My wife and I have been together since 1976 so the effect was more “once removed”. The big effect was the pain and loss of seeing a couple friends pass horribly from something unknown. I can’t describe the feelings but I can remember the anger I had that no-one seemed to want to do anything or even talk about it much. It seemed like, from memory, more like 1986 or so that it was really discussed even though people had been passing from it for several years.
I also first read about it before it was recognized as a disease. I think it was from a Time Magazine article, on the back page, which described this very curious patient that one doctor had, who mysteriously started to get all sorts of illnesses that most people didn’t get anymore. And to suffer horribly from things as simple as a cold. It was a story told as a sort of intriguing mystery case, which the author clearly didn’t imagine would show up again. It was a couple of years later, that it started to officially be called AIDS (Syndrome is the label that medical investigators give to a specific set of observed symptoms, which they don’t yet know the cause of).
Once AIDS was well known to exist, it naturally became a huge political football, since Republican Ronald Reagan ran the country, and the hyper conservative GOP, victorious because they made a point of insulting and then ignoring the rights and lives (and deaths) of a certain collection of people, including gays. That was the beginning of another malady which still infests the nation, which is that of Antiliberalism. Reagan and his supporters transformed the GOP from being a party of conservatism and financial objectivism, and transformed it into a group dedicated to opposing about forty to sixty percent of all Americans just because they are in the opposing party. It was the end of actual thinking for Republicanism.
And I remember more than that, how insanely irresponsible the mostly left-wing press was in the eighties. Because they wanted to say bad things about the Republicans, and Reagan especially, they would attack Reagan’s relative silence about AIDS, and encourage everyone to suspect that the Republicans were purposely downplaying the dangers of this virulent mystery disease, and failing to take any government action to protect anyone, because they hated gays. And the same people exaggerating the danger of AIDS to try to make Reagan look bad, AT THE VERY SAME TIME, would play up to the self-righteous “we love everyone because we are superior” crowd, by saying in the same news presentation, that there were these absolutely VILE people who were refusing to touch AIDS victims, because SOMEONE was over-hyping the danger.
I remember especially, when Magic Johnson admitted to having it, and he put out a video with the help of then-briefly-popular Arsenio Hall. They advertised it in a rather smarmy self-righteous way, which didn’t help the cause of actually understanding AIDS, at all.
So we had one side ignoring AIDS for political gain, and the other side over-hyping it for political gain. Thank goodness the medical profession was just focused on fighting the disease.
- I was born in 1967
- I was thirteen in 1980 and 16 in 1983
- My mother was a health economist specializing in ways to combat HIV
- It scared the hell out of me
My older sister was married young and monogamous by the time things really got rolling. Her telling me, “Man, I had so much fun in the 70s. You kids got screwed.” didn’t help much.
I read ‘And the Band Played On…’ in the original trade paperback because mom came home from work one day and tossed it at me. Some of her data’s in there somewhere.
It placed teen sex - even for me as an upper middle class white kid without drugs - into a list of things that - like skydiving, motorcycle riding and antagonizing guys bigger than me - could suddenly turn and kill you. I had a few girlfriends in high school - 1981-1985 - and they were all long-term full school year sorts. No one-night stands at all. Mom supplied rubbers. She saw what was happening every single day of her work life.
So yeah, for me in the sweet-spot of the OPs timeline, it had some impact.
Not that the 90s in DC were much better. Homeless men and women coming up to me on Capitol Hill saying, “I got AIDS! Gimme $10 so I can buy my medicine!” Mostly I figured they’d drop it on crack - DC in the 90s had a glut - but what the hell. And volunteering in homeless shelters - again inspired by mom - and knowing that some segregated the people by HIV status and some that simply wouldn’t cater to them.
You guys must all live in “the big city”. I was born in '72 and don’t know anyone who contracted it. My high school graduating class was 60 people.
Eh, mine was 6.
None of them I know of got it. But I certainly knew people who were HIV positive in the community.
Lots of my friends died, including my best friend. I became an HIV interventionist and wrote my dissertation on HIV. I teach HIV trainings for students and professionals.
