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Back to history: When AIDS patients held die-ins, they went to hospitals, lay down in front of them, and literally waited to die.
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IF I DIE OF AIDS FORGET BURIAL JUST DROP MY BODY ON THE STEPS OF THE FDA
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If you’re young & either queer or queer-adjacent, think about the number of people out of the closet you know your own age & think about how many you know your parents age. They’re not stamping us out of the mould any quicker these days than in the '60s, except in lockstep with population growth.
I think, growing up, my picture of relative numbers of queer people & straights was unavoidably impacted by the number of empty seats at our table. That might be the case for you too. The number of elders you never got to meet.
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Remember this when people talk about how small the LGBTQIA+ population is. That it’s “such a small percentage of the population to be catered too”. Remember this and tell them, “that’s because homophobia killed them”.
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This picture of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus is often included with the “The men facing the camera/in white are the surviving members” but it leaves out something extremely important:
By 1996, all of the men facing the camera in the picture were dead.
Every.
Single.
One.
Eric Luse, the photographer, said this in a more recent article:
“The men in white are the surviving members of the original San Francisco Gay Men’s choir (sic). The others represent those lost to AIDS,” reads the caption.
Luse released the same photo three years later, but this time with an amendment to the caption.
“The Gay Men’s Chorus posed to illustrate the impact of AIDS. Those dressed in black, with their backs turned, represent those who had died.
Today, all their backs would be turned because the obituary list is now 47 names longer than the chorus roster. For each man singing these days, more than one chorus member has died of AIDS.”
This information started the choral members saying before each performance, “I sing for two.”
The SFGMC also maintains their “Fifth Section,” a list of members who have been lost to AIDS over the years, “Their names are memorialized in our concert programs and in the list below. Their spirit lives on with us and we honor their memory” they site on the webpage.
By 1996 the obituary list was almost 50 names longer than the entire choral roster. All of the positions plus four dozen more, gone. The obituary list continued to grow, too. The cost and availability of any treatments in the mid-late 90s continued to cause more death.
If you were queer in the 80s and 90s, you knew someone who had it and knew people who died from it. Period. I cannot stress the impact this had on the queer community and those of us who were alive at the time, and I know the scope of it is almost unimaginable to younger people today.
By 1996, there were NO surviving original members of the SFGMC. You need to know that when you see this picture.
The men in white are the surviving members of the original San Fransisco Gay Men’s choir. The rest represent those lost to AIDS.
Dozens of the men turned away from the camera here in this shot were also dead alongside the men in white. It is vital to recognize that. There is no hope in this picture, it isn’t a display of a lucky few who avoided death. There is no “Well at least some of them survived” because no, they didn’t, and this time was so fucking bleak and painful it’s astonishing that anything got done. They’d march one week and die the next. Their friends would bury them in the morning and march in the afternoon. This went on for years. Bigotry and hate and ignorance killed generations of queer people. It speaks to the sheer resilience of the community that from that all but state-sanctioned genocide, we have gained so much ground in the last few decades. Much is owed to the people who refused to stay quiet and who fought even on their deathbeds, so please consider learning about LGBTQ+ history as a way of continuing the fight and showing respect. Many of us coming of age at that time didn’t have that opportunity, and made it a point to learn and get involved as teenagers and young adults because we saw what we were losing.
And the Band Played On is quite good and goes into some detail. There may be more modern works that are better in certain respects. I quite liked it being written partway through the crisis, but it definitely requires keeping in mind that some parts may be quite dated.
As far as why gay men were more affected than some other groups, there were a few factors that come to mind. Transmission rates vary based on the kind of sex, and penetrative anal has a much higher risk than most other kinds. Casual sex was also incredibly common. Related to that, there was a Canadian fight attendant who was a super spreader. For years after his diagnosis despite knowing full well the death sentence he would pass onto others, he continued to find as many partners as he could in each city he passed through. IIRC this only stopped when he became too sick to continue working.
I’m pretty surethe book covers all of these factors, and in a lot more detail. It’s not a light read, but it does manage to capture some of the vitality of the brief era between Stonewall and the AIDS crisis, and it was clearly written as a labor of love for those who were lost.
Just a bit of a fact check, courtesy of Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaëtan_Dugas?wprov=sfti1
“In 2016, a group of researchers led by evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey conducted a genetic study that looked at blood samples taken from gay and bisexual men in 1978 and 1979 as part of a hepatitis B study, and based on the results of the data, concluded that Dugas was not the source of the virus in the United States. “On the family tree of the virus, Dugas fell in the middle, not at the beginning.””
Sorry I didn’t mean to suggest Gaetan Dugas was patient 0. I had kind of forgotten the book did. I had mostly remembered him for his mobility, and alleged refusal to stop.
Holy hell, that’s fucked up. But also, and I’m not trying to be disingenuous, but how is that the government’s fault exactly?
From the factors you listed it sounds like the epidemic was due to people having casual, presumably unprotected, anal sex. And one guy singlehandedly acting as a super-spreader.
I’m not trying to suggest that gay people are to blame for it, but that’s almost how it sounds from your comment. What exactly did the government do (or not do) that exacerbated the problem worse even than that flight attendant?
Did they draw out the research process unnecessarily long so a cure couldn’t be found sooner? Did they withhold the medicine once it had been developed instead of distributing it to everyone who needed it?
I’m legitimately trying to understand, I was too young in the 90s to know what was going on.
It’s worth keeping in mind that until AIDS, unprotected sex had basically no consequences for gay men, as compared to straight couples. I suspect me learning to use a condom in high school health class might’ve been as much AIDS related as pregnancy.
IIRC every single step of the research process was delayed due to blaming gay men for the problem. And would’ve been delayed a lot more if not for several folks at the CDC risking their careers. The book went into a lot of detail on this, but I’m not sure I can do it justice from memory, but it looks like there are good comments going into a bit more detail.
https://newrepublic.com/article/117691/aids-hit-united-states-harder-other-developed-countries-why
This article compares death rates in different countries, and compares the responses from governments at the time it was spreading, trying to figure out why the US rate was so high.
Thanks, that was an informative article. From what I read, I gather that the main factors which caused the epidemic to be so much worse in the US than in any other developed country, aside from socioeconomic factors that made it more ripe for the spread in the first place, are: 1) ineffective prevention and drug policies from the reagan administration that didn’t heed research or best practices being implemented in other countries; 2) shitty healthcare system that can’t or won’t get people tested and treated in a timely manner; and 3) expensive/unaffordable healthcare that’s prohibitive for many people who require treatment.
Am I missing anything?
The complete disregard of the crisis at the beginning. Inside the white house they called it “the gay plague” and many conservatives in the Reagan administration moralized that it was god’s punishment for homosexuals. The response to the crisis was willfully delayed, because from their point of view the infected deserved their fate.
Needle exchange programs were framed as endorsing drug use. Safe-sex education was vilified as sexualizing children.
Reagan himself thought AIDS was like measles and it would go away on it’s own, no matter what people told him. Only after a personal acquaintance of him died from it, did it dawn on Reagan that this disease that had killed tens of thousands of gay men and intravenuous drug users and infected a lot more, might actually be a problem for non-drug-using heterosexuals too.
The Koop report held great informatiin about what could be done to prevent spread, written in large parts by one Anthony Fauci. But: