AIDS in the '80s: taboo or not?

[treanir]

As you may or may not know, I'm currently writing my master's dissertation on AIDS plays. My two supervisors disagree on something, and I want to know from people who have personal experience. My question is this:

Was AIDS a taboo topic in the 1980s?

Supervisor 1 says: "yes, it was. People were not comfortable discussing it and avoided it where possible."
Supervisor 2 says: "no, it wasn't. People did not have the luxury of making the disease a taboo."

NB. I am going for the gay response. I know AIDS was almost completely ignored in the mainstream/heterosexual media.

 

[alley]

I remember it being talked about and discussed...a lot. Everything negative...how you got it..
who got it...

And how many who were dying from it... and how many more who would die from it as it spread.

Maybe the first supervisor is talking about the stigma that was attached???

I was not around a lot of gay people then.

 

[kallipolis]

From my experience of the eighties I can confidently say that among my gay friends, and acquaintances the topic of Aids was not a taboo subject. Rather the topic was thoroughly discussed without limits.

As you can imagine with friends and acquaintances dropping like flies (some dying in a matter of a few months, after the diagnosis was confirmed) it was impossible not to discuss Aids as a regular topic of conversation.

I need to correct you on your misapprehension that Aids was ignored in the main stream media. The media gave wide coverage to the rapid spread of Aids, and I may add in the UK and here in Greece, there was government sponsored television advertising that invited people to use condoms during sexual encounters.

 

[unloadonme]

It's a bit of both.

AIDS was discussed in general terms incessantly. In the UK, the government even delivered a booklet to every household called (I think) "Don't Die of Ignorance".

What was often a taboo was the discussion of AIDS in relation to individual people. They were commonly said to have died from pneumonia or whatever rather than from HIV/AIDS which was the underlying cause.

 

[Harke the Boeotarch]

I knew about AIDS at least since 1987 (I was 10).
There were magazine ads with Chriet Titulaer in Kijk magazine and tv ads as well.

It wasn't a taboo in the Netherlands, at least not by then.

You really need to read the Homo-encycopedie Van Nederland.

 

[tidimus]

I suppose it would depend on what group of people you are talking about.

Politicians - TABOO
Everyone else - talked about it constantly. Think 1 week of swine flew coverage over the course of years.

I was only 6-7 years old when AIDS was revealed as AIDS. You couldn't get away from the subject.

 

[GL]

when i was in high school i knew this upper class man who was so cute. we shared band and theater class and he was a really nice guy and even from my deeply closeted perspective i knew he was gay.

by the time i got to my senior year word came down that he had been very ill and eventually died. the rumor was he had died from aids. eventually it was confirmed but i remember then that when people talked about him and his passing it was equally 'poor guy' with 'well only gays get it.' i was surprised at both the sympathy and the derision. some people went out of their way to make it known aids was a "faggot's disease."

back then aids and any discussion of it was very taboo. nobody wanted to talk about it because nobody wanted to deal with the gay connotation.

 

[kallipolis]

when i was in high school i knew this upper class man who was so cute. we shared band and theater class and he was a really nice guy and even from my deeply closeted perspective i knew he was gay.

by the time i got to my senior year word came down that he had been very ill and eventually died. the rumor was he had died from aids. eventually it was confirmed but i remember then that when people talked about him and his passing it was equally 'poor guy' with 'well only gays get it.' i was surprised at both the sympathy and the derision. some people went out of their way to make it known aids was a "faggot's disease."

back then aids and any discussion of it was very taboo. nobody wanted to talk about it because nobody wanted to deal with the gay connotation.

This is not my experience, and this includes American friends and acquaintances.

On the contrary the death rate obliged society to address the matter of Aids, if only to deal with a very evident growth in paranoia among sexually active people of all sexual orientations.

 

[GL]

This is not my experience, and this includes American friends and acquaintances.

On the contrary the death rate obliged society to address the matter of Aids, if only to deal with a very evident growth in paranoia among sexually active people of all sexual orientations.

i appreciate your perspective and i'm glad your experiences were positive, but not all of us can share that or even claim it. regardless allow me to put my experience into context. i graduated from high school in 1988. this was also the same time my friend died. i did not know one "out" gay person in my small south texas home town. in fact my friend did not appear to be out in any way. i'm sure there were other gays in my community, but no one was out. fear of reprisals and attacks kept a number of people in the closet.

