The AIDS© Thread

You had to be there. Yes. No, it was very much on the surface.

I posted this story before on The DL. I watched the local news in New York City and the CBS station had a story about gay cancer. I wasn't frightened by it, just thought it strange. I was going to The Ninth Circle that evening. I figured one of the older guys I knew there would have heard of it. I was 18 and still living at home in Brooklyn. I asked on friend there about this "gay cancer" the name I couldn't remember how to pronounce. I would later learn it well, Karposi Sarcoma. My friend looked at me like I was nuts and said "You can't get cancer from being gay."

Within a year or two many of the young men in that room, the downstair bar, would be dead.

Pretty much every conviction I have was informed by what I experienced during the worst of it.

I came out in the early 90s and miraculously remained negative (mostly because my participation in anal sex was quite limited).

But I had several friends die. Almost all of them were men of very modest upbringing and/or incomes and from small towns. All of them poor, except for Bill, a stunningly beautiful Kennedyesque guy. I saw him and chatted with him for a few hours one day and within a few months he was dead.

I never knew aids was copyrighted.

Horrible disease and so unfair

Someone asked about it in a seventh grade class, and our teacher told us very calmly and without error how it was transmitted. A few years later two brothers in our school "transferred," and then we heard they had died. Their names were on the AIDS quilt when sections of it were brought to the university nearby . . . every gay bar I went to in college had a bowl of condoms right at the door. Later, I dated someone older who had lost 90% of his friends, and so wanting to stay healthy and also thinking of how that could have been us, not knowing, I can't really think of barebacking as hot.

You too young to have lived through it have no idea how much it fucked up our lives in every possible aspect and totally defined who we would become. I wish I had a more eloquent words to describe the devastation and wrenching pain and self-loathing and the soul crushing chasm we felt every day for ourselves and our community.

I absorbed the gleeful, violent cruelty people were capable of exhibiting and of tolerating. And the way it was excused then as “fear”. Of course there were beautiful people who prevailed, ultimately, but for a time there things did seem hopeless, people prevailingly heartless.

Why take diet pills when you can enjoy Ayds©?

The absolutely worst time of my life. I lived in San Francisco during those years and lost practically every friend I had. Horrible.

Way too many friends, neighbors, acquaintances, coworkers and two ex lovers. For several years I would attend funerals more than birthday celebrations. I remained negative because I was monogamous and not the promiscuous type, and above all, I got lucky. I believe more than half the gay population in Manhattan died between the early 1980s and 2000.

I was 15 when it started making the news... I thought this was going to be my life, short and disease ridden

I was fortunate. I was about Ryan White’s age when his plight made waves. I had the information I needed to stay safe in advance of becoming sexually active. That said, my entire sexual history centered on avoiding HIV.

For most of history, ejaculate has been considered the elixir of life. To me, it is that of death. Swallowing, facials, jacking off with another’s spooge and other cum play was and remains completely off the table. When a lover asks, “where do you want it?” I tell him in his condom or on his side of the bed. Showering post-play is non-negotiable to me.

I found NPH’s character’s rant about young people raw dogging in “Uncoupled” was the first depiction I have seen of my perspective.

I lived through it in the 80s and 90s and never want to be reminded of it, in any way.

If it wasn't for DL I would never have had an idea of what the gay men of that time suffered through and endured. Thanks for posting guys. It puts a lot of my life today in perspective.

It defined my life in every possible way between 1982 and 2000 and still has major repercussions today. I lived in Manhattan from 1979 to 1984 full time and then part time for the next several years. I lost numerous friends - probably the majority of my friends. I worked with modern dancers, and 3/4 of the male dancers in both of the dance companies I was associated with died of it. People would just suddenly not be there, and no one needed to say they went off to be with their families when they died. We just knew what had happened. Often the cause of death wasn't listed in obituaries.. The dread was palpable. Gay people were pariahs. When I moved to north Florida, doctors and dentists were very nervous around me and would glove up and mask up, because I told them I was gay and had lived in NYC. When treatments finally became effective, there wasn't an immediate rebound in joy, because people had seen so many early treatments fail. I cannot watch Longtime Companion or Philadelphia again. Those movies dredge up so many heartbreaking memories.

I don't stay in that emotional place, but the middle of my life has these enormous bookends around a nearly 20 year period of terror and grief.

[quote]When I moved to north Florida

Andrew Holleran?

I haven’t read a single response but just came here to say that you should DIAGF for asking a question using a deadly disease, which most here know people who died from, just to show that you know the code well enough to type an obscure symbol.

I think you’re a troll.

Just look at the number of threads that you start, not comment on, but start. You’re trying to control this place by simply flooding the zone.

Anyone who doesn’t believe me, use trolldar and see how many threads this OP has started just today.

