It’s been three decades since the first AIDS deaths in the LGBT community. Time has changed the narrative. For one thing, those infected in the first decades are mostly gone. A generation of gay men, activists and leaders of the burgeoning liberation movement are gone. Also among the victims were visual and performance artists of all disciplines and hues.
In those first years, I was living in Germany. It was during that time when men got sick and died in horrific agony. Health care providers could do nothing but treat symptoms. A couple I knew received their death sentence; they were diagnosed with HIV. They decided to end their lives rather than go through the inevitable slow and painful process of dying. A friend of theirs, a nurse, provided them with insulin. They held a farewell party and said good night to their guests for a last time. Their plan was to inject each other with a high dose of insulin then go to sleep forever. One later woke up. He was thirsty. He drank a liter of cola then went back to bed. In the morning, he was still alive. His partner lay dead next to him. The sugar in the cola had reversed the lethal effect of the insulin.
Horror stories like theirs were the order of the day. But as much as the gay plague decimated the male population, it also united the LGBT community. Although President Reagan ignored the plight of tens of thousands of gay men, the community rallied. Lesbians formed support networks for their ailing brothers. Drag queens and leather men held fundraisers, created food banks and provided social services. These efforts would later organize and evolve into major health organizations and political advocacy groups. The grassroots Milwaukee AIDS Project, created by BestD Clinic volunteers in 1984, would become the AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin. That institution remains today as Wisconsin’s primary HIV care facility.
Decades later there are still new infections and no cure. But, thanks to science and dedicated research, HIV has become a treatable, albeit chronic, condition. Still, the casualties of the disease and government complacency remain in our memory. But now, instead of the panic mode of the 1980s and ’90s, we understand HIV/AIDS as part of the LGBT narrative. Those years of crisis are now part of our history. Recently, a film version of Larry Kramer’s 1985 play The Normal Heart was released. The play is a document of those first years of despair, written in that time. It was a clarion and call to action. The film, packaged in a cinematic setting of excessively handsome men dying, somehow seemed like just another tearjerker. Today, we should look back and honor our dead friends, artists and musicians rather than relive their dying in a morbid déjà vu. There are other matters to deal with, like educating, testing and dealing with the stigma of HIV.
World AIDS Day of Remembrance is December 1. It should be that, a remembrance.
