Hart Island is a small islet located a mile east of the Bronx. It’s one mile long and a third of a mile wide (roughly 213 acres), and during the mid ’80s and ’90s, New York City buried thousands of people who’d died of HIV on the island out of fear the bodies might infect others.
The island and its dark history were recently explored in season two of Ryan Murphy‘s groundbreaking FX drama series Pose. Two HIV-positive queer characters travel to the island in 1990 to visit the grave of their dead friend.
True to history, the friend’s grave is marked only by a number. Crates, each with a dead body (some weeks or months old) were stacked atop one another deep in the soil. Men in hazmat suits, some of them Rikers Island prisoners forced to become gravediggers, walk around the island rubble as bulldozers covered the graves in earth.
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Although the city only buried 17 HIV-positive people there during 1985, they continued to do so well into the ’90s. The number of HIV-positive people buried there is estimated to be in the thousands, but city officials are reluctant to provide exact numbers because of longstanding criticisms of the island’s crude handling of deaths at the time.
Often people who were buried there had been rejected by their families for their HIV-status. At the time, many funeral homes and graveyards refused to accommodate people who had died of HIV-related illnesses for fear of contagion. Hart Island became the only possible resting place for many of these unclaimed and rejected bodies as well as for poor people who couldn’t afford to bury family members killed by the epidemic.
The New York Times says Hart Island could be “perhaps the single largest burial ground in the country for people with AIDS.”
New York is considering considering policy changes to make Hart Island more accessible to those whose relatives are buried there. Until then, its history is kept alive by those who know about it, media like Pose and The Hart Island Project, an interactive website that has a database of its burials, including those who were HIV-positive.
Chrisk
Wow. What a dark history.
I’d like to find every single family member who rejected them and put them under ground as well. They don’t deserve to live.
staggerlee
That’s an insane approach. It was a different time.
Brian
Judging history by contemporary standards always works out so well. That’s why the Brett Kavanaugh hearings were such a unequivocal success.
Allie
I’m sure the victims were comforted by the knowledge that their families’ actions were common at the time, staggerlee
Oh wait
That’s not how it works, is it
OzJosh
A different time?! It was the 1980s/90s, not the 1780s. I wouldn’t be too sure that most families would behave any differently today.
stanhope
Staggerlee you are quite a piece of work…..you absolve people who were responsible for this atrocity with a wave of your limp wrist and saying it was a different time? You have the intelligence of a trump supporter and equivalent morals.
RIGay
Thank you for this.
CenterRight
It’s old history. Let bygones be bygones.
white-queer-african
@CentreRight, I am speechless by your comment! Forget history? A uneducated comment from a troll perhaps?
Chrisk
Do you always have to say shitty things to get attention? You definitely fit every definition of a troll.
Cam
The same account that continually screams about the Clintons doesn’t want to talk about history when it has anything to do with LGBT people.
We get it, you always support anything bigoted and are opposed to anything that is about the community.
supremebuddy
Don’t you have anything better to do…remember what you give out returns to you a thousand times a thousand fold…
LostMyClothesAgain
Center right … based on your Queerty.com comments it is a certainty that people well one day be pissing on your final resting place. Show some respect.
Jonathan
No one will remember you.
JennyMcPike
…said every defendant at the Nuremberg trials…
iron
It is very sad the way gays have been treated. we can see that from all wars.
l believe in cremation. while many people may disagree. It is more setting to free the soul and save the land.
We have come a long way but still, have an intolerance of others of chosen beliefs, l am sorry to say
stanhope
Klan rally starting in 10 minutes..early admittance for dim wits..better run as it is sure to be crowded.
Kenover
This is our Holocaust and it continues today. NEVER FORGET!!!
karljordinson
So sad and poignant the struggle what happened back then with ignorance about infection and contamination.
All stories Ryan Murphy thank god is documenting through tv
stanhope
Ryan Murphy is to be commended for the work he has done…now he is an American hero.
baal61
Truly the only positive thing I can say about this is ” no souls are in that tomb’ they flew with the light of the angels long ago’ FEAR AND IGNORANCE bury sanity. X
fireman452
normally I would just move on but this is SO horrific I just have to say it -to call what NY did a “tomb” is a gross exaggeration, this is a DUMP, and the disrespect shown is unfathomable. Yes I know it is 2019 and not 1983 when medicine was placed in a bucket and shoved across the room for HIV patients, but for the love of God, this is very close to what the Germans did in the Concentration Camps. I spent 4 years in Poland on a Fulbright Scholarship, I KNOW what Treblinka, Majdanek, and O?wi?cim (Auschwitz) were and what happened there.