I think that’s a troll tactic, not sure though…

No, but when I read his books, I was struck by some of the similarities. I'm much much younger than he is....especially in DL years

I was out of the country from 1979-1981, my sophomore and junior years of high school. I am from a tiny, rural town in the Midwest. While abroad, I read the NY Times for "American" news and saw a small article in it about young gay men in New York and Los Angeles who were dying of *something*. Owing to my small town upbringing, I did not have many opportunities to have sex with other guys. Then I attended a rural university with no gay community, so I was nearly celibate for four years of college. (Yes, I swapped blowjobs with a few guys while there.)

By 1986, AIDS was officially named and transmission by (gay) sex was confirmed. I started graduate school that fall in a large city. That fall, a friend came to town and we went out to a gay club. I refused to drink mixed drinks and made the bartenders hand me a bottle of beer and an opener so I could open it myself. Near the end of the night, a guy I had seen on campus marched up to me and gave me a wet, open-mouth kiss. For weeks afterward, I was petrified I would get AIDS and die.

I thought every pimple was KS. Every scratch or scrape commanded careful monitoring, lest it did not heal quickly. Then by 1990, acquaintances and friends of friends started getting sick and dying. Like the posted above, I was attending so many funerals. The same year, I learned that my dissertation advisor had AIDS. I went abroad again for two years during my PhD studies and had no sex whatsoever during that time. My advisor died shortly after I came back and I decided that this was a bullshit way to spend my 20s. I was at a conference in Toronto and went out to gay bars with a groups of people and saw explicit pamphlets about transmission of HIV. The Canadians believed that receptive oral sex was low risk as long as you did not have wounds in your mouth. That was it! I started my oral slut phase that lasted from 1993 to, well, now.

The number of guys I have sucked off and been sucked off is in the thousands. I have never been a big fan of anal sex, but I adore oral sex. Good thing, too!

Disclosures: I am now 59. Half of my fraternity house got syphilis my second year of college, including me. I got it again about 25 years ago from a guy who blew me – I saw the sore form and went to the doctor, got a blood test, and a course of antibiotics. No other sexually transmitted diseases, ever. I have been on PrEP for several years now, get tested for everything every ninety days, and still have plenty of sex, mostly oral.

AIDS killed a lot of people I knew and several that I loved. I feel somewhat lucky because of where I grew up, isolated from "city problems," even though I hated it at the time. My life does not and never has revolved around sex, like many guys I knew who died. Even then, a dear friend was a sexual prude and he still died of AIDS in the mid-90s (because he trusted somebody he should not have).

Periodically I rewatch And The Band Played On, which streams on HBO Max. The source material has many faults, but overall, it is an accurate timeline of the AIDS crisis in its first decade. When I watch it, I am transported back in time and I know I have been very lucky indeed.

[quote]The number of guys I have sucked off and been sucked off by is in the thousands.

[quote]My life does not and never has revolved around sex.

One of these statements is not true.

I was nineteen when TIME did its first cover story on "the new gay cancer." That was the same week I tried anal sex for the first time. I came down with a flu-like bug a few days afterward, and was absolutely terrified. If you weren't there at the time, you have to understand that it was an era of raging homophobia and anti-gay legislation. There were serious efforts made to round up gays and move us to concentration camps to protect "normal" people from the disease. Ambulances were refusing to transport gay people to hospitals and mortuaries were refusing to bury those who had died from AIDS. That was the world I came of age in. I don't want to talk about the losses that came in that world.

When you youngsters call me an "eldergay" I take it as a badge of honor. I'm still here.

I was so horrified by my friends and lovers who had HIV/AIDS struggling to live or die with some dignity on the shitty shitty shitty safety net in the USA. By chance in the late 80s I started going often to Europe and my milieu there didn't have to suffer this added hardship. AT ALL. I move permanently to Europe after grad school. I was SO fucking burned by NYC turning into a capitalist playground and my experiences of the AIDS epidemic. Not everyone suffered, for example white collar professionals who had money or very progressive employers, or both. But for many it was awful and many in the USA were PROUD to make it miserable for people with AIDS. And even those who had compassion, had no power to snap their fingers and make being poor and sick in the USA OK.

[quote]If you weren't there at the time, you have to understand that it was an era of raging homophobia and anti-gay legislation. There were serious efforts made to round up gays and move us to concentration camps to protect "normal" people from the disease.

William F. Buckley, an "intellectual" conservative columnist and host who had the ear of much of the Republican party, suggested that homosexuals be rounded up and forcibly tattooed. In the New York Times.

In the fucking New York Times.

[quote]Everyone detected with AIDS should be tatooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.

AIDS absolutely defined me as a gay man from my early 20s to the arrival of PEP in my early 30s. AIDS is hard-coded in me, like DNA. When I see “U = U”, I am so grateful for progress. But I pause and think back to the 90s.

I see the sex-positive folks on here absolutely frothing at the notion that I should refrain from sex as if it’s internalized homophobia.

But I always come back to this: How will I know if there is something new if it gestates undetectable for months or years?

Damnit, OP! This thread brings back so much pain. I'm sorry I started reading it.

