Those who were teen and older in the 80's-90's - how did the AIDS crisis affect your life?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m in the middle of listening to the audiobook of And The Band Played On. Depressing stuff, I tell you what. It’s made me think a lot about the times they covered, and what the disease did to the sexual revolution that had seemed so promising.

I was born in 70, and grew up with my mom’s gay friends being a big part of our lives. I was vaguely aware that there had been a sexual revolution, and that when I was older I would be lucky, because it used to be not OK to sleep with people you weren’t married to, but when I was of age I would be able to sleep with whoever I wanted, and people wouldn’t think anything was wrong with that. (I didn’t know how I felt about doing so, but I was aware the option was there.)

The first time I remember it being talked about was when someone was reading aloud in class about doing a speech with visual aids, and it kept saying things like “Don’t use too many aids in your speech” and “Make sure your aids are relevant to the topic”, and the class getting all giggly about it. This was in '83? '84?

When I was an older teen, it had become a Big Thing. My mom tried to get in contact with some of the guys from her old circle, when she remarried - several had died from the disease, one had killed himself when he started to decline. Her best friend, Otis, who had always been around me, was positive and was doing some clinical trials for a new drug. He died in 1990.

In high school I had a couple friends who tested positive, but I lost track of them afterwards and don’t know if they survived or not.

How it affected me personally? As a mostly-straight girl, it completely undid the sexual revolution - we were back to judging folks for sleeping around. I was paranoid about using condoms every time - everyone was. Bi guys, for some reason, became even sexier - the thrill of risk? We crushed hard on them, but were afraid to sleep with them. Well, mostly. >.>

What about you? How did the epidemic touch your life? Or did it?

2

I was already married by then. The major effects for us were the loss of several friends in the late 80s and early 90s.

3

I’m slightly older than the OP and as best I can tell, the effect on my life was trivial, beyond the enhanced regulations regarding donating blood, which I’ve done frequently since 1987. I’ve lost no friends or acquaintances to the illness, though this means little since I’m not a generally sociable person and have never had a large circle of contacts.

4

Not directly. When my daughter was born, she needed a transfusion, and the possibility it was contaminated was in the back of our minds, but it was never an issue.

Someone I knew died from it, but we hadn’t seen each other in years at that point.

5

I was a teenager when it happened. It caused A LOT of fear and trepidation for a bunch of us.

Knowing what I know now, I wish I’d knew about Media Hype, and the fearmongering they do. Every day, it was something new about what would kill you - Kissing was TEH DEATH! Touching sweat was TEH DEATH! Sharing deodorant was TEH DEATH! It got to the point where you didn’t know what was safe anymore, and you either (A) ignored it and smooched with your partner, or (B) didn’t do ANYTHING because YOU WERE GOING TO DIE IF YOU DID!

It was bad. And the media hype made it worse. The normal course of stealing kisses from people, dating for two weeks then breaking up, or just having naked fun time was just messed up for a lot of folks.

6

I graduated high school in 1987, so I was well aware of AIDS and HIV. We had plenty of advice to use condoms, not just for pregnancy, but for safety. I don’t remember anyone snickering at the use of the word “aids” in other contexts. I do remember people talking about whether it was a punishment from God to the homosexuals, and other “reasons” why the disease might exist. I did not know anyone openly gay until college. My family ran in fairly conservative circles and we lived in a rural area.

In college I met James who has become one of my oldest and dearest friends. He was the first person who was gay that I became close friends with. He has always been cautious and thankfully, not HIV+. Other friends I have made since then were already HIV+ when I met them. Some have passed away, and some are managing it.

I think the biggest impact on my life is that, due to my very diverse group of friends, it is a fact of life for me. I expect I will always know someone with AIDS or who is HIV+.

7

Loss of friends, and kind of, loss of innocence. I had a couple of friends who had gone to New York for the big party New York was then, and AIDS was kind of the end of the party. It changed dating for a lot of my gay friends and I think some of them turned to monogamy who otherwise wouldn’t have, out of fear. Actually this probably happened to some straight couples too. I was already married so it wasn’t personal, but I had a good friend who was very much an activist.

In the '70s, gay acceptance was moving toward mainstream, and AIDS had a very bad effect on that.

And it was very revealing (and sad) to see who among my friends turned against anybody who was gay because they might be “infected” and they might “infect” somebody else, and even if they didn’t “their practices” resulted in the epidemic. Like maybe if they poured you coffee. Up to that point I had thought my friends were not like that. Other people were like that–not my friends. Some of them really surprised me, and not in a good way.

8

no effect whatsoever.

9

It didn’t effect me really at all. But I am a straight white male that grew up in Suburbia, spent some time in the Navy and then got married a few years after the Navy.

