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I'm a 25 year old American and for the past week I've been asking people for their personal memories of the US epidemic in the 80's and/or their personal experiences with the disease. I've spoken with multiple people of various ages, races, and locales and the only people who recall knowing about HIV/AIDS before ~85 are those who were involved with the gay community and heroin users. One woman swears her friend was hospitalized as the result of unspecified opportunistic infection(s) as early as 1979 in Houston, TX. I obviously can't corroborate this with CDC data, but the symptoms are nearly identical with initial reported infections and it's not like HIV was non-existent until 1980. Now I'm asking for your help. Please help me gain a more complete understanding of America and AIDS in the 80's by sharing any personal stories you can. When did you first learn about the virus? What was education like in your area? Does anyone remember getting the Surgeon General's info packet in the mail around 1987?
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Sep 13, 2015 23:42
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| # ? May 4, 2024 12:46 |
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I started working on the AIDS virus under Reagan when he needed a helpful tool to curb social unrest, and I was one of the lead researchers under both Bush administrators to produce a shelf-stable version that would reliably be spread to target populations via chemtrails. I can't really say more.
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Sep 14, 2015 00:59
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killaer posted:I started working on the AIDS virus under Reagan when he needed a helpful tool to curb social unrest, and I was one of the lead researchers under both Bush administrators to produce a shelf-stable version that would reliably be spread to target populations via chemtrails. I can't really say more. I was the guy that hosed the first chimp with AIDS. AMA
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Sep 14, 2015 01:25
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Bug Bill Murray posted:I was the guy that hosed the first chimp with AIDS. AMA I caught GRID from Bug Bill Murray.
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Sep 14, 2015 01:44
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4z2DtNW79sQ I think this will be a big help to you OP.
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Sep 14, 2015 01:50
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I'm only 30, so I don't have direct experience with the AIDS virus. I do work with community nurses who've had over 30 years of experience with the early AIDS epidemic, mostly in the ghettos of Boston. There was a teenager who had been infected with AIDS through the many times his step father raped him. He dutifully took the drugs available to him at the time, but when he turned 18, he refused to take anymore. He wanted to be in charge of something in his short and miserable life. He died shortly before his 19th birthday. All the nurses and caregivers he'd had came out for his funeral. I spoke with one of our doctors for an article, and so this is some of what he told me: He kept losing patients from some mysterious disease. One of his patients, who is still alive, miraculously, stopped answering the phone for ages because of how often it would be more news about another friend who'd died. The man was able to wait out the worse of the symptoms until better drugs came around. This person was the guest speaker at our Word AIDS Day celebration last year.
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Sep 14, 2015 03:41
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My mother worked in a San Francisco Hospital blood lab running tests starting in the early 70s through the early 80s back when AIDS started popping up. (Just to clarify, she didn't quit because of AIDS, she got offered a better job closer to her family. I was about three years old when this happened.) She hated the gay bath houses, even before AIDS became a thing, because there are other incurable STDs that it sucks to have. My mom wasn't anti-gay, just coming at it from someone who worked in healthcare regularly testing people for STDs and too often the results came back positive. Being diagnosed with genital Herpes, or Hepatitis whatever letter, is better than HIV. They probably won't kill you, but you still don't want to have one of those diseases.