R19, why do you care if someone starts lots of threads?

If we don’t like them, we won’t comment. If we do like them, we will comment.

And anyway, you are a troll based on your post. The “you mustn’t create too much new content or Tony Woodard will go crazy because he’s that guy” troll.

Shut up OP Poo Shoes R28 D@vid@

Pedro was the first exposure I had to seeing someone live and then die from AIDS. I cried for a week after the last episode of the Real World aired, which I believe showed or told he had died.

He made me realize as a 14 year old that I was gay because I totally crushed hard on him, then he died from AIDS. I thought that was the reality of being gay……a painful, lonely death. Really fucked me up for a while.

R28, you can choke on a dick too.

The argument that you or OP get to say anything you like, in any way, with any frequency while I’m supposed to keep my mouth shut, because negativity… not the slam dunk you think it is.

Fuck you TW! You aspie asshole

UK here. I can never forget that time. The rampant inhumanity from Thatcher’s government and the right wing media while people were suffering in unbelievably horrible ways made me lose faith in people. Civilisation is only a veneer.

I came out in the early 80's I was also extremely lucky in that I had haemmerhoids which precluded any receptive anal intercourse for me. As much as I hated those painful lil fuckers..... they also effectively saved my life. I very rarely topped either. But like R21 I just made up for it with lots and lots of other sexual activity that didnt involve anal sex. I was a "side" before there was such a thing. That kept me pretty safe, although I did have a couple of close calls. One time at a bathhouse I had a guy that really wanted to fuck me, and he wouldnt take no for an answer, had to smack him upside the head a few times before he got the message. Found out a couple of weeks later through friends that he'd seroconverted. Also had a similar situation with another guy, had to pull a (highly illegal) handgun on him to get him to stop. This all went down in my early 20's so mid 80's

Scary scary times, and yes I had a few friends die of it. One was a flatmate, a decent guy too, it was horrible seeing him pass.

I guess I have internalised the fear to some extent - I still cannot bottom for anyone, and only top when asked to, quite honestly if I never was able to anal again I wouldnt miss it

This seems so insignificant today — but before Ronald Reagan even mentioned AIDS, Princess Diana shocked the world by not only visiting an AIDS ward, but shook hands and hugged the gay men suffering from the syndrome. It made worldwide headlines; this was at a time when some nurses didn't even want to work AIDS wards. To have the most famous woman in the world do this was monumental, and I don't care if you MARY! me.

I had friends die. I tested positive in 1987. I told many people thinking it would somehow help others. It didn't, it backfired and caused to be a pariah in the gay community as no one wanted to be associated with a known positive person. This continued off and on for 30 years or so until life savings medicines became the norm.

Other than that, it's been a breeze, seriously.

R22 What I meant by my life not revolving around sex is that I have had friends and acquaintances who spent hours every day trying to get sex. Seven nights a week at clubs, hours every day cruising tearooms, evenings in AOL chat rooms and on Craigslist, you name it. Some of them couldn’t hold down a job because they spent all their time looking for the next dick. It was as if their full time job was looking for sex. When I’m horny, I look around. But it has never consumed me like it did some guys I knew.

I was extremely active in my 30s and 40s, sometimes egregiously promiscuous, especially when I was on vacation. But still, I consider myself lucky I never got HIV.

AIDS is still horrifying even in 2023. Have you seen how the TikToker "influencers" celebrate World Aids Day? Aids Ribbon Red Lipstick!! Such respect.

[quote] But I always come back to this: How will I know if there is something new if it gestates undetectable for months or years?

I hear you, dude. and you're entitled to your caution. I hope for the sake of the many guys who aren't as cautious that this won't be the case.

I came of age right around the time The Gay Cancer made the cover of Newsweek.

I'd been looking forward to someday having my own apartment and sex -- even though I was pretty innocent.

I came to LA and saw people dying left and right; I pass for straight and couldn't believe things that people would say about gay people after they left the room.

R40 did you come out eventually? Did you finally have gay sex? How did you avoid the plague?

If you think those days are history, you don't know much about the av erage person. All that bigotry and hate is sitting right there just under the surface waiting for a change to come out again.

I remember calling a friend in San Fransisco about a different kind of work issue.

He said he had been detailed to a task force looking into some truly strange deaths all gay men.

Several months later CDC published its first MMWR on what we would later know as AIDS. There were a lot of early theories. Most of those theories would have been relatively easy to deal with if they had been proven correct.

An infectious disease was the one theory that was going to means 100,000s of deaths.

R26

You won’t know. Not if it does not generate symptoms.

The best thing about MPox was that the symptoms came on quick and for many they hurt like hell.

Syphilis sores do not usually hurt but the P and the S symptoms are easy to spot if you know what you are looking for. And even if you don’t know what they are up you generally know they are something. And they are normally seen 21 days to several months after infection. Not years later.