 

[treanir]

I need to correct you on your misapprehension that Aids was ignored in the main stream media. The media gave wide coverage to the rapid spread of Aids, and I may add in the UK and here in Greece, there was government sponsored television advertising that invited people to use condoms during sexual encounters.

1) When was this?
2) I should have mentioned this in the OP, but I focus on the United States. My dissertation would become too big otherwise. (it already is!)

I'm getting a clearer picture from the responses. Keep 'em coming.

 

[kallipolis]

i appreciate your perspective and i'm glad your experiences were positive, but not all of us can share that or even claim it. regardless allow me to put my experience into context. i graduated from high school in 1988. this was also the same time my friend died. i did not know one "out" gay person in my small south texas home town. in fact my friend did not appear to be out in any way. i'm sure there were other gays in my community, but no one was out. fear of reprisals and attacks kept a number of people in the closet.

In the eighties I was living in a big city, rather than a small community. Thus I appreciate that public interaction can vary considerably between city and the sticks. Certainly my time in London, Bologna and Athens during the eighties did evidence much openness of discussion on the subject of Aids.

 

[NedNickerson]

I can remember talking to a female college friend of mine in 1982 about "the gay cancer" as AIDS was called in the beginning. She looked at me like in astonishment, and said, "That's crazy. There's no such thing as a cancer that affects only gay men!"

Of course, as time went on, doctors eventually figured out what it was that was killing so many gay men. And later, the news reports began coming out that it was beginning to affect the heterosexual population as well, that it had "crossed over" into that segment of the population through bi-sexual men.

It was always gay men and bisexual men who were the focus of such stories. Then slowly there began to be more news articles of individuals catching and dying the disease, for whom there didn't seem to be a logical reason. People were confused and frightened about reports like those, until it was discovered that the disease could be transmitted through blood transfusions.

I don't think it was taboo to talk about the disease in the beginning, but rather, I think as long as the disease seemed to stay in the gay population, it wasn't talked about as much, because the general population didn't think it would affect them. But when it began to affect the heterosexual population, little children and old grandmothers, that's when you began to hear more about it, and to see articles in newspapers and on the news about the spread of the new disease.

It was, of course, the announcement of Rock Hudson having the disease, particularly when he showed up on Doris Day's cable show looking gaunt and older than his years, that most people had their first glimpse of how the disease could make the body waste away. It had only been a few months before that he had appeared in episodes of Dynasty and people were shocked at his change in appearance. After he died, whenever a celebrity died and the cause of death was listed as "not given" or "under investigation," people assumed, "Oh, he died of AIDS."

The movie "Longtime Companion" is the best movie I know of that covers the early days of the AIDS crisis in the 80's. It's also called "the gay cancer," in the movie.

I don't think it was "taboo" to discuss it. It's just that there wasn't a lot of information about it in the beginning and people were wary of it , while at the same time being curious. I can remember it being talked about a lot in the 80's and not just among the gay population. After other celebrities died from the disease, such as Liberace, Robert Reed, Ryan White (who caught his disease through a blood transfusion), Amanda Blake (aka Miss Kitty on "Gunsmoke," who caught it from her bisexual husband), deaths which were widely covered in tabloids and shows like Evening Magazine and Entertainment Tonight, people began talking more about it. There was a lot of misinformation out there as to how you could catch it - toilet seats, shaking hands, whether it was airborne or could be caught from mosquito bites, etc., that has carried down to this day. Remember, we're still only about one generation away from the beginnings of AIDS.

I'm reminded of an episode on "Golden Girls," where Dorothy is diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. But before she is finally diagnosed, Sophia makes an impassioned speech about how thousands died of the Black Plague before they discovered what caused it. But it had started with just one man. She was worried that Dorothy might be dying and the doctors didn't even know it. And that's how it was with the first AIDS victims. Hundreds died across the country before doctors began making connections, and it took several more years before the advent of AIDS prevention programs, during which time even more innocent, uninformed and misinformed individuals caught the disease.