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Sep 14, 2015 09:02
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I can remember the newscast on the night they announced they'd discovered the virus that causes AIDS. It was called "HIV". I was four or five. I remember a crude, frightening-looking computer graphic of the virus like a sickly-green globe with round tendrils coming out and a pink center - all coloured for artistic effect, no doubt, but what I remember most vividly was how immediately a young kid barely out of toddlerhood could feel such a sense of doom and gravity about what the TV reporter said. Apart from that, us kids didn't really think much about it at that age. Gays or drug addicts, or sex and drugs as a whole, weren't something we knew or comprehended much of, we rode our BMX bicycles and watched Miami Vice on VHS tapes in some kids basement and played war in the forest. Gradually as we got older it came into our lives more, if not directly then through the mass media. It frightened us more than we liked to admit. The finality of doom, a literal death sentence as inevitable and leaden as being condemned to the electric chair, was what made it so terrifying. More high-profile AIDS victims showed up in the news. The big turn was no doubt Freddie Mercury right as we were entering into our teens. It was a cultural atom bomb. It reverbed so strongly up throughout the nineties, when the first solid retroviral suppression regimens began to get effective around 1995 or so with their promises of a near natural lifespan, most of us didn't even notice. The ghost of AIDS had simply menaced us for so long by then. I honestly didn't even discover HIV no longer implied a long and painful death until well past the oughts because I guess I didn't need to know anything more than I knew already. In the past few years I've come to realize more and more how deeply HIV/AIDS affected me and the decade in which I was a child. It's a subject I sometimes dig into to work through all that. Force de Fappe fucked around with this message at 22:51 on Sep 14, 2015 |
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Sep 14, 2015 22:49
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I really don't remember when everything hit, but my parents both taught school. The neighboring county school system barred a 6-year-old from class because his mother had AIDS. Because of their tiny population, this place briefly had one of the highest AIDS rates in the country. I've since looked it up and it was 3 out of 5,000 or so citizens. It was 1986. Though some of the AIDS myths about transmission were getting blown up, the school panicked and it took a lawsuit to have the child readmitted, but only on the ground that he not live with his mother. I read somewhere that he later withdrew from the system, so there's a chance he was in ours. Our school system mandated teachers to go through AIDS training. All this stuff now gets rolled into new teacher orientation or recertification, but all teachers had to go through one AIDS-specific. At about the same time, there was another school system who declared that if they had any HIV-positive students, they would be completely segregated from others. This was an actual metropolitan county. That's to say nothing of the school case that brought AIDS fears to the spotlight, Ryan White. That and Magic Johnson's HIV diagnosis are what pushed it into the mainstream for us in our little backwoods area. There is a bit of the AIDS scare that still exists in professional sports. Players really can't bleed anymore. You used to see bloody jerseys. Now any little cut is promptly treated. I"m pretty sure that was borne out of Magic Johnson.
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Sep 15, 2015 03:36
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Force de Fappe posted:I can remember the newscast on the night they announced they'd discovered the virus that causes AIDS. It was called "HIV". I was four or five. I remember a crude, frightening-looking computer graphic of the virus like a sickly-green globe with round tendrils coming out and a pink center - all coloured for artistic effect, no doubt, but what I remember most vividly was how immediately a young kid barely out of toddlerhood could feel such a sense of doom and gravity about what the TV reporter said. Yep. It was on the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour for me, same age, and it's stuck with me all these years. Must've been 1983 or 1984. It somehow felt like it was going to be a really big deal. My other news memory from that time is my dad throwing his shoe at the TV listening to Oliver North testify about Iran/Contra.
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Sep 16, 2015 00:09
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I remember MTV came to do a documentary in my school about some kid who was HIV positive my freshman year in high school. Everybody was more excited about the possibility of being on MTV, than worrying that there was some hemophiliac HIV positive kid amongst them. I never met the kid that MTV made a documentary about, even though he briefly went to my highschool. poo poo, if I was a conspiracist I would argue that kid never actually existed. thrakkorzog fucked around with this message at 13:57 on Sep 18, 2015 |
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Sep 16, 2015 12:09
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I remember a child in Kindergarten that wouldn't touch things other children touched because he was convinced he would get AIDS.
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Sep 17, 2015 00:18
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I was born in Eastern Europe  so it didn't affect me at the time but when I was in the USA in high school in the early 2000s we were all taken into the auditorium to watch some horrible film about how these dudes got aids just from kissing, and other (gay) dudes got it by being in love, and it was so dramatic and scary that I thought that if I even touched any blood or kiss anyone ever I would die. Never mind the fact that by that point having HIV didn't mean a death sentence. Abstinence-only Sex-Ed, hell yeah!On the other hand I found a pamphlet in a drawer, from the 1980s from the company I work for, and the pamphlet was really informative and unbiased, and not "the gay plague!!" So that was a nice thing. Thin Privilege fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Sep 17, 2015 |
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Sep 17, 2015 01:19
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I went to Catholic high school and I remember we were making AIDS awareness posters in biology class, so that would have been 1989ish in a fairly conservative, sheltered environment. I also remember by then seeing some sitcoms using AIDS for their very special episodes or something.
