I’m currently reading this new book about Jim Jones and Peoples Temple, the cult he founded and most of whose members committed mass suicide/murder in 1978. The book addresses his rampant sexual habits, with both men and women - and much of this took place in the San Francisco area in the mid 1970s. I do remember hearing that he had an unspecified tropical illness and was becoming more and more incoherent towards the end, which was attributed to heavy drug use. I am personally starting to wonder if he had AIDS, or was at least HIV positive.
Of course there’s no way to know this for sure, unless there’s an extant specimen of his somewhere or at least one of his known sex partners who did not go to Guyana got AIDS.
It is remotely possible but highly unlikely. While AIDS is much older than most people believe (1920’s probably at least in the Congo), it didn’t become noticeable in North America until the very early 1980’s. Transmission before 1978 in the U.S. is too early unless he had the odd coincidence of being one of the first cases and an infamous cult leader.
I think he was just a typical cult leader in the same form as many others like David Koresh of the Branch Davidian Waco, TX fame among many others. Lots of sex partners is a constant theme and probably even a motivation for many cult leaders. There is no reason to bring AIDS into it without substantial evidence.
We’ll probably never know about the AIDS, but with rampant sex in a big city, eventually surely things would have gotten to the point where someone like Jones would have been more likely to have an STD than not, and perhaps, at a further point yet, more likely to have HIV than not.
Not long after we graduated in the mid 1990s, my BFF went to a pharmacy convention and met some people who had worked in the Miami area for many years. One of them said that starting in the mid 1970s, that hospital started to see people, mostly but not always of various Caribbean heritage, come into the hospital with bizarre infections that usually defied treatment. She believed that these people most likely had AIDS.
I recently saw an interview on C-SPAN 2 or 3 (they have assorted author interviews on the weekends) with AIDS activist Cleve Jones, who is HIV-positive, and he said that in the late 1970s, he participated in an obviously unrelated health survey. Years later, he inquired as to whether his specimens still existed; at least one did, and he had it tested and it did come back positive, indicating that he had seroconverted by 1978.
I’m not saying that I think Jones had AIDS, only that IMHO it’s a possibility. According to this book, he and his legal wife had stopped having any kind of sexual relationship many years before their deaths (gee, I wonder why) so unless she cheated on him, it’s very unlikely that she would have had it herself.
Actually, AIDS started showing up in the U.S. around the early 70s. There’s speculation that a teenager who died in 1969 may have been the earliest case. Timeline of early HIV/AIDS cases.