It surfaced up in 1980 though first news reports were published in mid 1981. So it's almost 30 years of this ravaging plague. Although many books have been written about AIDS but hardly anyone mentions the number of gays died in this epidemic. If you read the news reports of those years you will see that people were speculating that as high as two-thirds of gays were infected. That was not the case as many many survived and did not catch it.
I am from the post-AIDS generation so I do not have any personal experiences about the initial years of this disease. I am sure that many JUBers were sexually active at the time and they can give us some insight. How many friends did you lost to this disease? Also what your estimate is about the percentage of gays that actually caught this bug? There needs to be a detailed survey done or maybe a book written about this issue.
AIDS set a major blow to gay rights and they turned defensive and remained so until 20 years or so until the late 1990s. Safe sex became the norm and people of that generation are the biggest proponents of careful lifestyles. This is nothing short of a tragedy that the young generation is unaware of the consequences. Barebacking is on the rise and all the drugs and other stuff going on. HIV infection rate is on the rise among gay men. Are we waiting for another disaster?
Damn I'm getting old.Sometimes it seems like jsut the other day that I was reading the Daily News when they first gave the ''gay cancer''a name..AIDS.
I was only a teenager,and I remember the contrast the papers used to play the ''summer of love-67'' to the summer of fear 87'' not to be confused with the other summer of fear, the summer of ''Son of Sam, or the .44 caliber Killer,that terrorized N.Y in the summer of 77..
As a young horny kid, AIDS,scared the shit out me.It wasn't enough to deal with being gay in a then repressive Brooklyn neighborhood fullof it's own rigid rules about sexuality and what it meant to be a man.Then this fucking disease comes along and starts killing gay men. At the time, they were faceless,nameless gay men.
Years later,that would change.The victims had faces and names.They were my freinds.And to this day, I still miss them. Sometimes I try to do a ''body count'' of all the people I knew who died of AIDS.I can never finish it with any measurable degree of accuracy.There were just too many,and the wakes too close together.It drove some people insane.
I remember all the various stages of ''full blown AIDS'' The K.S on peoples faces,the ''pick lines'' the CMV that cost people their vision, the dimensia..All ths happening to young people in their 20,30,and 40's mostly..It was very sad.Real sad.In the back of my head, I always knew/feared one day that would be me.
That's not to say I didn't fuck like a rabbit when I was younger, but like most people back then, I did so with a fearsome devotion to safe sex.The idea of barebacking was insane, and wouldn't have been warmly embraced by hardly anyone.I never had unprotected sex until the late 90's..
The fear of getting AIDS permeated a lot of things.People still loved their freinds that suffered, but, prayed it never happened to themselves.Because what they went through was pure hell on earth.
We had a right wing,republican President that refused to even say the word ''AIDS'' while it was claiming thousands of young lives.Those lives weren't considered worthy of living by his administration or the religious zealots that determined the disease was Gods judgement for a life of sin.I hate those motherfuckers to this day.
I never would have thought,that one day in the not too distant future,it would have all been but forgotten by young gays.And that barebacking wouldn't be a rare slip up,but instead a fun,sensible thing to do with perfect strangers,and even actively promoted on a gay website..
I guess at the end of the day, it doesn't matter that they spit on the graves of our freinds and loved ones.It is after all ,a porn site. Show me the money..Cry and you cry alone..
Or something like that..