JosephYvon
There should be a memorial plaque with their names on it ….
nitejonboy
I’ve been explorinig the website dedicated to the island and the people buried there for a few minutes now and I am deep down the rabbit hole, so many stories…so many names, also so many unidentified or unclaimed, sadly, god bless them all….what surprises me is how many older people are there, people born in the 1880’s and 1890’s that were in their 80’s and 90’s, I guess you don’t think of older people getting HIV or AIDS or even having sex lives, makes you realize how far and wide this hit so quickly. I pray someday this is all just a memory and we’ve eradicated this horrible disease and the hatred that has come with it.
Daltxman
Not everyone that is buried on Hart Island died from AIDS. It is a potters field where people that were unclaimed, unknown or very poor were buried. All cities/counties/states have them. I am sure many of those buried there were unclaimed by family due to the circumstances. My husband and I, both long term poz survivors (35 years), have been blessed to be able to live thru such a horrible time. During this time, life expectancy was 45 days after diagnosis. 45 days! For years, no one knew exactly how it was spread. The panic was very similar to the recent Ebola infections. Except, instead of being contained in a city, it was spread out around the world. Dark, horrible times.
Brian
I honestly didn’t know this existed until I saw the Pose episode.
Condor221
This is a disgrace to NYC and anyone who knew it was going on.
LthrboyGeorge
I had no idea of this until now. Absolutely shameful and stupid, and this must be rectified somehow. Every person who was ‘dumped’ there must have a proper memorial stone with his name and dates of birth & death. We treat stray animals better than what these fellow Humans got.
Groshua
So, how about a little more history? Like, the island was used for TB patients to be confined for years and years. Your headline offers the history, but unfortunately, doesn’t delve very far.
Lenny
I too honestly didn’t know that this place existed ! Absurd , I think, although in the past decades people feared AIDS as much as LEPERS were feared in the past centuries. Now most people worldwide don’t fear AIDS any more because of the medical advances and discoveries along the decades. Thank God!
Aj76
Such a sad story.
May they be resting in peace!
BRENT
All I can say is: thank God I live in England.
Kangol2
I knew about this gravesite and it’s no less heartbreaking reading about it again as it was when I heard about it years ago. So many early AIDS sufferers’ biological families abandoned them it may seem hard to believe today. There are a number of people walking around today who should be atoning for how they treated their loved ones.
By the way, Ed Koch, a closeted gay man and conservative Democrat, was NY’s mayor during these brutal years, and his record on addressing the growing AIDS crisis was awful.
GO_Phoenix
I was about to write a comment of my own when I saw yours, fireman452, in your response to baal61’s. You’ve encapsulated exactly what I wanted to say. I then saw other comments explaining that many others were left there, too, so should also like to acknowledge them.
So damned tragic and sad.
Aires the Ram
Mass graves are horrible, but common, world-wide. Doesn’t make the situation any better. But we cannot, and should not, attempt to remake history into something more “pretty” than it really is. We must look at true history, not a sanitized version, or a politically-corrected version. To do that is doing a great dis-service to those already dead, and a great dis-service to future generations, who will then be doomed to repeating what history has taught, because of not being taught. Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. We shouldn’t be tearing down war-time statutes, and no plaque or commemoration of those buried at this island or elsewhere is going to change anything. We must live for today, it is all we are given.
white-queer-african
@Aries the Ram, I salute you and applaud you. Forgetting history! Explain that to @CentrRight! I weep thinking of the karma coming his way.
PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS
So many today have no idea how AIDS was for all practical purposes a Gay plauge in the 80’s….those poor souls suffered a horrific tortours death…..
People were grasping at any possibility of surviving. One of my best friends parents mortgaged their home to raise $50,000 to pay for a “cure” where a quack at a clinic in Atlanta was telling victims that by draining and super heating their blood, it would kill the virus. Basically it destroyed any white blood cells that were still functional attempting to suppress the virus and quicken the death of Billy and countless others.
Our local neighborhood bar moved it’s opening up to 1pm instead of 4pm because there would be so many people waiting outside almost every day to gather and mourn a friend they had just buried…