While the stigma surrounding HIV and AIDS continues to get in the way of preventing and treating the virus, the social climate today is nothing compared to the intense fear and shame that people faced in the ’80s and early ’90s.
The confusion in the midst of the epidemic, fueled by the devastating effects of the illness, created a climate where some would rather die than face treatment head-on.
Related: HIV+ Man’s Photo With His HIV- Family Goes Viral, Combats Stigma
Below, Dr. Frank Spinelli, who treated many patients with HIV/AIDS during this time in New York’s gaycentric Chelsea neighborhood and is one of the physicians featured in the series Dueling Doctors, explains first-hand the harrowing reality that plagued urban gay communities:
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Grant Mealey
Yup…..was there, clinicians refusing to treat, body bags piled out by dumpsters ….Ronald Reagan trying to kill us all….sigh
John Malin
What is truly sad and disgusting is the fact that even today idiotic moralizing, making a virus into God’s Wrath against “Them Thar Homosexuiles” is still so prevalent. So, if you get the flue, you’ve been bad and if you go into the office knowing you are infected, you should be beheaded, disgraced or at the minimum shunned. The illogical Mobius thinking of the demented mind.
Suburbanbum
After my 30 years of death defying struggle combating the HIV virus I can say to young gay men only one thing: Protect Yourself! In 1985 we didn’t know why we were dying or what to call this disease. A generation of dear friendships and gentle lovers was annihilated. Please, always remember to protect yourself, your partner, and your future. Because of HIV…we are forever changed.
Daniel Jordan
It was a time when it felt that help was on the earth.
Louie Mars
The millenials don’t care.. those know -it -all’s are still getting infected.
Brian
The idea that Ronald Reagan harmed gay people is ridiculous. He did no such thing.
Men who frequented the gay scene tended to be very promiscuous and reckless in their conduct. They lived for today, for the “feel good” factor. This meant drugs and promiscuity. There was little regard for the human body in terms of its health and well-being. This incredible recklessness brought immune deficiency to the scene.
If you’re going to point the finger, point it to the reckless men who brought it on themselves with their atrocious conduct.
HIV does NOT discriminate according to your sexual orientation. However, it does discriminate according to your conduct as a human being.
alphacentauri
Is Dr. Frank Spinelli HIV+? I know women and men who are HIV+ and they told me how they personally prefer to go to a doctor or medical professional that’s also HIV+ and who knows what it’s like being HIV+ and on meds.
@Louie Mars: That’s very true. I do remember the fear about HIV/AIDS in the 80s and how a lot of people died from it, so I am not promiscuous, I get tested, and have safer sex. But I know people who were born a few years after me, a decade after me, or even a year or two before me who do not practice safer sex, who think that they can’t possibly get HIV (this includes straight people too), and if they are gay men they have the mentality that if they go on PreP that they can bareback as much as they want and they’ll stay HIV neg and STD free.
alphacentauri
@Suburbanbum: A gay male friend of mine who is in his early 60s remembers that all too well; but he survived the HIV/AIDS pandemic since he started using condoms in the late 70s and for sure in the very early 80s when HIV was called GRIDS or thought to be a cancer.
alphacentauri
@Brian: Normally I do not agree with you Brian but I do agree with your comments here.
Even if gay men had been told to use condoms by the President at the time of the HIV/AIDS pandemic nobody would have listened, as HIV/AIDS was very new and a lot of gay men thought that ‘It won’t happen to me!’ and thought they could continue to have unsafe sex, and Reagan did mention AIDS in 1984 but gay men love to blame him and his administration for people making the choice to not have safer sex or use condoms.
JA Gibbs
Well, I will share this. But I truly believe young gay men simply can not be bothered.
Nixter
@Brian: Truth.
Tracy Pope
Lived through it. Remember caring for friends at their home and then going to see them in the hospital and not being able to go in to see them because they’re “quarantined”. Then it changed to going in with full disposable mask, booties, gowns and pants but still not touch anything in the room or my friends. Had to be sure to remove all the disposable wear inside out and discard them at the door of the room in the Hazardous Waste bin. Then with new information that changed but… The funerals. So many. And so many the bill footed by friends because their “family” wouldn’t have anything to do with it. My heart has broken too many times as friends and loved ones died with HIV/AIDS.
Since the first push to wear condoms I always have. Found out several years ago I carry the “Viking DNA” gene that helps prevent HIV infection but I still use condoms every time.
1EqualityUSA
My young eyes saw too much. It forever changed me.
Kangol
I lived through it, especially from 1988 on. A very difficult period to be a young gay person and see so many gay people falling by the wayside, so many careers nipped in the bud, so many good people you’d meet one month gone or very sick a few months later. Also tough was seeing how cruel so many families were towards their dead sons, degaying them or denouncing their “gay lifestyle” as they lay in their caskets (in those funeral homes that would take them). Just a very sad time that’s almost all but forgotten today.
BTW, the ACT-UP activist and brilliant writer Sarah Schulman wrote one of the best books about how the mass deaths of so many gay men transformed the landscape of the world we live in today. It’s called The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination.
1EqualityUSA
86 to 89, woof.
lildoggy
@Tracy Pope: Tracy, there was actually a time period when we could not find a funeral home that would take someone who died from AIDS. It was worse than anyone can imagine.
paulbear30
@alphacentauri: The funny thing is that while Reagan is NOT at fault, I wonder about people like you and your irresponsible condom advocacy, which is vile in its superficiality. As usual, people like to address symptoms and not diseases. If people like you weren’t busy saying “use a condom” instead of “find pleasure outside of intercourse”, then maybe you’d make a lot more sense. But instead you encourage people to engage in slippery slope sexual acts, no pun intended. Bareback is an inevitable consequence of the normalization of sodomy. Sorry to break it to you, but guys like to wax philosophically about the self hatred implied in bareback sex, but you don’t want to look in the mirror and see how all of you sucking/fucking aficionados are the same.