How did GRID effect gay rights?

[AK84]

Thanks panache45. er PWA? A follow up if you will, were their any people who were sympathetic who you were surprised about?

Tethered Kite that is mind boggling.

[MrDibble]

PWA=People With AIDS

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

I don’t think you get enough credit for this, panache45, but it’s nice having you around. You’re like a living history of the gay rights movement, which is handy to have considering how much time we spend discussing those issues here.

@panache45

But little by little, people did come around . . . not out of sympathy, but because of courageous individuals and organizations. And now, finally, in the last few years, homophobia is for the first time socially unacceptable in our mainstream society. We even have politicians and sports people who have to apologize for anti-gay comments. And now we have a President who’s in favor of same-sex marriage. This is remarkable, something I never thought I’d see.

It has long been my opinion that Freddie Mercury’s public acknowledgment that he had AIDS (and eventual death) was a Big Deal in terms of making homosexuality and HIV/AIDS less “other”, but I was nine when he died so I can’t back that up. Beyond that, I lived in the UK where Queen were much bigger.

Do you remember things being any different after that?

[Typo_Knig]

Rock Hudson announcing he had AIDS, with Doris Day at his side - I think this was a big step forward for acceptance of Gays as people, particulary for the older generation who watched all of Rock Hudson’s and Doris Day’s movies. Who, even of that generation, could hate Rock Hudson? OK, many did but they are jerks. panache45 do you think that figures like Hudson and Magic Johnson making public announcements helped your cause? What about Ryan White? BTW, your cause is ours. AIDS is a disease of people with blood. If society can prevent you from marrying the person you love on outdated religious grounds, society can also dissolve my inter-faith marriage. We are all in this together.

I wish that Margaret Heckler and C. Everett Koop had been listened to by the rest of the Reagan administration. A lot of lives would have been saved.

And what Really Not All That Bright said - thank you, panache45, for your service to our society!

[Tethered_Kite]

Elizabeth Taylor also played a large part in humanizing AIDS. Also that young boy in FLA., Ryan White.

As with anything that is misunderstood and threatening there was a tremendous amount of denial. Then, as the disease began to affect people from smaller towns where most people knew each other there also grew a slow but steady acceptance.

[Vaffanculo]

@Annie-Xmas

America’s response to AIDS is one of the worst in our history. Since only “those people” got it, nothing was done for ten years to help cure it. That is an absolute disgrace.

But while the sentiment is crass, isn’t it correct? According to the CDC May 2012 Fact Sheet (quoted from http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/topics/msm/index.htm)), the disease does largely infect “those people”:

Gay and bisexual men are more severely affected by HIV than any other group in the United States (US).

In 2009, MSM (NB: men having sex with other men) accounted for 61% of new HIV infections in the US and 79% of infections among all newly infected men. Compared with other groups, MSM accounted for the largest numbers of new HIV infections in 2009.

If one subgroup, such as gay men who comprise 5% or less of the overall population, produce 61% of new cases, it is hard to argue that AIDS isn’t “a gay disease”. Subtract the junkies sharing needles and you’re left with a small number of hemophiliacs, health care providers, researchers, and those unwittingly becoming intimate with same.

[Guinastasia]

@Tethered_Kite

Elizabeth Taylor also played a large part in humanizing AIDS. Also that young boy in FLA., Ryan White.

As with anything that is misunderstood and threatening there was a tremendous amount of denial. Then, as the disease began to affect people from smaller towns where most people knew each other there also grew a slow but steady acceptance.

I think Ryan White was probably what hit most people that it wasn’t just a “gay disease”. Which is a disturbing thing, if you realize it – that people began to wake up only one when someone who wasn’t actually gay got AIDS. (Well, not that it hadn’t happened before)

But at least in this case, we saw the real scare about blood transfusions, and the importance of testing.