Sorry if this reply is a bit rambling. To sum up, I don't think it was necessarily taboo or even that people didn't have the luxury of making it taboo. It's just that there wasn't a lot of information about the disease for most of the 80's. And this was also before there was the internet, when people still relied on the daily newspaper and the evening news to get their information.

 

[gsdx]

I need to correct you on your misapprehension that Aids was ignored in the main stream media. The media gave wide coverage to the rapid spread of Aids, and I may add in the UK and here in Greece, there was government sponsored television advertising that invited people to use condoms during sexual encounters.

1) When was this?

AIDS was virtually ignored by the media over here. There were numerous articles about it in gay magazines, but hardly anyone else even knew about it outside the gay community. (Perhaps that's why it is still thought to be a 'gay disease'.)

It wasn't until Rock Hudson announced his homosexuality and having AIDS in the mid 80s that the media began to take notice. (Perhaps that's another reason why it is still thought to be a 'gay disease'.)

 

[kallipolis]

1) When was this?
2) I should have mentioned this in the OP, but I focus on the United States. My dissertation would become too big otherwise. (it already is!)

I'm getting a clearer picture from the responses. Keep 'em coming.

A UK poster has drawn our attention to a booklet issued by the British Government on the topic of Aids. This booklet sought to educate people on the dangers of Aids, and also to ensure that the fantasy realm was also addressed.By fantasy realm I am referring to the many wives tales that grew out of the paranoia that surrounded Aids.

Government sponsored television advertising in the UK and Greece attempted to dispel the many myths that were masquerading as fact. The use of condoms was very heavily emphasised.

 

[Harke the Boeotarch]

Silence = Death

 

[treanir]

^ Larry Kramer's the author of one of the plays I discuss (The Normal Heart), so I've got that part of the history.

 

[kallipolis]

I recall a regular precautionary check up at a VD clinic back in 1979, when the Consultant (a good friend) brought my attention to a venereal infection, that was beginning to surface in the United States that was demonstrably untreatable.

The Consultant had a heart to heart discussion with me on the ethics of promiscuous sex, that encouraged me to be a lot more aware of the risks attached to a free sexual life.

On a personal note I began to lose friends in the late eighties, and by the early nineties there was massive crossing of the Styx. I hoped that the boatmen would be kind to my many innocent friends, and acquaintances.

 

[bankside]

I remember research and demographic information commonly being reported in the 80's in popular household magazines like "Discover" and so on. Discussed in media - shows like "Donahue" and any number of news specials. But! I think they spent a lot of time analyzing the impact of it being a taboo subject on the likelyhood of continued transmission and the impact of taboo on the development of HIV as a public health problem - how taboo helps HIV spread, how it prevents people from acknowledging it and seeking treatment etc..

In short, you could talk freely and openly and constantly about HIV being a taboo subject.

That is in the general public eye however. The only gay media I had ever seen published in that time was Canadian, and I don't think I saw it until the early 1990s. It certainly focussed on "the gay battle" against HIV, and it was assumed that if you were gay, you were a soldier in that battle. (old Pink Triangle Press stuff..."The Body Politic" was the name of the newspaper)

Very funny too, the first time I heard of this "top" and "bottom" nonsense, only at the time they used the euphemisms of "greek active, greek passive, or french active, french passive" One was supposed to be oral sex and the other was supposed to be anal. I can't remember which was which. But the really surprising idea was that people divided themselves into "active" and "passive" in the personal ads. I would have been 17 or 18 and reading these back-issues thinking these must have been old fags in their 40's who had never known about equal rights and that they were still stuck in outdated constructs of "masculine" and "feminine" and if Gloria Steinem could get past sexism, then I could fuck or be fucked and no old fag was going to tell me otherwise.

Strange how the world has worked out since then.

 

[Yves]

Was AIDS a taboo topic in the 1980s?

NB. I am going for the gay response. I know AIDS was almost completely ignored in the mainstream/heterosexual media.

The answer depends, among other factors, on the context (rural/urban, US/non US, etc) and media you are considering in your research. In addition, Gay owned media or gay-friendly sources of information were very limited in the 80s. Nevertheless, AIDS was hardly ignored. Not all the information provided was accurate (or neutral) though. Misinformation and lack of access to reliable info about AIDS were very real.