Similar with me. I was born in '73 and my high school graduating class was 39 people. None of us got it and I didn’t know anyone that did until much later. However, I clearly remember the hysteria when the cause was first discovered. I had to go to a youth camp at a sister church that focused on HIV prevention. It was a Methodist church so there was no fire and brimstone talk. It was more like an emergency sex education and health class for teenagers.
My university had other ones very similar to it when I started college in the early 1990’s. There was a dedicated sex education instructor that taught a session in popular freshman classes like Psychology 101 and she brought in real HIV patients to speak.
It was a big deal back then as it should have been because it really was a death sentence for the vast majority of people that contracted it. Some people saw it as victim blaming especially among the gay and IV drug using community but I still don’t think it was that way at all. They were just trying to tell us how to avoid getting killed through optional activities.
Frontline’s The Age of AIDS is a 4-hour documentary that goes through 2006. Online, free, cross-cultural, well-constructed. The Age Of Aids | FRONTLINE | PBS , click “watch the full program online.” Transcript also linked at that site.
I was in San Francisco. Don’t like talking about it either, but I understand some. Not all, because I’m a straight woman. A lot of friends – okay no, I still don’t want to talk about it.
I was a teenager in NZ in the 1990s and AIDS was the “Gay/Drug User” disease then, so as long as you weren’t a homosexualist or doing needle drugs it wasn’t at the forefront of concerns for most of us.
Having said that, it was indirectly responsible for decent and frank sex education, including the exhortation to remember condoms every. single. time.
I grew up in a smallish city (100K people), and I had 75 guys in my high school class (all-male Catholic high school). Out of 75 of us, I know of at least 3 who are gay, and one of them died due to AIDS.
Part of that may simply be luck of the draw, and part may be that I’m 7 years older than you – members of my high school class were of an age that we became sexually active right around the time when HIV and AIDS first became known.
OTOH, after high school, I went to a large university in a very liberal city, then moved to Chicago (and subsequently started working in advertising)…all of those very likely contributed to me becoming friends with many more gay men than I would have ever met if I’d stayed in my hometown.
Barely at all. It was news that was mostly about things I didn’t understand or have a connection to. In the 80s I wasn’t having any sexual experiences of my own*, I didn’t know any homosexual men or drug users who might be affected, and the specifics went mostly over my head.
By the 90s I had a lot of friends who were gay, but didn’t delve too much into their personal lives. They were sensible people being careful, as far as I knew. Still didn’t know any drug users. And I was also still not having sex with anyone, which was what preoccupied me more than anybody else’s problems during that time.
It seems now they’ve got a handle on it. HIV rarely leads to AIDS anymore, and seems to be under control. Happy to hear it, but as far as I know that doesn’t affect anybody I am associated with.
*I am heterosexual, though a lot of people think I’m gay because I’ve never had a girlfriend and I have one of those carefully enunciated accents
I was born in '68, and it kind of made me and my classmates normal.
Our sex ed had been unusually complete and effective. Complete in that it covered a lot of stuff including every pregnancy-prevention known and available, along with their rates of success, possible causes of failure and secondary effects, and along with information on STDs which the other schools in the area didn’t provide either (both actual STDs and clearing up some mythology on the subject); effective in that the injunctions to the gist of “if a man isn’t willing to put a condom on for you he should go hump a tree; if you boys aren’t willing to do that bare minimum, you should be told to go hump a tree” worked. We had sex in similar circumstances (ages, types of locations, etc.) as our friends and relatives from other schools but always with rubbers involved, and often as one of two measures being taken.
And we were called “squares” and worse for refusing to do it without a condom. Until AIDS happened. After AIDS, well, we still got called squares and narrow-minded and pouted at, but a lot less often and if we told someone else about it, the response was more likely to be “what a moron (s)he was” than “oh you’re such a square!”
I do know some people who died of AIDS, but they were all several years older than me, intravenous drug users and more in the “see them at somebody’s wedding” level of acquaintance than anything else.
Yes; just in my adult lifetime (1988*-present), it moved from “death sentence” to “manageable chronic condition”.
