'All your friends were dying': revisiting the horrors of the Aids crisis

[marmar]

‘All your friends were dying’: revisiting the horrors of the Aids crisis
In a damning new season of podcast docuseries Fiasco, journalist Leon Neyfakh revisits a period of devastating loss and horrifying apathy

Benjamin Lee
Thu 19 May 2022 02.08 EDT


(Guardian UK) Over two years into a global pandemic that’s killed more than 6 million people, infected over 500 million others and irrevocably changed the way we all live, work and interact, while some mourn and some continue to constantly readapt, for others, an investigation continues.

How did we get here? What mistakes were made? And what can we learn? For those who survived another global health crisis decades prior, one with a far higher mortality rate but drastically lower visibility, many of these questions still remain. In the summer of 1981, a quietly alarming new illness started to afflict gay men, initially reported in localised gay media but soon covered in the New York Times with the still rather unforgettably chilling headline “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals”. In that year 234 people in the US died. In 1982, the CDC used the term Aids for the first time. By the end of the decade, over 100,000 Americans had died.

“I think fear was the overwhelming feeling,” journalist Leon Neyfakkh said to the Guardian, having interviewed many who survived the era for the most recent season of his Fiasco podcast. “Just knowing that you might have it but you don’t know for sure and you might not know for months or years because for a long time there was no way to check while at the same time, all your friends were dying.”

While there are many, still-to-be-unpacked problems with how the US and many other countries mishandled and continue to mishandle Covid-19, there has been at least some sense that it was being handled. But under Ronald Reagan’s administration, at a time when the majority of US states still upheld sodomy laws, dealing with a condition that mostly affected gay men, and then eventually needle-sharing drug users, was not seen as a priority. “Any time you’re talking about sex or drugs, it’s a moral issue, not a public health issue,” says Bill Clinton’s former surgeon general Joycelyn Elders on the podcast. ..............(more)

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/may/19/fiasco-audible-podcast-docuseries-aids-crisis

[CountAllVotes]

1. Major correction

AIDS first appeared in San Francisco in 1978.

I know. A good friend of mine had a house he rented rooms out in. One of the tenants died of what they called "gay cancer" at that time.

He had amebiasis and was 27 years old.

[MuseRider]

2. Thank you.

I read a lot about this, do not absorb real statistics however, it mostly emotional. It will be 20 years in December since I sat with my brother as he drew his last breath from this horrible mess. AIDS took him, not quickly enough, I know the horrors of it. Still, I read books and articles and will listen to this podcast. Thanks.

[SWBTATTReg]

3. I don't want to remember these times, but it is good to have such articles/etc. out there for

others to read about, learn about. If anything, the fear was actually very tangible in the communities back then, we all knew that something was going on, but what it was, was still unknown, still mysterious, and scary.

After a long bout of many dying every month, it seems like, the numbers of those dying have dropped significantly over the last 20 years or so, thank God and thanks to advances made in medical science. COVID is a poor comparison vs. HIV/AID, the learning curve that is, so in another way, medical science has advanced so much. What gets me for the most part, is that so many (especially the tRUMP nuts) ignore common sense medical advice to get the vaccines, mask up, self-isolate, if need be, etc. and instead, end up killing their friends, family, etc. all around them (and even themselves).