25 Years of HIV

Alexandra Billings has a moving account of the early days of the AIDS pandemic here in America:

At a time when the mere threat of avian flu or SARS can set off a coast-to-coast panic–and prompt the federal government to draw up contingency plans and stockpile medicines–it’s hard to imagine that the national response to the emergence of AIDS ranged from indifference to hostility. … People with the disease were routinely evicted from their homes, fired from jobs and denied health insurance. Gays were demonized by the extreme right wing: Reagan adviser Pat Buchanan editorialized in 1983, “The poor homosexuals–they have declared war against nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.” In much of the rest of the culture, AIDS was simply treated as the punch line to a tasteless joke: “I just heard the Statue of Liberty has AIDS,” Bob Hope quipped during the rededication ceremony of the statue in 1986. “Nobody knows if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Fairy.” Across the river in Manhattan, a generation of young adults was attending more funerals than weddings.

…

I almost died. I was in the hospital and my doctor told me to call my parents and arrange the funeral. Chrisanne did just that. We were arranging my funeral as I lay in my hospital bed with my blue checkered gown wetting myself and sweating so bad they were changing my beddings three times a night. I was 35 years old. I had already been infected since the late eighties. The tip of the disease. I lived long enough, stayed away from the hospital just long enough to watch every single one of my friends waste away to ash. I had seen more death before I was 40 than anyone in my family.

Read the whole thing.