In the 80s it was the “Gay and Needle User disease” so not a big worry.:smack: Well by the time I really knew better I was 100% monogamous anyway.

Sounds like my experience was almost completely the opposite of Noelq. But on the other hand I was a nerd that didn’t date much.

10

A friend of mine from high school died of it, I found, at a high school reunion. And two colleagues at work. As I have never had sex with a man, used IV drugs, or received a blood transfusion, I am not at risk, so it never impacted me directly.

Even during the 80s and 90s I could spot this. “AIDS is now the disease of us!! Anyone can get it!! If current trends continue, WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!”

Yeah, right. Pull the other one; it’s got bells on it. (Put on a condom first, of course.)

Regards,
Shodan

11

I was born in 1965. As a straight male, it didn’t have a large, direct impact on my life, but it wasn’t of zero impact, either.

My first recollections of the disease were learning about it in a segment on “60 Minutes” (probably around 1984 or 1985), and then Rock Hudson’s death from it. At about the time of Hudson’s death, one of my college roommates (who is still a close friend of mine) had just come out of the closet, and I was very worried for him.

Before I began dating the woman I’d eventually marry, in early 1990, I’d been sexually active with three other women, though my last contact with any partners who might have, themselves, been HIV positive was in 1986. While it didn’t seem like the odds of me having contracted HIV were terribly high (as far as I knew, my former partners had not had sexual contact with any gay men, nor were drug users), it wasn’t zero, and I probably should have gotten a blood test. I didn’t, because I was young and foolish. :frowning:

I’ve lost one friend to AIDS – a Lutheran minister who officiated at our wedding in '92, and who had very quietly lived with his partner for many years. The church would have likely defrocked him if he’d been openly gay, but it was a fairly well-known fact within the congregation. Around 1995, some sort of virus hit the school which was attached to the church (my wife taught at the school, and they closed for a week as so many teachers and students were ill) – by that point, he was immuno-compromised with AIDS, and the virus triggered a brain infection which killed him.

12

I worked in medicine, and it had quite an impact on the way we handled patients, especially WRT body fluids. When I started working in hospitals in 1979, we were quite blasé about getting blood, sputum, urine and even feces on us – we just washed it off or changed clothes if you got soiled. When I started my career I worked ER, ICU, and post-op a lot, and those places bring you in close contact with body fluids. In the earliest days of AIDS, it seemed like getting the virus was a death sentence, and we had many in-services and seminars on the virus and how to avoid exposure. Initially, we at the front-line staff level tried to take note of patient’s history and reason for admission, and, I’m sorry to say, treated certain patients with much more caution than others. Unmarried 35 y.o. male admitted for treatment of pneumonia? Beware! But it quickly became apparent that there was no way to tell who might be carrying the virus asymptomatically, so the watchword became to avoid all contact will all bodily fluids. I don’t think I touched a patient for the last 15 years of my medical career without wearing latex gloves. Donning gloves every time I entered a patient’s room became second nature. I saw a lot of patients die from AIDS-related illnesses (AIDS doesn’t kill anyone directly, it opens the door for a host of other diseases to swoop in), but no one I knew personally died of it. That’s a bit surprising, really, since most of my post-AIDS work was in Seattle, and I knew a lot of gay men.

13

A few other experiences, recalled now that I’ve read others’ posts:

While I certainly never met him, Freddie Mercury had been one of my favorite musicians since I was in high school. Over the course of several years ('89-'91), it was increasingly clear that he was very ill, and a lot of people assumed he had AIDS – but, despite his flamboyant persona, Mercury was very private about his personal life. He’d never publicly come out of the closet, and he and his bandmates in Queen continued to deny that he suffered from AIDS. He finally announced (through his publicist) that he had the disease in November of '91, only 24 hours before he passed away from pneumonia. His death hit me as hard as has the death of any other celebrity.

Only a few weeks before Mercury’s death, I was attending some focus groups for my job, when it was announced that Magic Johnson was HIV-positive. He was one of the first well-known people in the US to have acknowledged having the disease without being in one of the original two elevated risk groups, and I remember a lot of discussion over what this meant.

Finally, one of my high school classmates died about a decade ago. I had lost touch with him after we’d graduated, but he was gay, and had fought cancer, complicated by AIDS, for several years before passing.

14

I am a bit older than the OP, and while I was always very aware of aids, it never affected me personally. All of us teenagers in the 80s were very conscious of safe sex and were afraid of getting aids. I also had two friends who caught it, both gay men. One died from the disease (years after I lost contact with him) and another was killed while trying to protect a woman (a stranger) from her abusive husband. Actually now that I think about it I knew 3 more gay men that were HIV positive; all of them are still alive as far as I know, at least they were in ~2000.

