In 1971, a Haitian immigrant arrived in New York City full of dreams of a better life. Unfortunately, they didn’t get a better life, nor did many that they came in contact with. This unlucky Haitian was patient zero for the HIV epidemic in the United States, along with many other parts of the world. Little to nothing is known about this person, other than they must have been down on their luck. The first population to be affected were homeless junkies, spreading the virus via sharing needles. By the mid-1970’s, a number of homeless people began dying of a sudden onset of a type of pneumonia commonly seen in those with weak immune systems. So many died that people who worked with that population began calling it junkie pneumonia. However, similar to the cases already taking place in Africa and Haiti, nobody with the power to do so gave enough of a shit about homeless people to look into it. By 1976, similar cases began appearing amongst the homeless population of San Francisco. It was there that HIV began to affect a different population, and first appear in the public eye.
In 1969, a police raid on a gay bar in New York City, known as the Stonewall Inn, broke out into a three day riot, breathing new life into the gay civil rights movement. Utilizing similar tactics as the African-American Civil Rights movement, the gay community began battering down barriers. Over the next decade, nineteen states decriminalized same-sex relations, psychiatrists quit viewing homosexuality as a mental disorder, and many people began to not only openly declare their sexuality, but to celebrate it. Seeking places where they could openly be themselves, many migrated to major west coast cities, the most prominent being San Francisco. There, many created a culture that critics called hedonistic, filled with celebration and casual promiscuity, the center of which were the bathhouses, where people could meet anonymous partners.
Amongst those making the journey to San Francisco and similar cities, many were cut off by families and lacking the means to support themselves. Intermingling with both the gay and homeless communities, they became the bridge for HIV. Between the large amount of casual sex and the high transmission rates of anal intercourse, the virus spread rapidly, leaping from city to city, carried by businessmen and flight attendants. By 1981, the disease had spread enough to start catching the notice of the Centers for Disease Control, which noted strange clusters of deaths by pneumonia. Over the next eighteen months, new clusters were discovered across the nation, with people dying of diseases and infections that shouldn’t be afflicting otherwise healthy individuals. At first it was only noticed in gay men, earning monikers like the gay disease, but soon after its prevalence was also noted amongst junkies, hemophiliacs, and Haitian immigrants. Thousands began to sicken and die.
In the world of the 1980’s, though progress had been made, the gay community and anything to do with it was still stigmatized by the majority of Americans. Due to this stigmatization, the spread of HIV was largely ignored by the government, the media, and the public. In the early days, little to nothing was known about HIV, nobody knew how it spread, so many doctors and nurses refused to treat HIV patients. Even as the disease spread, many medical professionals refused to acknowledge that the virus could be contracted by the heterosexual community. Despite people dying every day, few resources and little funding was put towards research, a problem only exacerbated by infighting amongst researchers more interested in their own fame than collaboratively working together. The virus wasn’t identified until 1983, and a broadly available test didn’t become available until 1985. Politicians refused to even mention the disease, with President Reagan not even mentioning it until 1987. This abject refusal to even acknowledge the virus, led to HIV getting into blood banks, spreading the disease further. The media furthered the chaos by printing rumors that led to cases of mass hysteria.
In the end, it took members of the gay community, and their supporters and families, to forcefully thrust the issue into the public eye. Famed actor Rock Hudson died from the virus in 1985, and was followed by several other prominent celebrities, such as Freddy Mercury. However, it wasn’t until babies and women began to die in more significant numbers that the public began taking the issue seriously. Unfortunately, homophobia wasn’t the only thing activists had to fight. Members of the gay community pushed back as well, especially against calls to limit sexual partners and to close the bathhouses, decrying the demands as doomsday projections. These same activists also raised money to fill the gaps in funding for research and medical care for those getting sick.
Deaths caused by HIV in the U.S. continued to rise throughout the 1980’s and early 1990’s, finally peaking in 1995 at 42,000 deaths per year. The following year, researchers developed a cocktail of antiviral drugs which reduced death rates by 60 percent in two years. Today, fewer than 17,000 die each year of the disease, which is widely viewed as treatable. Some 1.1 million Americans live with HIV, 14% of whom are estimated to be unaware of it. An estimated 700,000 people in the U.S. have died of HIV infections since the beginning of the epidemic.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pelosi_at_Second_National_March_in_1987.jpg