If you are young and were born after the medications to control AIDS were created and society in general began treating it as a medical issue and not a punishment from God, you need to read this and learn history. 

There is a huge break in the passing on of our “Gay Family” history from the older to the younger, and this was caused by the decimation of Gay Boomers who are not here to pass facts on with the result that quite a bit of “history” is surmise and comfortable myths that fit more into a desired history and not the factual one.

On Friday, 03/13/2020, President Trump held a White House corona virus press conference that included Pence, his corona virus response team, and the CEOs of major drug and pharmacy companies who seemed to engage in an infomercial for their companies, and among those who spoke was Deborah L. Birx, the State Department’s U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator.

She had been around when the AIDS epidemic began in 1981, and was there in the early years, so her retelling of history was a little more than disturbing.

Because of the Reagan administration’s chosen ignorance, callousness, and its demonizing of those living with and dying from AIDS in order not to offend his base who promoted the idea that AIDS was a punishment from God, for the first years of the crisis the federal government had little desire to learn or do anything.

Beginning with the first known cases in 1981 anything done was because of Gay activists and allies doing the teaching through pamphlets based on what was known, creating support networks of Gay-friendly doctors, nurses, and hospitals, establishing hospices that  cared for those dying especially those rejected by families and hospitals, and demanding through protests and demonstrations that something be done.

There simply was no sense of urgency to deal with AIDS because only “THEY” were dying of it.

The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) was formed in March 1987 when, at the Lesbian and Gay community Center in New York City, Larry Kramer spoke out against the current state of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis that had formed in 1982, but which to him, a co-founder, had become politically impotent, and proposed a new organization devoted to political action.

 ACT UP became an active and visible presence that engaged direct action to get something done.

As Anthony Fauci has said,

“When the activists started to appropriately react to the rigidity of the clinical trials [to research anti-HIV drugs], for instance, they started storming the National Institute of Health and burning people like me in effigies, and Larry Kramer, now a close friend, was calling me a murderer. The best thing I’ve done from a sociological and community standpoint was to embrace the activists. Instead of rejecting them, I listened to them.”

When in 1988 Congress directed the CDC to take decisive action by sending information about the AIDS virus to every household so people could make decisions based on facts not political or religious spin, and forbidding anyone outside of the CDC from interfering in the content of the mailing, the Reagan administration sought a judgment from the  Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice as to whether the statute was unconstitutional.

The OLC ruled that the Congressional move denied the president final say over the dissemination of public health information, and was an “egregious” action that violated the Constitution.

Spin was supported.

That is why it was so offensive to those who lived through the early years of AIDS when Dr. Birx said:

 “In less than two weeks together, we have developed a solution that we believe will meet the future testing needs of Americans. I understand how difficult this has been. I was part of the HIV/AIDS response in the ‘80s. We knew from first finding cases in 1981. It took us to almost 1985 to have a test. Another 11 years to have effective therapy. It’s because of the lessons learned from that we were able to mobilize and bring those individuals that were key to the HIV response to this response.”

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The unspoken lesson learned was to treat science as science and not subject it to political and religious control which is the underlying reason that it took from 1981 until 1985 to get something done.

It isn’t that the government had learned to act faster, but that it should go with science and act immediately.

To blithely ignore the facts and present a false history is a highly disrespectful offense to those who died during those four years of neglect and those living with a virus today that could have been limited if action had been taken.

During those 11 years it took to have effective therapy, the Gay Community was on its own to handle AIDS, and doctors who had discovered that a “cocktail” of medications was effective in slowing the progress of AIDS were told to stop or lose their license to practice, as some did, because the government had chosen one pharmaceutical company to develop a treatment, and it had come up with AZT, a pill whose side effects were not only worse than the virus itself, but was eventually found to have been more lethal than the virus.

What happened after those 11 years was that what had been done by the Gay Community on its own was adopted as general practice.

Bigotry ruled the day, and it took lives.

The advantage this time for everyone is that the first cases were not found by a doctor whose patients were in the majority Gay, a number of whom were experiencing an apparently new malady because back then straight people were acquiring HIV and passing it on through ignorance because of the belief that the virus only attacked Gay men.

As Dr. Birx told the George W. Bush Presidential Center in 2019 about that period in the 1980s, it was a time 

“when you not only couldn’t make a diagnosis, you didn’t know what the problem was, and you didn’t know how to treat it, it was devastating”.

It was a time ruled by anti-Gay bigotry and apathy in the highest level of government that created what she now laments.

And for young GLBT people, when you go to the bars and see an empty bar stool or a small table at which no one sits, in these days that we are told we need to be compassionate, accepting, and helpful to all coming down with the virus, and to put aside political divisions, remember the words from Les Miserables,

“There’s a grief that can’t be spoken,
There’s a pain goes on and on.
Empty chairs at empty tables,
Now my friends are dead and gone.

Here they talked of revolution,
Here it was they lit the flame,
Here they sang about tomorrow,
And tomorrow never came.                                                                          

From the table in the corner,
They could see a world reborn,
And they rose with voices ringing,
And I can hear them now
The very words that they have sung
Became their last communion
On this lonely barricade, at dawn.

Oh my friends, my friends forgive me
That I live and you are gone
There’s a grief that can’t be spoken,
And there’s a pain goes on and on.

Phantom faces at the windows
Phantom shadows on the floor
Empty chairs at empty tables
Where my friends will meet no more

Oh my friends, my friends, don’t ask me
What your sacrifice was for
Empty chairs at empty tables
Where my friends will sing no more.

Someone should be sitting there.

There was a “reason” attention took so long in the 1980s, but not now.