*Please don’t remind me that I’ve been a legal adult for 29 years. I’m having issues with my 30-year high school reunion.
I guess I qualify as I was a teen in the late nineties. It affected me in that I was freaked out about it, but then learned in health class how it spread. I remember the Captain Planet episode about it, too. I actually did not know it was associated with gay men at all by the time I learned about it. I was scared about transfusions and treated used needles as toxic, though. And I’ve entirely internalized the use of condoms, even if I never actually had need to use one in that period.
I didn’t find out about all the struggles until after the fact.
I was born in 1975, and grew up in Northern VA outside of DC. I was aware of it from the media. My dad had two child hood friends who died of it. One was married with a daughter and he got it from a transfusion. I learned years later, that my dad and another friend were getting him AZT in the states, and getting it to Brazil through a contact on an airline. I remember going with my dad to visit his late friends parents when I was older.
Another friend of my dad’s died in 1990 from AIDS. No one knew he had it, although we found out after the fact. He was cremated and my uncle took the ashes back home when came to visit.
Born in 1962.
Was a virgin until age 30, so I missed the dread that a lot of people went through when AIDS first reared its head in the general population.
I didn’t know anyone personally who was infected.
The greatest impact on me personally was the whole generation of creative types that we lost.
I was diagnosed with a blood disease in '91 when I was eleven. This was right around the time that they started keeping IV needles in the original packaging until they were ready to use them and opened them right in front of the patient. I remember quite a few nurses making a really big production out of opening the packages, which did not help my needlephobia any. Probably made it worse, in fact.
I also remember getting an HIV test in my preliminary bloodwork when I started getting treatment at a university hospital. This was also a minor big deal because of the Ryan White case.
Speaking of Ryan White, we watched that movie and the movie of And the Band Played On in high school health class during the sex ed unit. I “watched” both of them with my head down on the desk. This also did not help my needlephobia.
The information we got in sex ed in my freshman year was actually pretty good. A lot of the teachers at my high school (the health teachers and the ROTC staff sergeant) told us exactly what kinds of sex there were and how to use a condom and various other types of barrier birth control. A few years later the abstinence only movement took hold and I don’t think they do it anymore.
Heck, I remember teachers mentioning that sex existed in elementary school (for me 1985-1991). They had to because we were hearing about AIDS from the nightly news and newspapers and conversations at home so they had to tell us what it was. I recall the consensus on whether or not you could get it from kissing changing frequently for a few years.
I
I knew pretty solidly by the time I was 23 that I wasn’t going to parent: I was different in a way that might or might not be biological on some level, and I was committed to being an activist and trying to change what that difference MEANT, socially, and meanwhile I’d be damned if I was going to place another person with the same traits into this world to deal with that stuff. Sure, I might be successful in the endeavor but probably not so soon and so completely that having and raising children was in the plans. So I got a vasectomy.
The relevance of which was, hey, I didn’t need to cope with condoms, right? Nice bonus benefit. Always hated the damn things.
The relevance of that being that the AIDS crisis totally threw a spanner into that. Suddenly condoms weren’t about babies, they were about AIDS.
II
What else? Well, I had a homemade insignia embroidered into my jacket. Looked like this. I intended it to represent being a gender invert. (There was no such term as “genderqueer” in the 1980s, but it’s essentially a form of being genderqueer). I was on line to donate blood and was turned away because the person in charge decided it meant I was probably having sex with guys, and hence that I was an AIDS risk.
And… III
Me and a friend of mine sat with a fellow psychiatric survivor who was in a state of panic and freakout in 1987 or thereabouts; he was obsessed with the possibility that he was infected and would come down with AIDS symptoms and die. As it turns out he wasn’t wrong. This was my first up-close and personal confrontation with AIDS as the grim reaper and losing someone I knew (if not as a close friend, still someone I had sat up with and talked with all evening).
It has just affected my life, I lost a dear friend to HIV complications last week. I’ve spent three days crying. As recently as late 2011/early 2012, I had several friends test positive.
As a spin off of this thread, I’ll start the, “Ask the guy on PrEP” thread over in MPSIMS.