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Sep 18, 2015 20:12
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Not really what the OP was asking for, but my mother is a visiting nurse and all her cases used to be AIDS patients. She just went to a funeral for a woman my age (34) that died of AIDS. The woman had worked as a case scheduler for the company. From what my mother could piece together it seems like she'd had HIV for a few years, but no one knew about it because with current HAART regimens it is a manageable chronic disease. It seems like she was so healthy for so long that she just figured she had beaten the disease,or failed to appreciate how important it was to maintain the regimen. She went off her drugs, shrugged off a few symptoms, and by the time she ended up in the hospital, the disease was beyond treatment. She died within a couple of months.
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Sep 18, 2015 20:52
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My birth mother, a Catholic high school teacher in the Midwest, died of AIDS in the early 90s. She had gotten it from the man she married after giving birth to me, who had gotten it from a blood transfusion in 1981. He died a few years after her. I have only seen one photo of her when she was sick, and it was such a shocking difference from the ones just a few years before. It was a horrible, painful death then, and completely shrouded in shame. But the Church continues to say they died of the nobler, safer, Cancer, and is one of the reasons my grandmother has cut ties with that diocese. It makes me sick to see the stigma persist well into this century.
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Sep 18, 2015 22:08
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artichoke posted:But the Church continues to say they died of the nobler, safer, Cancer, and is one of the reasons my grandmother has cut ties with that diocese. It makes me sick to see the stigma persist well into this century. I'm so sorry. I heard a very similar story from a friend. The rest of his family maintains she had a brain tumor because of toxoplasmosis degeneration. It's not right and I'll never understand it. Infection rates are rising again and there are people who refuse to acknowledge HIV/AIDS. I tried to pitch a needle exchange downtown but was told exhanges and/or safe injection sites will never happen in this city.
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Sep 19, 2015 13:43
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I only remember one little anecdote about it. I was in 3rd or 4th grade so this was '93 or '94, and someone came in to give us a presentation on HIV/AIDS. They explained that it was transmitted by contact with infected blood, and among other things that you have to be extremely careful and clean up blood with bleach to kill the HIV virus. Later that day, we went outside for recess and there were drops of blood on the front steps of the school. I quickly told a teacher that there was blood that needed to be cleaned up and they shrugged it off and acted like it wasn't a big deal. I was confused since they had made such a big deal about it in the classroom but acted like it was nothing when I stepped out of the classroom and what the teachers did completely contradicted what they had told us a few hours later.
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Sep 19, 2015 15:07
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When I was a kid in the 80s everyone was scared of nuclear war and aids. As far as I could tell, sooner or later there was going to be a nuclear war, no matter what, because the Russians were so evil. To a modern 90s or later person, the best way to explain what aids was to us was that it was like the outbreak of the disease in the movie Contagion. People quickly dying in a suspicious and world threatening way. Except once the government started to accept it existed, we were all told that the main vectors for that disease were those mysterious and deviant gay people. Many people thought you could get aids from toilet seats or the air around sufferers, and that for there to be a gay person present was to place everyone in legitimate and profound danger. What was even more troubling was that any expression of sexual awareness would also somehow create even more victims. One of my area's universities installed condom vending machines in the toilets, and the local government sent in cops to remove them. The thinking was that if people were capable of having protected sex, it would spread immorality and aids, instead of preventing it. Imagine being told as a kid that if a certain kind of person was arrested or sent away, you would be safe and wouldn't get that deadly disease. That was all we knew. Anyone with an alternative view was dangerously crazy. Later on, when people started to be announced on the news as having caught aids from blood transfusions and other diseases, it was still hard for them live in public. Children with aids were segregated because no-one would attend school near them, parents would withdraw their children. Parents would come under a great deal of scrutiny as well. This video is a pretty good example of the time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zMdWhoFFck
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Sep 20, 2015 05:48
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Isaac Asimov died of AIDS. His family kept that hidden for a long time because of the stigma behind it.