Some epidemiologists and social scientists have conducted extensive research on AIDS and media representation in the 80s in different societies (France, Eastern Europe, etc). Rock Hudson diagnosis/death is one of the key events in terms of media coverage and public discussion.

Was there a single "gay response"? No, IMO. Many gay men were in the closet or living in denial and not willing to be part of a visible "gay response". At the same time other gay men and women (and straights) fought to increase the visibility of AIDS and discrimination in the media. There were competing agendas in terms of the public discourse and not all gay men agreed on the discourse or the reality of HIV .

I know AIDS was almost completely ignored in the mainstream/heterosexual media.

Was AIDS completely ignored? I disagree. The situation was more complex and AIDS was a topic of interests because the public health alarm among many other factors.

It's also important to know the context of your research because media outlets (discourses) available in large urban areas and/or gay-friendly places were different to those in rural areas (pre Internet era)

 

[ByronMc]

You might want to check out this highly acclaimed 1985 television drama, AN EARLY FROST. It is available from Netflix and was written by Ron Cowan and his partner who later wrote and produced the American version of QUEER AS FOLK. AN EARLY FROST is a very moving look at AIDS in the early 80s.

"An Early Frost was the first motion picture ever to deal with AIDS, It proved to be an artistic triumph, debuting on November 11, 1985, on NBC. The storyline focused on a young lawyer who developed AIDS, returning home to visit his parents and revealing both his condition and his homosexuality. Their varying reactions form the heart of the story, as well as the lawyer’s encounter with others who had contracted the disease. An Early Frost was one of the most acclaimed telefilms, receiving fourteen Emmy nominations that included five members of the cast. It also won a Director’s Guild Award."

Synopsis
An Early Frost opens as young Chicago lawyer Michael Pierson (Aidan Quinn) visits his family in Pennsylvania. Michael is fearful about telling his loved ones that he is a homosexual, only revealing his secret to his sister. When he returns to Chicago, he tells his live-in lover, Peter Hilton (D. W. Moffett), that he was unable to tell his family he is gay. Feeling ill, Michael consults a doctor who informs him he has tuberculosis. Dr. Redding (Terry O’Quinn) does further testing and concludes that Michael has AIDS. The doctor probes the sexual histories of both Michael and Peter. He conjectures that Peter might be a carrier who does not have the disease himself. Peter and Michael argue and break up. Michael returns home to stay with his family. When he tells them the situation, his mother, Katherine (Gena Rowlands), is desperately worried, but Nick, his father (Ben Gazzara), is hostile and angry, almost striking his son. The reaction of other family members is unpredictable. His sister panics and refuses to see him again. His grandmother (Sylvia Sydney) is warm and loving, giving Michael his first whole-hearted embrace since he revealed his condition. Michael visits his father at his office, but finds him cold and unresponsive. That night, Michael has a seizure and passes out. The ambulance drivers refuse to transport him after they learns he has AIDS. His father is outraged and carries his son to his car, driving him to the emergency room. At the hospital, Katherine questions a flustered Dr. Gilbert (Don Hood), who says that the prognosis for surviving AIDS at the present time is remote, almost hopeless. But the patient must be encouraged to hope, since it is the only weapon he has. In an attempt to be supportive, Katherine invites Peter to visit them. Nick is distant, but as they discuss Michael’s character, he grows warmer. At the hospital, Michael starts to recover from his infectious episode. He meets with an AIDS support group, but walks out, unable to relate to them. One patient, Victor DiMato (John Glover), is very ill, but he tries his best to be humorous and upbeat. He talks with Michael, getting him to accept his condition. They become friends. When he is about to leave the hospital, Michael is surprised by his father, who comes to bring him home. Nick is becoming more tolerant and sympathetic to the difficulties facing his son. Michael and Peter reconcile, and when his lover leaves for Chicago, Michael promises to follow in another week. Visiting the hospital, Michael prepares a last will for Victor. When he returns with the will drawn up, he learns he is too late, that Victor passed away during the night. Katherine is horrified when she learns that Victor’s entire family had rejected him and he had died alone. She vows that their family will stand by Michael under any circumstances. She finally persuades Michael’s sister to reconcile with him. As he prepares to return to Chicago, Michael feels strengthened by the support of his family.