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

In My Humble Opinion
21

I’m going to be very brief about this; otherwise, I could write a book.

I was a single, sexually-active gay man, living in NYC when the epidemic began. I remember when there were merely a handful of men who were dying of a mysterious illness. I immediately joined GMHC (Gay Men’s Health Crisis) as a counselor and “buddy”. When ACT-UP began, I joined that too.

For the next 15 years, I watched almost all my friends, lovers and acquaintances drop like flies. The exception was my now-husband, whom I met in 1987. I held people’s hands while they were dying; I administered meds; I emptied bedpans; I attended countless funerals and memorial services.

After we relocated out of NYC, the numbers slowed down, but haven’t stopped. We attended our last funeral last year.

I hate referring to ourselves as “survivors”. With the death of each loved one, a little of our own lives is gone, and less remains. In moments of optimism, we think that it gives our own lives purpose, that we have a mission to continue the work of those whose lives have been shortened. But in moments of pessimism, we realize that this is too much of a burden, a weight to heavy to bear.

That’s all I can say, for now.

22

(((Panache45)))

23

I was born in 1980, so I’m in the “I heard you can get AIDS from a toilet seat!” “I bet you got STUPID from a toilet seat!” generation. I guess I’m in the first cohort of people to have never known anything different. We got real sex ed, as opposed to whatever they’re teaching now, and everybody I ever knew was intense about protection. It was always a very big spectre hanging over us.

God, even now I see people freaking out about getting AIDS from all sorts of things. Toilet seats, mysterious puddles. I think it would not be good to tell them much about hepatitis, though.

24

^ This.

25

Throughout the 80’s and 90’s I worked in a movie studio. In my area, the ratio of gay men to straight men was about 10 to 1. I can think of only two of my gay male co-worker from that time who are still living. Too too many funerals.

I am a straight male, but when I was younger was often mistaken for gay due to general appearance. Also, when I was younger I was a regular blood donor. Once the epidemic became known, giving blood required a lot of extra verification questions. Frankly, the unsympathetic retired nurses administering the blood donations seemed to doubt my protestations that I had indeed not engaged in any risky behaviors and repeated questions in an over-insistent accusatory manner which I found offensive. Consequently, I gave up donating blood. So there is that. (Yes, I acknowledge that in the greater scheme of things this is supremely trivial and petty. I am not trying to make any points other than relate something that I experienced.)

26

I learned about “bug-chasing” a few months ago and was utterly shocked.

On the thread question, I had sex ed starting in 5th grade in the '90s and don’t remember HIV/AIDS being covered then (though I work in a school and it is now), but it was pretty well understood and discussed in later grades.

One of our classmates had severe hemophilia. He was born shortly after they figured out how to stop batches of clotting factor from being contaminated with HIV, or he would probably have ended up like Ryan White. Something like 90% of severe hemophiliacs in that time frame ended up with AIDS, which is a mind-boggling statistic.

27

Thanks, Maggie.

28

I knew a number of people who died from AIDS. I didn’t ask how they got it.

In comparison, my 31-year old son knows more people who died from heroin.

29

I was in my young 20s by 1980. By then Herpes had put most of the nails in the coffin of the Sexual Revolution started in the 1960s by the birth control pill.

People, including young people, were still having lots of sex, but the idea that it was safe, or at least that any STDs you did catch were readily curable, was gone. Every encounter with every partner carried the risk of lifelong infection with a disease that was mostly minor and irritating, but would render you a sexual leper for life. That fear, becoming an untouchable, was very real and very deep-seated in the late 70s early 80s. Over herpes.

Then AIDS showed up and suddenly herpes seemed like a case of sniffles.

Although as said above, for the first decade or so AIDS was not part of the mainstream. As a tasteless joke of the era had it: “Q: What’s the hardest part of having AIDS? A: Convincing your mother you’re Haitian.” If you were not gay, an IV drug user, or Haitian, you were “known” to be 100% immune / unaffected. Which represented about 95% of the population and about 98% of the people willing to talk about it in public.

Reality of course was not that sanitary. Once HIV was identified as the cause of AIDS we all realized there’s nothing about the disease that’s specific to those three groups. That’s merely where the largest reservoirs were and that there was a lot more intra-group transmission than extra-group transmission because of the social demographics.

Then came the era where there were no effective treatments and the concern was that it was escaping out of those relatively small relatively closed groups and out into the mainstream. There was a lot of scaremongering then because there was not solid science on how virulent it was. If it had gotten loose in the general hetero public in quantity, and been a little more virulent than it actually turned out to be, and if progress on treatments had been a little slower than it was, there could have been tens of millions more deaths than there were.