Clap comes in quick and for many the symptoms hurt,

The next crisis will be something totally new at least to us, or a combination of sexually transmitted infections like syphilis+ hiv leading to neurosyphilis etc, or STIs that are resistance to treatment likely gonorrhea.,

An article about some strange disease killing gay men in NYC circa 1981 may have had a profound impact on my sexual preferences when I came out 6 years later - no anal whatsoever.

R44 a G vaccine is in the works. C going ab-resist with no recourse is highly likely. Something new and viral is definitely a threat but bacterial is happening fast. Mgen is the new one spreading around like wildfire.

R46

According to CDC

Often asymptomatic anally and orally. And MGen is seen to be developing resistance to Rx.

Significant antimicrobial resistance presents a major challenge to the treatment of M genitalium infection. Because M genitalium lacks a cell wall, antibiotics targeting cell wall biosynthesis, such as beta lactams (eg, penicillins and cephalosporins), are ineffective against this organism

R41, came out slowly.

yay! sex! Having some later today ... but I still keep it safe.

Lived through it all - the most disappointing part of it? Finding out that as LGBT - We are truly alone and despised. Yes, we had a few allies but by and large we were 'those people' that 'regular' Americans had zero interest in defending or protecting. I would love to say that times have changed with younger generations- but can't . Reading the hateful bud lite stuff was a recent reminder that we are still very much a minority....or maybe I am just scarred or jaded?

A few years ago I met up with a law student and gave him head a few times. A couple months later he contacted me to say that I gave him Mgen, which he said caused a case of urethritis. I had just done a comprehensive STI screen a few weeks prior, including "non-gay" infections like chlamydia and Mgen, and was negative for everything. I screenshot my results and texted them to him, but he didn't believe me. He said he had only hooked up with me and another "regular" FWB (who told him he said he was not infected) and that I had to be the vector.

The issue of other STIs making one more vulnerable to HIV infection is real, however. Inflammation, tears in the skin and mucous membranes, etc. provide a pathway for HIV to enter the bloodstream.

Sheesh, I stepped off the Merry Go Round right before covid and have never heard of Mgen.

R26 has a point. Thats why I am not putting any trust in prep, I would rather just avoid the high risk activities in the first place

This Mgen thing sounds a worry though

R34 I thought that you could get haemorrhoids treated in the hospital, snipped off or something like that. How long did you have them?

R54 the treatment was a hell of a lot more than just a bit of snipping off, big job, I was in three days, longest stay I've ever had in hospital. I had them decades, but they'd got past the point of being manageable with diet etc. Doc said it was a miracle I'd managed as good as I had as long as I had

If anyone tells you have a haemorrhoidectomy, it'll be fun, let me tell you something.... it aint No Fun At All

R55 My mom's best friend had hemorrhoids removed surgically a while ago. She swears she would have kept them if she had known how horrendously painful the recovery from surgery would be.

[quote] another "regular" FWB

Who knows how many "regulars" the FWB had?

Bud Light has fuck all to do with anything homophobic. It's people tired of being force fed the idea that all it takes to be a woman is a dress.

Oh god, hemorrhoids.

At least those are universal.

R31 / Toni Woodard: “ [R28], you can choke on a dick too . . . while I’m supposed to keep my mouth shut, because negativity”

Yes, keep your mouth shut because negativity. But I’m still not gonna suck your withered, gross dick.

This thread is a valuable oral history. Thank you to those who have posted - it’s really something to read your stories. Sending you hugs. I still can’t imagine going through that time period.

[quote]I still can’t imagine going through that time period.

Lucky you. I am unable to imagine not having gone through it. Somehow I managed to stay HIV-negative, in spite of the fact that I spent the late '70s and early '80s doing the things you needed to do to become HIV-positive, often and enthusiastically. I saw so many friends die. I saw so many people who weren't necessarily my friends, but whom I knew from around the neighborhood, disappear.

Were most of the survivors tops? Did any slutty bottoms survive? Were they immune?

r63, I was a slutty bottom. I did not become positive. I know for sure I got fucked by four guys who eventually died of AIDS between 1976 and 1982, and had oral sex with at least one other. And countless ones I never saw again post-sex. There is said to be some gene or blood factor that renders you immune to HIV. Maybe I have it. IDK.

Three men I knew who got HIV, and with whom I never had sex, claimed they were "exclusive" tops. They were very proud of it, and I believed them. Two of them died during the '90s. The other one is still with us AFAIK.

r64 should say "I know for sure I got fucked between 1976 and 1982 by four guys who eventually died of AIDS"

R64 you should get tested for the gene

I asked my doctor about that a few years back, r66, and he said it was tremendously expensive to run that test. So I never bothered. I'm old now. It's not that important any longer.

R67 maybe host a gangbang with only unmedicated, poz tops then check the results later

Another AiDS can happen again!!

R69 Shut the fuck up! You don’t know anything! I listen to the science.

I went to see the AIDS quilts at AmeriFlora and was surprised how patrons avoided it as though the exhibit itself would transmit the virus.

