Twenty-five years ago I was working in an art gallery in San
Francisco. I was 27, with long blond locks, working in a gay
industry and living in a gay neighborhood (Polk Gulch). If I’d been
gay myself, I’d have been living a bacchanalian dream. And I’d
probably be dead. Little did we know that we were witnessing the
first inklings of a public health catastrophe in the making. It was
a gay problem then
– it is much more now.
Twenty-five years ago I was working in an art gallery in San Francisco. I was 27, with long blond locks, working in a gay industry and living in a gay neighborhood (Polk Gulch). If I’d been gay myself, I’d have been living a bacchanalian dream. And I’d probably be dead. Little did we know that we were witnessing the first inklings of a public health catastrophe in the making. It was a gay problem then – it is much more now.
This week marks the 25th anniversary of the discovery of AIDS. According to a United Nations report released last week to coincide with a three-day U.N. conference on AIDS, the disease has killed 25 million people, with more than 38 million now living with its viral cause, HIV.
The U.N. report had some good news: virus-suppressing drugs are getting to more people who need them, especially in Africa, and the spread of the disease appears to be slowing in some previously devastated countries. But it continues to rage where ignorance and public officials turn a blind eye, especially in China and Eastern Europe.
In the beginning that was also the case in this country.
The discovery of AIDS is most commonly attributed to a June 5, 1981 article in the Centers for Disease Control’s publication “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report” by Dr. Michael Gottlieb, then a young immunologist at UCLA Medical Center. An article on the mysterious ailment by Dr. Lawrence Mass also appeared a few days earlier, on May 18, in a gay publication called “The New York Native” under the unfortunate headline “Disease Rumors Largely Unfounded.”
In an interview with Dr. Gottlieb for the 10th anniversary of his MMWR article, he told me that he sent his research off to the CDC on May 18, so let’s call it a tie.
Either way, the word on the street in San Francisco was ahead of both publications by months.
One day – it was late 1980 or early 1981 – our gay bookkeeper at the art gallery remarked on rumors of a new disease that had become known as the Gay Plague. Previously strapping, healthy gay men were wasting away – and no one had a clue why.
Writer Michael Bronski described those early days of the epidemic in the gay community this way: “Sometimes life feels like living in under a fascist regime. People just disappear without a word.”
At first it was called GRID, for gay-related immune deficiency. In French it became SIDA, and in place of the real acronym, a French/African substitute quickly sprang up: Syndrome invented to discourage love (amour).
By the summer of 1985 there were over 12,000 AIDS cases in the U.S., with over 6,000 dead. But then, after four years of neglect by the Reagan administration, something happened to get the world’s attention: A personal friend of the president’s, actor Rock Hudson, died of AIDS.
It was not until the following year that President Reagan finally mentioned it publicly, followed by a high profile campaign of AIDS education and condom use by Surgeon General C. Everett Koop.
Worldwide, the public health response was even slower, hampered by fear and homophobia. In 1988 condom production in Catholic Poland totaled 30 million a year for a population of 38 million.
Today, with some good news to celebrate, there is still so much we don’t know. A cure remains illusive, and it’s a testament to the stubbornness of the disease that only a few days ago scientists announced they had traced HIV to its likely simian origins, in a community of chimps in the southeastern corner of Cameroon.
Scientists speculate that HIV may have jumped to humans as long ago as the 1930s, but somehow it remained quiet for decades, and who knows how many may have died of the disease without knowing it. There is an irony in that. The gay community, so demonized by those who saw AIDS as God’s punishment, may actually have served as the canary in the AIDS coal mine.
The descent into that darkness began in the spring of 1981, which today looks like our last days of innocence. We didn’t realize that our two greatest taboos, sex and death, had found their nexus.