Fortunately the medications and the awareness increased fairly quickly and the virulence didn’t. Which was little help for the many, many people who were infected and died in the early days.

30

This reminds me of a bit from one of Eddie Murphy’s standup movies of that era (I can’t remember if it was “Delirious” or “Raw”). Paraphrasing, and it’s pretty un-PC (and put behind a spoiler box, because it might be offensive to some, given the nature of this thread):

“First we had gonorrhea, and they could cure you of that. Then, we got herpes, and once you get herpes, you got herpes for life! Now, we got AIDS, and motherf***ers die from AIDS! What’s next? You stick your dick in, and it explodes?”

31

Killed my uncle in '84.

32

I remember first learning about AIDS from a TIME or Newsweek article, when it didn’t have a name. My first takeaway was that it either means that something is physiologically different about gay people, which had all kinds of moral, legal and sociological implications, or else really, everyone could get the disease, and it was disingenuous of the magazine to say that “only” gay men got it.

It scared me enough that I didn’t have sex in high school, and when I finally did in college, I made the guy get tested. I got tested too, because I didn’t admit to being a virgin.

In college, I came out as bisexual, and so I had a lot of gay male friends. And I lost several. I learned that you do not mention it when a gay man loses weight, because it may not be on purpose, even if he was overweight before, and he looks good for the moment.

I also learned that in the late 1980s, the local board of health didn’t believe in woman-to-woman transmission. I knew a lesbian who was HIV+, and even though her old girlfriend was already dead of AIDS-related pneumonia, and she had slept with one boy once 8 years earlier, the board of health still insisted that he must have had a very early case of it, and that’s where she got it.

Our Bodies, Ourselves wasn’t much better, assuring women that if their partners didn’t use drugs and weren’t bisexual, the women probably shouldn’t worry. That was the, IIRC, 1984 edition, that last edition of the 80s, but the one I had in college. The first one of the 90s was better.

I watched the TV movie And the Band Played on… around 2000, and already so much had changed.

I also remember that Reagan would never mention the disease, not even when Rock Hudson came out as positive.

33

I was born in 1972, and I don’t know of ever having personally met anyone with AIDS. (Of course, they don’t have it tattooed across their heads, so I could have met a few, but it is nothing I’ve ever been aware of.)

A cousin of mine had a friend through work (that I never met) die from AIDS in the late 80s or early 90s, so I suppose that is the closest it reached me.

34

Straightish male, graduated high school 1974. My funniest, most compassionate, most life-affirming friend from high school died in 1984. Because he had always been a bit of a hypochondriac in high school and after, when I heard through the grape vine he was ill, I assumed it wasn’t too serious–we’d hardly heard of aids. He died before I could get in to see him. I still miss him.

35

My oldest asked, “I know gay guys older than you (63), and I know gay guys younger than you, but why don’t I know any gay guys your age?”

I gave her a long fisheye, then said, “Guess.” She should know better.

36

For most of that time, it was just something that the other kids in school made tasteless jokes about, and I was the one who kept reminding everyone (purely academically) that you couldn’t catch it from skin contact, or toilet seats, or whatever. Eventually, by 10th grade, I was with a mature enough group of kids that the jokes stopped.

Then, one of my best friends showed me the bottle of pills he was taking. I knew he had hemophilia, but you don’t take AZT for that. So yeah, it suddenly became a lot more personal. If anyone’s wondering, the medications have worked very well for him, and his virus count has been below the detection threshold for many years now, but he still has to decide where to live based on what states have the best insurance status, to stay on the meds.

37

I remember that bit. It got a LOT of airplay.

Gallows humor was big right about then.

38

Not only was I a teenager, I also was a CNA in the mid to late 1980s. Universal precautions had just become standard and mandated. Frankly, HIV/AIDS was one reason I’ve never been promiscuous. HIV was a death sentence when I was in my formative years.

One friend and two uncles-by-marriage died of AIDS, which brought things home. No, I was not a gay male Hatian IV drug user, but HIV/AIDS had begun to affect straight people as well.

So, chalk one up for “made me have less sex than I might otherwise have had.”

39

I’m the same age as you Maggie. I grew up a straight white kid in suburban Toronto, met my first girlfriend when I was 17 and we were both virgins. After 3 years together we broke up and it was almost 2 years until I met my now-wife (who was a virgin) with no one in between, mostly because I was looking for “The One”.

I don’t think AIDS kept me from sleeping around those 2 years, but it may have helped.

40

Truthfully? It didn’t affect me. It never affected most heterosexuals who didn’t use drugs (no matter how much the media tried to peddle the lie that EVERYONE was at risk).