What year would you consider as "being at the height of the AIDS crisis for gay men in America"?

Probably whatever year you personally lost the most friends.

The 1990s were pretty gruesome.

I would say 1992.

I would say late 80s. By the early 90s, there was already medication that was working to extend lives.

It depends on what your mean. The height of fear surrounding how HIV was spread was 1984. The satanic panic just afterward had a strong (but crazy) antigay edge to it. But 1990 was a very dark year for gay people as the death toll was mounting crazily and people were actually predicting the entire community would be wiped out. Business at gay bars was down 20-25%. The streets of the gay ghettos were places of fear. Discrimination was rampant. In the 1990s the death toll continued to mount until 1996, but we had become to win some political victories. We were widely touted as putting Clinton in the White House. Gay rights began to progress both in local and corporate level. People talk about gay friendly companies like Disney today, but dozens and probably hundreds of people were fired at Disney for being gay in the eighties, and that was true of every big company. Credit agencies actually downgraded gays thinking we would all get sick and run up our credit cards. And starting in about 1993, the statistics showed HIV spread slowing, that people were actually planning for the future in way that was inaccessible to gays of 1986 who thought there was no future for us. Then in 1996 the cocktail came about and while it didn't change the fear quotient among individual gays for 4-5 years, the climate of Oppression began to lift with stunning speed.

1990 is when people my age started dying around me...I was 27 and I was traveling a lot for work and would be gone for a month and come back to see friends turned skeletal skinny.....still wonder how we mentally got thru it....

R5 - Very interesting post. I'm curious about how credit agencies downgraded the credit of gay men. How... did they know you were gay?

1986 was the first time someone died I was in the room with, the date of which I remember. 1992 is the last such year. Those or any of the years in between will do.

The peak number of AIDS deaths in the U.S. was late 95 early 96. After protease inhibitors became widely available to U.S. AIDS patients, the death rate dropped. IIRC, by 1997 insurance companies stopped granting viatical settlements, so the worst was over r since they obviously were no longer able to profit from AIDS deaths.

Address for one, also there was a "gay" card called Working Assets....

I think stories like this need locations. I saw the news, read the papers, and people talked about it, but I never saw the death that some of you people report.

I was in Minneapolis until 1985, and then moved to Phoenix. I'm thinking I've only known a handful of people that had HIV. I might have heard of another handful from gossip. I think only one died. I worked with him. He had a "car accident" and was in the hospital. I went to check on, when he told me the real story. Within days, his very supportive dad (hard to imagine, but it can happen), came from Denver and packed him up to take him home to die. That's the only real story that makes me cry. Not because he died, but because he such a dad.

I remember turning over a work bonus check to a hospital to keep a friend there who was uninsured. The hospital was going to send him home iwth PCP pneumonia in both lungs. I had to chenge his bed pans because the nurses didn't want to. When I called the people in his address book to tell him, one of his closest friend's only "sympathetic" comment was, "Well, you aren't surprised, are you?" That was 1988.

They displayed sections of the gay quilt and around 1992 they displayed a section in the foyer of the office building I worked in in New York. Extremely hard to view because every panel was so intimate and ultimately so very sad.

"I think stories like this need locations. I saw the news, read the papers, and people talked about it, but I never saw the death that some of you people report."

Because if you didn't experience it, it didn't happen?

Do you realize the media catered to AIDS hysteria, but not facts. They were following the lead of the Reagan and Bush administrations. Do you remember the riots in front of the White House? Was that reported in Minneapolis.

People like you piss me off. You read the papers, you watch the news, and if it doesn't pierce your little bubble it didn't happen. Just as there are Holocaust deniers, from the beginning there have been AIDS deniers. Chief among them, the President of The United States.

I have actually met people now who think AIDS has been cured already.

Back at "the height of AIDS" the only reputable news sources were medical journals and the gay media. Our local bar rag had more information about the real AIDS crisis than the local newspaper and TV news. The New York Times motto was "All the news that's fit to print." And many news outlets thought AIDS wasn't a "fit" discussion for a "family paper. "

You aren't gay are you? Because that level of ignorance in a gay person is very disheartening. In a straight person it's par for the course.

I'm most pissed off about what you said, not because you were ignorant then. A lot of people were hoodwinked by Reagan's "morning in America" bullshit.

I'm pissed off that you haven't learned anything in the last 30 years. I'm pissed off that you still think "well, we didn't have that kind of thing in Minnesota."

You remind me of a woman I met in the 80's who claimed they didn't have homosexuals in Australia.

She lived in Sydney and apparently didn't know a thing about Mardi Gras. I wouldn't be surprised if the parade marched right past her front door.

"Because if you didn't experience it, it didn't happen?"

No. Because when I didn't live it, it makes it tough to relate. Geography helps. It also sheds light on how it spread. I believe there is still something to be learned from the early days.

It's like reading about the Black Plague. Some cities lost 50 to 60% and others only 20%. Makes you wonder why. What did those places do differently so that you can learn from it.

" I believe there is still something to be learned from the early days."

Well, bless your heart.

I would say the height in terms of panic was 1985. News of it escaped the gay ghettos and started to be national news - primarily the Rock Hudson Death blew it up into huge national news and made it real to a lot of Americans. Which set of an anti gay panic. And gays could deny it for a while in the early 80s but by 1985 there was no doubt - tests proved there were tons of infected people.

But statistically, the death tolls of the early to mid 90s was the peak of dying. The early 90s is when I started to see a lot of dying and the ghettos emptying out of older men. And while people mention the turnaround in 1997-98, I k ow a lot of people, including myself, who didn’t believe it and though it was only a matter of time until these drugs stopped being effective too.

For me, I would say early 90's rather than late 80's. Deaths were coming faster and faster, the drugs were also killing people (because they didn't know the correct dosages to administer) and there seemed to be no hope . ACT UP was helping with getting peoples' attention focused on the problems, so that was positive. In 1992, I went to Washington DC to see the AIDS quilt displayed. I feel as though at least half of the National Mall was covered with quilts. The impact was overwhelming. The realization that all those people were dead, that they all had full lives and family and friends, and had died, many in their 20's and 30's I'm sure got the attention of many people who previously had dismissed the whole thing as a minor issue only affecting gay people. I couldn't attend the final showing of the quilt in DC in fall of 1996, but at that time the entire Mall was covered with quilts. So, yeah, early 90's for me.

The early 90s with the increasing deaths AND the reality hitting that this was not going to be cured and whoever had HIV had a death sentence. Very dark and despairing. The Living End by Gregg Araki captured my feelings about that time. Just waiting for the test to be positive and begin the official countdown to death. No realistic hope of a quick cure. Never imagined it would come so shortly thereafter.

My family lost our gay relative and our gay friends in ‘88. I also remember being devastated a few years later when Freddie Mercury died of AIDS. Then suddenly there were meds available and it wasn’t Unavoidable or Certain Death anymore. So at least for myself, ‘88-92 stands out as the apex of the crisis.