It gave people another reason to blame and hate us. Ignorance was huge. Fear was rampant.

I wonder where the gay & lesbian rights movement would be if AIDS never happened. Anyone have any intelligent theories?

The crucible moves civil rights.

AIDS actually helped the nascent gay rights movement because it became a rallying point. We got fed up with being ignored, or worse, by the powers that be. R73, you should read about the ACT UP movement. HIV more than decimated our community, and we lost a generation.

"In the earliest years of the AIDS crisis, there were many gay men who were unable to come out about the fact that their lovers were ill, A, and then dead, B. They were unable to get access to the hospital to see their lover, unable to call their parents and say, 'I have just lost the love of my life.'"

Judith Butler

That quote encapsulates the late 80s and the 90s for me...

R76, that’s so heartbreaking

Most of the survivors that I knew (or know) of were guys who did not engage in anal sex, including me.

Promiscuous butt sex is deadly

I first acknowledged my gayness to myself in 1984, when I was 22, and met my first boyfriend. I'd read about AIDS, and was petrified of catching it.

He ran with a pretty slutty crowd, and a lot of friends and acquaintances around us started visibly wasting away and dying. I was really shocked that just about all of his friends were cruising the streets after the clubs closed and going to bathhouses and sex clubs, as if nothing was happening. So that was my introduction to gay life...guys playing fast and loose with their lives, and being in denial of what was going on all around them.

I was the opposite of slutty...just naturally very inhibited and shy when it came to personal interaction with others, especially sex, so doing it with total strangers was not for me. They all criticized me, laughed at me, and called me stuff like "frigid". Yet it's probably the thing that saved me.

There was a core group of 5 of us who formed a sort of quasi-"family". Of the 5, only my then-boyfriend and I are still alive, the rest all died from it. One of them fairly recently, actually, about 7 or 8 years ago. I always reckoned he had self-esteem issues and used sex as an ego booster. Huge whore. He got diagnosed in the early 90's, and the meds saved his life. From what his sister told me, he got careless with taking them, or he got depressed and stopped taking them, and contracted that horrible PML brain disease, which is what killed him.

Similar situation with my boyfriend #3. I heard that he got diagnosed, don't know if he's still alive, but most of the crowd we hung out with caught it, and a lot of them died.

I also had a next door neighbor who died from it. Just wasted away to nothing before my very eyes. One day his sister pulled up and took him away. He could barely walk. That was the last I ever saw of him. She came back not long after to clear out his apartment.

I was super paranoid about it, and because of that, to this day I've never gotten tested for HIV. I also refused to get fucked or even suck dick, because I didn't want any infected fluids in me. I remember there was this one guy who was interested in me, and he was very open about being HIV positive. I let him know I wasn't interested, which went against the "politically correct" thing to do, but I didn't care. This was in the post-meds era, when guys were becoming "undetectable", but I still wanted nothing to do with it.

Oh, and I have to mention the two friends who found out they were positive and went hard-core religious, hoping Jesus would save them. Not sure if he did.

Now I'm 61 and have retired from sex. I'm happy not to have that stress and pressure hanging over my head.

[quote]Were most of the survivors tops? Did any slutty bottoms survive? Were they immune?

There are some people who have a natural immunity to HIV, it's a gene mutation called CCR5. Nobody is sure why this happens, but there are theories. One theory is that they are direct descendants of Black Plague survivors, i.e. people who had the Black Plague and managed to recover from it.

If you do the 23&Me DNA testing, it includes the CCR5-Δ32 gene. You have to review the raw genetic data though. If you have two copies, you are not immune to HIV infection. One copy and you have reduced susceptibility. No copies, you are immune to HIV infection. It is a very small number of people, mostly of northern European ethnicity, who have CCR5-Δ32 deletion/HIV immunity.

Go figure; I got a copy of CCR5-Δ32 from each parent.

I was only afraid of catching AIDS for 3 years, at most. 1983 to 1986. By 1986 it became clear that safe sex worked and sucking was fine. If I fell for someone and they were HIV+ I didn't flinch. Lost a couple lovers. It was horrible. I had 2 guys lie to me they were negative and I dumped them on the spot when they revealed the lie. That was horrible too. But THEY knew I had been with positive guys and you don't lie about that to a lover. I got into longer relationships in the 90s. But also by the end of the 90s I was turning into a raging slut. I was really good looking and it was embarras de richesse of easy hot sex, despite my having a boyfriend! In the late 90s, early 2000s many of my contemporaries who had been playing safe for years were no longer doing so. It was suddenly a folie of barebacking in European sex clubs. I was appalled. People started seroconverting. Early try therapy sucked. People didn't go tritherapy right after seroconversion then. They ran around with huge viral loads. One pill Atripla didn't start until 2008! Prep was 2012 and not so easily available everywhere. It took years to get a lot of people on it and to figure out how national health plans could afford it all. And for American cities to start picking up the tab for it, for low income people. I think in some ways 2000-2015 were silently grueling for a lot of people.

try therapy = tritherapy oops

I know as a woman who was a young girl back in the 80s and who experienced no personal loss (save for a cousin I hadn't seen for ages who died some time in the 90's) my testament means shit, and I am endlessly happy and relieved whenever I talk to the men that survived that absolute abismal time....I so wish more had.

