Century illustration (Source images: Creative Commons)
In the summer of 1981 in Los Angeles, five previously healthy gay men all mysteriously began to present with symptoms of pneumonia, and all of them died. Stunned and curious, the medical community set out to know more about the virus that had attacked and eventually destroyed their immune system. The initial conclusion? This was, according to a San Francisco newspaper, “gay men’s pneumonia,” and any gay man experiencing shortness of breath should go see his doctor immediately.
We didn’t know enough. But that wasn’t the main problem.
Within a year we went from calling AIDS “gay cancer”—this really happened, and it wasn’t meant as a slur—to more fully understanding the disease, its causes, and disastrous effects. Magic Johnson’s story helped us understand that it wasn’t strictly a “gay man’s disease” either, that there was something called HIV that was AIDS except not exactly, and that, on the whole, if you were rich you could beat this thing. We’ve learned a lot since 1981, and we’re still learning. But nothing significant or especially public was done in those days to reduce the stigma of those living with HIV/AIDS. In biblical terms, all we did with our knowledge was create the pool of Bethesda and determine who should be there.
