alert that went largely unmentioned by the press. The new disease that summer was labeled on Fire Island as the "gay cancer," and yet our own community still took little note.
That fall, more men began to be hospitalized, sickened with purple skin cancers and bouts of pneumonia that invariably led to quick death - and gay men began to wake up.
It was, perhaps, a little late - yet the disease was insidious and potent, took political, cultural and religious hold of an American decade that, shy of its failures to bear witness to the devastation of its disenfranchised own, might have been remembered as an indelible period of social progress.
Twenty five years later, the virus is still with us - mutated and muted, but here nonetheless. And its path through the course of that quarter century has cost a million lives even as it galvanized the gay community, quickening its humanization and leading, however indirectly, to an evolution whose civil progeny the GLBT community enjoys today - for it’s unlikely that gays would have so quickly gained liberties or enjoyed "Will & Grace" were it not for the disease that nearly robbed them of existence, and the innumerable people, gay and straight alike, who fought for life instead.
And today, in the wake of an exhausting quarter century of emotional toll, with infection rates back on the rise, the history of AIDS seems inexplicably in the distant past.
"A lot of people just don’t get the history of this," laments Bonnie Goldman, editorial director at TheBody.com, arguably the most comprehensive website dedicated to the disease. "Everyone was dying of this not fifteen years ago. We need to remember that."
Goldman recalls the early years of AIDS as a time of fear, ignorance and intolerance. It took years for the disease to even have a name, and faced with its unknown causes and certain death for those infected, the gay community itself turned an apathetic eye to it - an apathy ironically reminiscent of the "flaming youth" culture at work in the community today. Live hard and die young, they felt - and for many, they did.
"My first experience was back in that period," recalls Rebecca Haag, the Executive Director of AIDS Action Committee in Boston. "I knew friends - gay men - who got sick after the first few years. At first, it was just something we read in the newspaper. Then I started to lose friends, and for many others in the gay community, it started to have a personal face when we all started to lose people we knew and loved."
Invariably, however, the community as a whole sobered up; in the wake of public support undermined by the discomfort of having to look upon a lifestyle largely considered repulsive, gays realized they had to look to their own. Research proceeded slowly - it wasn’t until 1984 that the National Cancer Institute declared that they had discovered HTLV-III, the virus that caused AIDS. And it took four years and more than 10,000 deaths for Ronald Reagan to publicly acknowledge the presence of the viral killer. By the time Glaxo Wellcome announced the availability of AZT (zidovudine, Retrovir®) in 1987, nearly 20,000 had died.
"It’s hard to go back to that period and remember that something that started so slowly could so quickly and silently become a leading cause of death," states James W. Curran, MD, MPH, who for years led the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and spearheaded efforts to investigate the first known AIDS cases in the early 1980s. "It seemed to know no bounds, it’s an insidious virus. We thought it was such a small problem back then, and I’m always haunted by the thought that in the 80s we underestimated AIDS."
Next: The tide turns»
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