Anyway what I remember about Aids, I think the 1st time I heard of it was around 1988. I was 8 and we were watching a documentary on PBS with my brother and it was about the very subject...I remember just being petrified of the images of the men that were featured, all skinny and with those purple-y blotches....I was so absolutely traumatized by it all, and the fact that I was too young to understand how you got it made it worse. I figured that was something that could happen to me when I got older. It was one of those instances when you start growing up and start seeing how scary the world really is, things that you dont understand...I couldn't sleep that night and asked my older brother if I could sleep with him in his bed that night ...he was scared too, though being 2 years older and a boy he wouldn't admit it. I still wonder where the hell my parents were when we were watching that. Maybe not the best thing to view at that age.

On a slightly more light hearted note I also remember the documentary showing a woman putting a banana in a condom, I had fuck all idea what a condom was even for and figured we would have to get bananas and put condoms on them all over the households to keep the AIDS away.

A few years later my father got colon cancer. This was the early 90's in NYC, probably one of the worst times as far as the death counts. My mother still comments on the amount of men she saw in the same cancer wards my dad was in, with KS ...my dad sadly would soon meet the same fate those men did....sad times, but I think it made my mom and by extension her kids sympathize especially with what the men were going through.

Many years later after becoming involved in the theater and arts I would come to realize the mammoth sized loss the disease caused. Everywhere I looked, in the music world, in theater, in dance there were tremendous losses, so much talent and potential that came to a screeching halt and left the world half of what it could have been. I also began to learn about men like Larry Kramer and Randy Shiltz. A few years ago I went down a rabbit hold on youtube of interviews, documentaries, etc and learned how the GMHC was formed, what ACT Up did and endless stories of courage and defiance, and how sometimes the best in people is born during the worst of times.

Though it can't even begin to compare to a personal loss, particularly of people you loved or cared about, I think it's fairly safe to say the world as a collective lost to that disease. It's good, then, to always remember.

R71, I used to think that you'd get AIDS just by being gay.

You wouldn't have to have sex; it would just appear.

Foolish and illogical, I know. But still.

Yeah, it changed everything. I was wildly promiscuous until around 1985 when AIDS became so prevalent. Then the fun stopped.

I survived probably because I was never passive to anal.

But at the time we didn't know exactly how it was passed. The media would say it was carried through sweat and even tears. Such bullshit disinformation.

[quote] I believe more than half the gay population in Manhattan died between the early 1980s and 2000.

r12 I'm skeptical of that because our numbers have never been calculated accurately. They always said we were 4% of the population. But now Gen Zers identify as 20% LGBT. I think our numbers have always been about 20%, but most, especially bisexuals, were closeted and would definitely never tell a pollster.

R88

The professionals at UCLAs Williams Institute estimate the % of LGBT to be 4.5% of the US adult population.

Your “always been about 20%” has no basic in data or facts. It is a personal opinion. Some also have a personal opinion, not based on any data or fact, that the earth is indeed flat.

A recent Gallup poll claims the % is 7.1% of the US adult population.

Still a long way from 20% at least presently.

Maybe we should have a ladies auxiliary thread? No offense to you R87, but this seems like a thread for gay men’s voices and I want to honor that.

R64/R67, it's not expensive. 23andme runs the test as part of their basic profile.

That [bold]thing[/bold] is hideous R29.

[quote] The argument that you or OP get to say anything you like, in any way, with any frequency while I’m supposed to keep my mouth shut, because negativity… not the slam dunk you think it is. —Tony Woodard

The irony.

It disrupted and terrorized my life and the lives of all my gay friends. Obviously it killed many. Those of us who survived were changed forever.

From the youngest age, seeing all the news reports and magazine articles and TV movies about all these needless deaths was deeply, fundamentally traumatizing.

I knew I was gay at 8 and just assumed I would die before I was 21.

Every message was gay = terrible illness and death. You'd see an actor you liked in a TV show or movie and then a month later see a newspaper item that they had died.

Going on 25 years of therapy, I've never been able to get over it or fully enjoy sex or intimacy with another person. It was just too scarring.

When COVID started and Fauci was all over the news - how did that make you feel?

[quote]I'm skeptical of that because our numbers have never been calculated accurately. They always said we were 4% of the population.

In the 1970s, the figure was usually cited as 10%. I remember there was even a card and calendar company featuring gorgeous, half-naked men called "10%." Whether it was actually true, I couldn't say.