I am a straight male, but back then I hung in a crowd that had a lot of contact with the gay scene. I would regularly go to Rocky Horror and there was also a nightclub that was pretty balanced with a large gay and straight crowd. I would also occasionally go to gay bars with friends of mine, both male and female. Going to male gay bars was never a problem, sometimes going to the lesbian bar would be uncomfortable as men were really not that common there. In this crowd, we were all very aware of it and some of the people were really hard hit. My closest friends were all straight and, like I said, practiced safe sex religiously so were never personally affected. I did go get an HIV test with every lover I ever had, including my now wife of 21 years. It was something you did on the 5th or 6th date if things were going well…

15

I have a fairly young gay friend (in his late 20s), and his reaction when he tested positive was really blase. No big deal, for him, it just means you have to be more careful and take your drugs. I was :eek::eek::eek::eek:

16

I was born in the 60s, and an impressionable child in the 70s, when everybody on TV was sleeping with everyone who crossed their path.

Right before I reached puberty, came the herpes epidemic.
Right as I reached puberty, came the AIDS epidemic.

All my horndog hopes and debauched dreams came crashing down into ruin.

The g–d— baby boomers screwed up everything they touched.

17

It is becoming a big problem in the younger gay cohort. HIV infection rates are beginning to increase again as more and more guys think it’s ok to engage in risky behaviors without taking the appropriate precautions because of medical advances. In some horrifying cases, they even glorify the virus as a badge of gayness and actively seek out infected partners. I’m hoping that as PrEP becomes more available we’ll see rates go down again.

18

I was in elementary school when Ryan White was diagnosed and still in elementary school as his quest to get back to school raged on. I don’t know that the gay community was so much the face of AIDS for me - it was more Ryan White because he was much, much more like me.

I was in middle school when Magic Johnson came out as HIV positive. I remember a few days of heavy discussion of it in one of our classes. I remember feeling assured that it was not transmitted by touch or toilet seats, just blood and semen.

I also remembered being conflicted in my feelings about whether or not I felt bad for Magic. I was definitely a prude little kid. He was promiscuous, and that’s how he got it! Why are we calling him a hero?? I definitely remember debates over whether or not he should be allowed to continue playing. And that blood in sports became much more serious.

Around that same time, Freddy Mercury died. A few friends and I were pretty in to Queen at that time and it made us super sad. But still we were too young/insulated to really understand about the “epidemic.” I guess, really, Freddy was the first gay person I “knew” who had and died from AIDS.

When I was in high school (93-97) I was involved in LGBT advocate stuff. AIDS awareness never really came up.

I got a job in a restaurant and suddenly knew a lot more gay people than ever. I had a fairly good friend at work who was gay, and his best friend & roommate was a gay man with AIDS. By this point (the late 90s) I had absolutely zero thoughts of “catching AIDS” from interacting with him (or any of my other gay friends). I was often exasperated by him, as I was a teenager and he had some neurological problems due to AIDS so he sort of acted drunk most of the time and would then be hyper-drunk when he was actually drunk.

I was quite delighted when I saw a picture of my friend’s friend on Facebook a few months ago, celebrating his 56th birthday! Woohoo!

Since then I’ve seen/read/heard a lot more about the AIDS epidemic and its effect on the gay community and the world, so I’m a lot more woke on the subject. As a child during the most raging part of the epidemic - that all just sort of passed me by.

19

ISTR we actually watched The Ryan White Story (edit: and/or Go Toward the Light) in class in 7th or 8th grade. I guess at the time HIV/AIDS was one of those things which was “concerning” to someone of my age because it was some nebulous thing which was supposed to be scary w/o really understanding what it was. my utter lack of sociability meant I never had to worry about it, though.

20

I worked in a record store for a while in the eighties. I’d estimate 30 to 40 percent of the employees there were gay men. Five people I knew died. One of them was an assistant manager. He was the kind of guy who lived to fire people and would write you up for any infraction instead of saying “hey, don’t do that,” so no one liked him. I went to visit him in the hospital. I went by myself and by sheer coincidence his parents were visiting. He was a big loud guy and seeing him unconscious and emaciated was shocking. His parents were grief stricken and I tried to be as supportive as possible, though I didn’t know them at all. It was strange looking at a guy I couldn’t stand and realizing he was a human being with parents who cared for him, going through a death no one should experience, especially in one’s early 30s.

I got dressed down a few times for not being concerned about catching it myself, since I didn’t do needle drugs or have sex with men and I hadn’t had a blood transfusion since i was a child. That was annoying.