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Sep 20, 2015 13:53
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This isn't my recollection, but a former teacher of mine (urban, Los Angeles school by downtown) recalled a coworker of hers investing in some company called Church & Dwight in the early 80s, a little manufacturer of home goods. They, of course, laughed in his face when he said they were also a manufacturer of Trojan condoms. These were children of the 60s and 70s. Who the gently caress would use those things! Well, a thing called AIDS altered the landscape pretty quickly. Turns out the guy made out like a bandit, bought a house and retired a few years early. As for myself, I recall the Very Special episode of Mr. Belvedere, where Wesley's HIV+ friend shared a popsicle and the family freaked the gently caress out over it, later learning that you can catch it only through blood. That was my biggest acknowledgement of HIV/AIDS, until the afternoon I turned on the TV and one of the greatest NBA legends of the day announced he was HIV+ and was retiring. When I finally got cable TV around 94, I was privvy to MTV's Sex in the 90s series, which did quite a bit to spread awareness of safe sex and the effects of AIDS. I think, for an adolescent in the 80s and 90s, experimental sex had a giant cloud of AIDS hanging over it all. Like some poster said, you were afraid of the Soviets raining atomic hellfire, and afraid of catching AIDS. Learning that the Hippies hosed their way through like 20 years of their lives without worrying that their junk would fall off in a festering mess of disease, or that their bodies would become shrivelled husks felled by a common cold, really, really put the idea of sexuality in the 90s in cold contrast. Then I learned that it was initially called GRID, and that Reagan sat on his rear end about it until Rock Hudson keeled over. FilthyImp fucked around with this message at 08:56 on Sep 23, 2015 |
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Sep 23, 2015 08:53
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xutech posted:
Man those old PSA's really hit the spot... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRPJFuzdzkY
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Sep 24, 2015 01:44
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I remember an after-school-special on Nickelodeon with Linda Ellerby about AIDS, and I think Magic Johnson was involved. Maybe they just talked about him in the third person but it could have been an interview. I've heard people speculate Magic never actually contracted HIV/AIDS at all but that's pretty  AIDS was scary and bad, D.A.R.E. was in vogue, and I was pretty young (early 1990s). I talked to my parents about it and I heard stories of kids back in the and '60s and '70s doing things like poking holes in their arms and holding wounds together making them "blood brothers" or whatever, and how that was a terrible idea. On the other hand I watched my classmates huff rubber cement and play "the choking game" at recess, so my conclusion is that every generation of humans is really dumb, especially during childhood. HIV/AIDS education is important and good though. It certainly had a lasting impression on me and got me really freaked out about intravenous drugs and blood borne pathogens. I also learned more about T-cells, antibodies, and the immune system than I would have otherwise. Malcolm fucked around with this message at 03:10 on Sep 24, 2015 |
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Sep 24, 2015 02:59
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Have you watched The Age of AIDS? I think it pretty much covers everything. Very interesting to watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugdPBvTSYPQ I'd say the saddest thing about was the tens of thousands of hemophiliacs who got HIV through blood transfusions. Apparently the blood filtering process used back then couldn't catch the virus.
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Sep 25, 2015 09:46
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Pilsner posted:Have you watched The Age of AIDS? I think it pretty much covers everything. Very interesting to watch. My dad has hemophilia and he's one of very few men in that demographic who made it out alive. The standard treatment was daily blood product infusions, but my grandmother (a nurse) decided to only give him blood/factor when he injured himself, so he had far fewer chances to contract HIV. He had to be treated for hep C a few years ago though. Fortunately it was a minor case which is why it took 20-30 years for him to find out he had it.
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Sep 26, 2015 13:18
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| # ? May 4, 2024 12:46 |
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Pilsner posted:Have you watched The Age of AIDS? I think it pretty much covers everything. Very interesting to watch. Yep, that's what happened to my birth mother's husband. He went over 5 years with HIV without even knowing it.
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Sep 27, 2015 23:15
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