R91 well, it's posted. It can be deleted by the mods if they agree, don't think I can do it myself. I did wonder if posting it was the best idea as I did not want to appear the frau trying to gain relevance on a subject that she hadn't experienced 1st hand which is why I clarified that my perspective was absolutely trivial compared to others. But Aids did affect me, and us all, and I thought that could be a somewhat insightfull perspective to add.

And I am guessing you meant R85, R91?

Yes I meant R85 and apologies.

And again no disrespect to you R85. As I’ve posted elsewhere AIDS was very much life defining for me. It’s just seemed that this thread has become a place for gay men to say their peace. And their story is not our story. But maybe you can start the auxiliary thread?

(I believe the 10% came from Kinsey’s research)

R98

R101

That 10% did come from Kinsey. It was very flawed research used to come up with that percent.

And we go off-topic….

R92, I contacted 23andme.com, where I've been a member for several years. They're supposed to get back to me "in one or two business days." Thanks for letting me know.

- r64/r67

[quote] r89 Your “always been about 20%” has no basic in data or facts. It is a personal opinion. Some also have a personal opinion, not based on any data or fact, that the earth is indeed flat.

[quote] r90 A recent Gallup poll claims the % is 7.1% of the US adult population. Still a long way from 20% at least presently.

No, you miss the point. A recent Gallup poll shows that 20% of Gen Z identify as LGBT.

It's obvious the number has always been 20%, and older folks just lied to pollsters, Kinsey included.

I've always known and common sense told me, we are way more that 20% among Gen X and the entire population.

^ ^ ^ Sorry, I meant way more than 4%, not way more than 20%.

We have probably always been about 20% of the population, if not more if we're talking bisexuality.

Bump for a great thread.

R106

A personal opinion backed by absolutely no science or data.

“We have probably…”

The actual percentage of homosexuals in the population cannot be measured scientifically, or estimated with assurance. There are two main reasons:

1. It requires self identification, and statistically that is never a good idea. Data Analysis 101.

2. Even Kinsey couldn't draw a dividing line on his scale. How people choose to identify is up to them. For me (Kinsey 6), i am and always have been gay. But someone in the middle of the scale may identify based on who they are currently sleeping with or in a relationship with. And there are men who have sex with other men regularly, but always self-identify as straight. Which side of the line are bi/pan/omni people supposed to take? Is such a line even a real thing?

Kinsey said we were about 10% of the general population. For years the "reported" numbers were much lower, but since public acceptance and some laws have moved toward us, more people feel comfortable being out and identifying as part of the community. As restrictions and stigmas are removed, more people will come out. In the end, though, I think that line is just a myth, and Kinsey's scale is a more accurate representation of human emotions and desire.

[quote] A personal opinion backed by absolutely no science or data.

r108 Huh? That's not personal opinion. I linked a Gallup poll which shows 20% of the population is LGBT.

R110 - you're misrepresenting what the poll findings were:

From your link:

"Gallup surveyed more than 10,000 people by phone last year, and pollsters said the group most likely to say they’re lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or something other than heterosexual is the adult members of [bold]Generation Z[/bold]. The findings showed that [bold]19.7% of those born between 1997 and 2004 self-identified as LGBTQ[/bold].

When Gallup broke down the results to other age groups, the rate of LGBTQ identification was 11.2% among millennials and 3.3% or less among older generations.

After reviewing all the responses collected by Gallup, pollsters said they learned the collective number of Americans adults who identified as LGBTQ held steady in 2022 at 7.2%. That’s double the percentage, though, of when Gallup began to ask about LGBTQ identification a decade ago".

Over all age groups - 7.2% is what the poll outcome was.

R111 R110

Yes 7.2% not 20%.

The Gallup numbers are interesting. 7.2% of US adults in this survey identify as GLBT

Over half of that 7.2% identifies as Bi (4.2% of all US adults)

1/5 of that 7.2% identifies as gay

1 in 7 of that 7.2% identifies as Lesbian

Less than 1 in 10 of that 7.2% identify as trans.

Others of that 7.2% identify as something else.

So it looks to me that based on this recent Gallup poll 3% of US adults identify as Gay, Lesbian, Trans, Q or other.

With 4.2% identifying as Bi

Worked at a club in NY 1979… at the beginning.

Lost more friends in less than a decade than I did for the rest of my life at 67

r92, I heard back from 23andme.com. Unfortunately, this is what they told me:

[quote]Thank you for contacting the 23andMe Team. We do not currently include a health report incorporating the CCR5-Δ32 gene.

Phone polls don't tell anything. Especially Gallup which is generally funded by the right.

It's hard to picture the elders of DL enduring something so traumatic as the AIDS Crisis, considering how foul and hateful this site's exchanges have become.

I look at the angry eldergays, who survived all of this and lost so much, only to turn into crotchety old racists or name-callers, and ask what it was all for. Did you really lose so many friends and lovers just to let the gay community turn into this? Did so much of your humanity die in the 80s that you forgot how it feels to be on the outside looking in?

