"In 1981, my soul mate started showing signs of immunosuppression, before AIDS even had its name. ACT UP New York / New York Public LibraryĪvram Finkelstein, one of the designers of the iconic ACT UP poster “Silence=Death,” wrote in guest post for the New York Public Library: In particular, the sky-high price of AZT: $10,000 per year. “Our first demonstration place three weeks later on March 24 on Wall Street, the financial center of the world, to protest the profiteering of pharmaceutical companies,” ACT UP wrote. ACT UP NEW YORK / New York Public Library A 1990s ACT UP poster criticizing former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani's response to the AIDS crisis. Today, their actions and their activist art are legendary for speeding the government’s response to the AIDS crisis, allowing quicker testing and treatment of lifesaving experimental drugs, and drawing public attention to the deadly impact of homophobic public health policies.
The march for LGBTQ civil rights ground to a halt - after more than a dozen states repealed sodomy bans in the 1970s, just two jurisdictions, Wisconsin and the Virgin Islands, decriminalized sodomy in the 1980s. “God’s judgment is going to fall on America as on other societies that allowed homosexuality to become a protected way of life,” Bob Jones III predicted, according to UPI.Īs the anti-gay reaction gained steam across America with the election of Moral Majority ally Ronald Reagan, activists found their demands for attention for a growing medical crisis were ignored. On March 22, 1980, a year before that first MMWR report, evangelical Christian leaders delivered a petition to President Jimmy Carter demanding a halt to the advance of gay rights. She called the group "Save Our Children" and said it represented the rights of the majority of citizens. Singer and anti-gay activist Anita Bryant heads a crusade to nullify a local gay rights ordinance, Feb.
Jerry Falwell, whose “Moral Majority” inveighed against giving rights to gay people. In a 1983 appearance on NBC's "Today" show, activist and Gay Mens Health Crisis co-founder Larry Kramer asked host Jane Pauley, "Jane, can you imagine what it must be like if you had lost 20 of your friends in the last 18 months?"Īlmost at the exact time that HIV cases first began to pop up in Los Angeles and New York, the LGBTQ civil rights struggle faced a reactionary backlash led by figures like Anita Bryant and Rev. In NBC Nightly News’ first report on AIDS in June 1982, Robert Bazell reported that “the best guess is some infectious agent is causing it.” The first official government report on AIDS came on June 5, 1981, in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a government bulletin on perplexing disease cases: “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. Men who have sex with men were, and still are, disproportionately impacted by HIV because it transmits much more easily through anal sex than through vaginal sex.
By then, the sexual revolution was in full swing and HIV was spreading silently among gay male populations in large American cities. It was not until the late 1970s when the HIV strain that started the North American pandemic had made its way to the United States, via Zaire and Haiti.