The first story I ever posted on Daily Kos was written for World AIDS Day 2006. I’ve posted another one almost every year since then. This year the Trump regime has decided there should be no federal observance of World AIDS Day, saying...
...the government’s policy is “to refrain from messaging on any commemorative days, including World AIDS Day...”
This conveniently overlooks the fact that Trump has issued proclamations for any number of commemorative days and weeks this year.
It seems nobody else has published a story on World AIDS Day thus far unless it happened in the past half hour or so so it seems more important than ever to commemorate World AIDS Day and I will do my best to fulfill that task below the break.
It seems that I can reel off the reasons why World AIDS Day continues to be of vital importance to me without even pausing for breath. Much of what I’m going to be saying in this story I have written about on Daily Kos over the years.
I am of the generation of gay men who were already adults when the first cases of what eventually came to be known as AIDS were reported. While HIV and AIDS have impacted not just the gay community in the US but every community, everywhere in the world, from the early 1980s onward, my peers and I were at the epicenter. It’s fair to say that we are still dealing with the trauma of that era and likely will continue to be dealing with it for the rest of our lives.
There was the June 5th 1981 CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Well down the second page of that publication there is an item about a unexplained cluster of cases of illnesses among young gay men, illnesses that typically only affect the elderly and the immune-compromised.
In the period October 1980-May 1981, 5 young men, all active homosexuals, were
treated for biopsy-confirmed Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia at 3 different hospitals in Los Angeles, California. Two of the patients died. All 5 patients had laboratory-confirmed previous or current cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection and candidal mucosal infection.
That information along with some additional information gathered in the intervening four weeks appeared in a New York Times article published on July 3rd of the same year. That article plays a part in the opening scene of the 1989 movie “Longtime Companion” one of the earliest feature films to take on the issue of AIDS and by far the most successful, significant and, for a subset of the gay male community, the most accurate portrayal of what it’s like to see your friends getting sick and dying.
By the time that MMWR report appeared I had been HIV-positive for six months. I didn’t know it at the time but I eventually, using data from my participation in the Hepatitis B vaccine trial, to pinpoint the approximate time of my infection to somewhere prior to May 29th, 1981; a blood sample taken of me on that date later was tested and found to be positive for the marker for HIV. A draw taken three months prior showed no evidence of infection. At the time it took six weeks to six months for evidence of HIV infection to appear in a blood draws. I was very sick the previous December and reasonably though incorrectly assumed I had a particularly nasty bout of influenza. And I managed to track the date down further, based on memories of incidents from early that month. It’s likely I was infected on Friday, December 5th.
HIV was isolated in late 1983 or early 1984. It took another year to develop a test for HIV; that appeared around April 1985. I was tested for HIV a month later but didn’t receive the results until July. I was not particularly surprised and yet shocked at the same time. I now know that 98 percent of the people who were infected around the time I was have passed away.
The first person I knew to be diagnosed with an AIDS-defining opportunistic infection received his diagnosis sometime in October 1981. By the time I got that news I already knew that something was going around, confirming the rumors I’d started hearing around the bars in New York City over the preceding year. I’d moved to DC from New York in September and people in DC, even gay people, tended to be more focused on partisan politics than on medical news. Still I was paying attention. Another friend was diagnosed, and then another. And then they started dying. I have a list of something like 160 friends who died from AIDS-related causes. The first died in 1982, the last in 2007. However in recent years, friends of mine, long term survivors who were in the mid-60s to early 70s, began dying suddenly, most often from massive heart attacks. It’s more than likely that their deaths were caused not be opportunistic infections but as a consequence of low grade but chronic inflammation due to HIV.
Among the many friends I’ve lost there were also my partners Bob Framo and Mario Luna. I ended my relationship with Bob in the summer of 1986 and moved to San Francisco in October of that year. I met Mario only a couple of weeks after arriving though we knew each other for a number of months before we began dating. Bob died on April 23, 1993, Mario passed away on December 4, 1992. I think you can see a pattern here: the first week of December has long been a very challenging time for me.
I contracted HIV when I was 29 years old. I’m now 74. As far as I’m concerned I’m just an old guy whose lived through some things and is trying to keep living through other things, even including the Trump era. I have never seen myself as an activist but I suppose I am one (far more so than I thought I was as a college freshman when I helped take over the campus administration building). It all began in June 2000 when I was invited to speak with a reporter about what it was like (at the time) to live with HIV. The following evening friends saw my interview on KTLA which is the Fox affiliate in Los Angeles. It seems that simply going public with my status made me an activist. The following year I was interviewed briefly for a documentary. Over the years I’ve talked to the press a number of times about having HIV. It seems that after all this time simply mentioning in public that I have an illness is still considered a revelatory moment if not a revolutionary act.
The motto of ACT UP was “Silence=Death.” If speaking out loud about HIV is revolutionary than I guess I’m a revolutionary. The folks behind Project 2025 want to silence those who are marginalized, claiming that doesn’t happen anymore and to say it does is an act of disloyalty. I don’t believe that to be the case but if it upsets them then I guess I had better continue speaking up.
Update 12-1-2025, 9:50 pm PST:
I knew I had forgotten something important and it comes as an addendum to my final paragraph. Really not only does the so-called “administration” want to silence the already-marginalized I do believe they want us dead. While I’m not going to dig deeply into the statistics it’s safe to say that quite apart from eliminating PEPFAR funding and gutting USAID RFK, Jr as (in the name of science mind you!) cut funding for treatment and vaccine research for HIV as well has for a whole host of other conditions. That first move by itself has undoubtedly condemned millions of people to death in other parts of the world, the second move guarantees a reversal of prevention and treatment efforts some of them well on their way to being proven effective. We can expect to see more new infections and more needless deaths as a result of this cruel, callous and dishonest action. Yes indeed I had better continue to speak up. As should we all.
