Because the opening days of the AIDS Pandemic took place forty years ago, young people may have an academic, dare I posit a somewhat “romantic” knowledge and understanding of the situation for Gay people and the totally bigoted way the disease was viewed and conveniently used that resulted in thousands of deaths some of which may have been saved if attention was given to the virus when it first appeared and “proper” society had not chosen to let others die since it won’t touch “us”.
In those days there was neither a cure nor a preventative vaccine because any effort to find the necessary pharmaceuticals to cure or control was curtailed by religious bigotry and political convenience as was letting people die with dignity.
There was railing against lonely deaths during the heavy days of Covid when people had to die alone with no loved ones around and how such a way to die was just wrong and such a horrible way to die and lose a loved one, but this was how politics, medicine, and religion dictated people with AIDS should die and their loved ones lose them.
Yeah, it was like that back then.
Most didn’t notice.
More didn’t care.
While holding to the erroneous assumption that only Gay men got it while many Heterosexuals were dying of it in the form of usually treatable Pneumonia, the animus toward the “other” was glaringly obvious, and for the religious a convenient way to eliminate their chosen enemy and show the world that with God’s help they were victorious, no efforts were made to treat Gay people with respect and dignity as they died and lost.
In those days, we were denied a cure, and even information about prevention and treatment. Treatment protocols routinely and universally followed today had to be invented by an abandoned community who put together the hospices and assistance programs to have people fed and cared for, brought to doctor’s appointments, and have their inevitable funeral arrangements made as more funeral homes refused to touch the body of someone, especially us, who died of AIDS than would.
Along with the shame heaped on us by society it was terrible knowing nothing was being done except counting the deaths and praising Jesus.
It was horrible enough both for those who died and those who suffered the loss in those days and even after as people slowly accepted reality, but in this day and age with pharmaceuticals to prevent and control the virus so people with AIDS can live lives just as people with other chronic illnesses and conditions do with proper care, to deny both information and that care based on the same excuses rehashed from the eighties to go after another group of “others” is criminal.
Going to Tennessee these days would be like the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court who went back in time and, far beyond his academic knowledge of the period, got to live in it because the state turned away $8 million in federal funds to combat HIV when it is a state that is already one of the states most poorly controlling the epidemic.
Last fall conservative politicians and media people threw fits that Vanderbilt University Medical Center provides care for Transgender minors, which they, in their twisted minds have decided is child abuse and/or mutilation.
As one conservative media personality put it,
“They now castrate, sterilize, and mutilate minors as well as adults.”
The unit at the Tennessee Health Department that combats HIV, sexually transmitted infections, and viral hepatitis, seeing the broo-haha that began last fall over the university’s Tennessee Transgender Task force, a team of volunteers that focuses on Trans health and HIV prevention, removed the team from its website. Later in the fall it announced that federal HIV funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would be terminated at the end of the year.
At the beginning of 2023 the Tennessee governor not only announced the state would end the $235,000 fund that would have gone to Planned Parenthood and the task force, but would reject the $8.3 million from the CDC for HIV prevention, treatment, and monitoring and that these funds will be replaced with state dollars while shifting focus away from groups most at risk of contracting the virus, Gay men and people who inject drugs.
Basically as in the 80s, the attitude in Tennessee is that if people do not know about something or someone, rather than learn about either, the people and/or thing must die.
Governor Lee has called for a thorough investigation as,
“We should not allow permanent, life-altering decisions that hurt children or policies that suppress religious liberties, all for the purpose of financial gain. We have to protect Tennessee children.”
The dynamic duo that gets thrown around open endedly for maximum, multiple interpretations, religious liberty which trumps all our rights as we, who were once subservient to the Church of England both in politics and religion are now so to the Nationalist Church of Christian America and protecting children from non-threats of useful purpose are once again invoked.
And here, once again, we see the religious right and the GOP’s strategy. If they do not have facts to back a claim and win people over to their way of thinking and thus gain allies, they turn people against each other for protection from the invented threat and can avoid reason and hard work.
Threatened by AIDS in Tennessee? Blame those selfish Trans people.
However, if you really think about it, thank Planned Parenthood because they objected that cutting their funding as it had been originally planned as well that of the Task Force would violate a 2013 Tennessee funding law and this had the governor go for the only way to cut Planned Parenthood, reject all CDC funding.
The funds that were cut consisted of $6.2 million for HIV prevention and surveillance and $2.1 million for Shelby County, home to Memphis which is one of the 50 local hot spots that account for half of new HIV diagnoses nationally.
Without CDC funds Friends for Life, a nonprofit Memphis group that provides services to those living with and at risk for HIV, will become ineligible for pharmaceutical rebates through other programs, and OUTMemphis, Tennessee’s largest LGBTQ nonprofit group, will lose 10% of its operating budget that provides HIV testing, help clients access the HIV prevention pill, PrEP, and helps with financial assistance for people with the virus.
The governor said the state
“is committed to maintaining the same level of funding, while more efficiently and effectively serving vulnerable populations, such as victims of human trafficking, mothers and children, and first responders.”
Note who are missing from the list.
None of those listed are in recognized vulnerable populations. They are listed for the GOP strategy of convincing people we must stop helping one group of people by presenting them as fictitious competition to a more “acceptable” group.
In the past Governor Lee has signed several bills targeting transgender youths like the one banning Transgender students from joining school teams while the Tennessee legislature has filed at least 11 bills targeting LGBTQ people one of which bans gender-affirming medical care for minors.
Sadly, in Tennessee there is something that almost unites Gen Z with their despised Boomers. When it comes to AIDS and HIV, both generations will have experienced the lack of care, but sadly for Boomers the blow is somewhat lessened as there were no preventions or controls to be denied while this go around there are.
We were denied the designed nonexistent.
This time people will be denied what exists and what the Boomers fought for.
We died because there was no cure or pharmaceuticals to control things because neglect and ill-will prevented them. This time people will die because, even though these now exist, they will be denied because of, again, religion and politics.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
