I have to tell you, when I think of it, it is kind of a nightmarish thought. But what if the AIDS epidemic, affecting gay men of course, occurred in the 1950’s or early 60’s–esp. the 1950’s?
Obviously they would have taken an entirely different approach to it. Involuntary quarantines are one thing I can think of off-hand. That or lengthy prison sentences, I’m sure.
But what else would they (i.e., the authorities) do? And ironically, would a cold-hearted, conservative, homophobic approach have worked better, from a strictly medical standpoint, I mean?
Thank you in advance for all your kindly replies:).
It wouldn’t stay confined to gay people, thats just the initial stage of the spread. Greater condemnation of gay people may mean more people in the closet, but still having encounters. So it gets a general impact outside of the gay community much earlier.
Military personnel getting it in brothels have also been a strong vector.
Combine this with less ability to identify the agent, and you could see things like Africa, with 10 % of the population HIV-positive.
Also, hypodermic needles were much harder to come by back then, and retained until broken or confiscated in an arrest; anecdotal evidence from IV drug users of that era indicate that needle-sharing was common, if not downright expected as good manners.
This was before most of the US identity liberation movements. I imagine that it would have been seen in other populations first (for example, in the actual history of HIV in the world, MSM were not the first people infected or identified as a risk group in many countries). First infections and first reports would depend on which groups were most likely to be infected at the time based on riskier behaviors. In the US in that era it might have included insufficiently sterilized medical equipment, blood transfusions and organ transplants, blood exposure for medical and emergency personnel, mother-to-child transmission via male-female or male-male prostitution, or male-female sexual transmission.
HIV was present in humans in the 1950s and 1960s. There’s documentation of cases in African countries in that time frame, and by the time it was reported was a “gay plague” in the US, many non-MSM people had already been dying of it in some African countries and Haiti. That this wasn’t reported in our press reflects ethnocentrism, not an absence of HIV on the world stage.
Needle drug usage is a major vector today, and would probably be stronger in the OP’s timeline. This was the era before cheap disposable syringes, and heroin was definitely being used - beatniks in the 50s and rock stars in the 60s are two groups that are often talked about. Since at one point it was estimated that 10-15% of US troops in Vietnam were addicted to heroin, and I’m pretty sure they weren’t following sterile practices, it’s quite possible that if AIDS started becoming more widespread in this era, it would end up associated with Vietnam. You could certainly see a lot of conspiracy theories about it being a Soviet bioweapon, especially if the needle connection wasn’t made early on, and the cultural image of the disease would be wildly different.
One big change in the timeline is that AIDS would hit in the start of the Sexual Revolution. Historically this really took off in the late 1960s with improved birth control and antibiotic treatment for STDs, having a new untreatable STD take off when the movement started (rather than 10-20 years later) would have a huge effect on it. There would probably be a big ‘this is god punishing you’ backlash and a change in the movement where ‘free love’ gets associated with using condoms and other barrier protections. This is especially true if AIDS doesn’t get stigmatized as a gay disease and is instead seen as something associated with drug use and/or heterosexual sex.
By 1983, the 4H club was known: Haitians, Hemophiliacs, Homosexuals, and Heroin users; around the same time, GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency) was replaced with AIDS in the mass media because it was coming to be known that gay people weren’t the only victims.
Yes, they were. When I was a kid syringes were made of glass and designed to be reusable. The needles would eventually blunt or break, but even they could be used many times. Naturally, in a doctor’s office or hospital, syringes would be run through a sterilizer before reuse, but they also weren’t very tightly accounted for. It wouldn’t be too hard for a hospital worker to take a few home.
Would blood testing technology of that era allow blood donations to be screened for viruses? If not, you’d have a situation where blood transfusions would be a major risk.
Also not the thing that caused an epidemic and got AIDS noticed was the promiscuous lifestyle of gay men, particularly in San Franscisco and NYC (Although due to travel, it spread elsewhere). The sudden liberation in a matter of years from a closet mentality to basically unrestricted behaviour meant that the disease found a perfect vector (but not the only one). There’s also the theory that like most virulent diseases, the most virulent forms of the disease “burn themselves out”, meaning the ones that do not hit their victims as hard last longer and so spread more. It seemed that AIDS was a death sentence within a year or three originally. Now, even before treatment, it does not appear to be so dangerous, and with treatment, becomes a condition.
So I’ll take the contrary view, that it likely would not have spread anywhere nearly as fast and furious in the 1950’s. Gay people did not have bath houses where they mixed and matched half a dozen partners in a night at the time. Promiscuity has always been with us, straight an gay, but nowhere near the level that in the 50’s as the promiscuity that caused an epidemic in the 80’s. Many gays were closeted or associated with a small circle of friends. More likely, as mentioned, needles and then blood transfusion would be the prime vectors. Also note that when they knew what they were looking for, in 1980’s it took almost a year to find the AIDS virus. One imagines a more horrible trade-off in the 1950’s - “we can operate to save you but there’s a chance of a death sentence from the blood transfusions”. Blood donations from friends and relatives would become more of a thing. I imagine it being a toss-up whether mostly uncircumcised European countries or the USA with its propensity for buying the blood of junkies would lead in the race to have the most AIDS cases. (The risk of catching, so spreading, AIDS from a woman to a man is allegedly 1/5 the risk when the man is circumcised).
Note that one major reason it’s used is that ‘gay’ is a pretty narrow term that only refers to a small subset of men, namely those who exclusively or primarily partner with other men and identify with gay culture. Men who are bisexual, heteroflexible, “bi-curious” and the like wouldn’t qualify, same with a rather large number of (largely rural) men who have sex with men but don’t consider themselves gay because they aren’t like what they think of as ‘gay men’, or men who work as prostitutes or porn stars and have sex with other men for money without having an actual interest in men. This is important for information gathering because if you ask a question like ‘are you gay’ or ‘have you had gay sex in the last six months’, you will have a significant number of ‘nos’ from men who have had sex with another man.
Not long after we graduated in 1994, my BFF went to a pharmacist’s convention and met a colleague who had practiced in southern Florida since the early 1970s. She said that a few years later, her hospital started to see people, mostly men of Caribbean (i.e. Haitian) descent but not always, coming into the hospital with bizarre infections that usually defied treatment, and if they recovered, they were usually readmitted shortly afterwards and died on that second admission. Everyone agreed that those people probably had AIDS.
Around the same time, I read (IIRC in “Spin” magazine, of all places, which had a monthly AIDS column) a quote from an infectious disease physician who said, “In 10 or 15 years, AIDS will mostly be a disease of drug addicts, and you won’t hear much about it.” I’m skeptical about futurist predictions, but he was right. HOWEVER, the buses in my town have signs that have a stock picture of a young adult on them that say things like “Know your status - AIDS is treatable” and my local newspaper has similar ads that appear every day. Maybe it is treatable and we don’t hear much about it, but it’s still a very real thing that is not curable.
I recently read a book whose title evades me right now, which stated that as things exist now, AIDS isn’t curable or vaccine-preventable because it mutates so readily. I agreed.
I remember news reports in the 90s where some medical experts were investigating unknown causes of death where the deceased had aids like symptoms and they were theorizing that it could of been here in a “pre aids” form back in the late 60s early 70s that eventually evolved into what we know it as today