Of course, the fighters and the organizers will always be heroes, but it's a real shame that a group that saw so much pain has now grown into this swamp where everyone hates everyone else, and bullying is fun, and everyone's happiness exists to be torn apart by the tribe.

Look what we say when we see a gay wedding announcement. We call them hookers, or ugly, or snobs. When an elder talks about medical woes, we tell him to get a new caftan or a new Filipino houseboy. When the government and the Anita Bryant types go after today's sexual weirdos, we help them light the bonfires and say "No T in LGB."

What was it al for?

You're confusing eldergays with people who married women and stayed closeted and voted republican who are now coming to datalounge because they like gay porn.

What was "what" all for? AIDS epidemic was not something anyone asked for. It certainly was not therapy or education for the "community" or for any individual. Maybe you should read Sontag's A Virus has no Morals. Viruses do not add meaning to human existence. They do not comment on humans. They have no psychological, or philosophical or moral or mystical relation to humans. From a human standpoint, virus are to be fought, avoided, endured.

R119 Oh, right. But how is one to tell the difference?

R117

The Williams Institute at UCLA estimates that 3.5 % of US adults are GL and B .

0.3% identify as as T

Considerably less than the recent Gallup poll

R118 let me explain in another way. If an eldergay on DL is a cunt he was probably a cunt during the epidemic as well. AIDS didn't change his M.O.

Also, perhaps you are new to using the intertertubes. Let me tell you missy - people act different in virtual forums than in their lives.

Finally, why don't you reread DL's motto - on the sign in page. You seem to be a satire free zone. Sassy snarky comments about the gay weddings in NYT society pages is a PERFORMANCE. Very few people here really wish ill on these newlyweds. It's just taking the piss.

If you cannot understand irony and cosplay - this may not be the discussion forum for you.

I grew up pre internet and had extremely little information about my own sexuality. I didn’t really meet other gays who were identifiable as such until college.

So my first experience with AIDS was, ironically, with women who had relationships with men who were drug addicts.

AIDS in a very direct way educated me that there were other men attracted to ther own gender — like I was. Younger people might not appreciate how low-information and isolating the analog world was.

The NCHS, some very serious survey folks, of the CDC , estimates that 5.2% of the adult US population is GLBT.

R116 Reread R82. There is no report. You have to search the raw data for the gene's presence. They will add raw data to your dashboard if you ask for it.

CDC has been populated with right-wingers ever since they became responsible for reporting the nation's abortion numbers.

R127

How many current cdc employers do you know? Even one at NCHS?

No federal agency goes out of its way to protect the gay community like cdc does. Protecting the gay community is in their dna.

R14 me too. R19 I get what you are saying, but I really do love reading about people's stories. I lived just in the fear phase of basically try to never have sex- which didn't work- but not in the phase of watching my friends and loved ones die around me. But I imagine it's too close still for some people. I remember when it was first on the news and my father gave me the "it's only gay people" so I didn't need to worry- that plus his "gay people shouldn't vote because they are mentally ill" made things real easy to live in his house (I am being sarcastic for those unable to read into it). Ryan White really did change the conversation, such a brave kid, it finally gave the assholes like my parents information to STFU- a kid just like their kids could get it and his mom couldn't protect him.

I met him, he came to my college for orientation to mix within the freshman class, to later share with everyone who he was- it was meant to illustrate that you never know who has it. I hung out with him but was too cool to go to any organized assemblies and he kept asking me to go- I was like- um no, I am just going to smoke in my room, thanks. Then I found out he did this whole unveiling and then went home so I never got to talk to him again. I felt shitty. He was really sweet and charismatic and I hope he knew I would have hung with him with AIDS without AIDS.

Who is the stinkfish at R118 ?

R118

[quote]Did you really lose so many friends and lovers just to let the gay community turn into this?

I came of age in the late 90s so I can’t really speak from personal experience, but I can only imagine that surviving that hell only to have your community invaded and taken over by trannies wanting to pump children full of hormones and assholes wanting to mindfuck the general population with their 27 revolving gender identities, and then being told by some blue-haired twerp that you are “privileged” because you identify with your penis - well I’d be a bit pissed too.

R131 is right and justified. These aqua-haired kunts and BPD “queer” straight women, who are playing Woke Victim Olympics for clout, have no fucking clue the fight and the death of gay men that went into getting them to the point that they could let their little homo sons run around in Cinderella dresses, only to do a modern day version of conversion therapy on them by transitioning them. Fuck those pieces of shit! They’re just as bad as MAGAs in my opinion, worse in some ways.

R132 And look what you do with your hard-won freedom.

You use it to mock others, to laugh at their struggles, to shove them out of your tent and say "Sorry, we're freaks, but you people are too much for my taste!"

R133 is brainwashed and doesn’t get it. Once you’re in the T Army there’s no coming back, it’s like defecting to North Korea.

R133 is ready for PEDO/MAP Pride or Scat Pride, maybe? Where’s your personal line? Which freak will you finally turn away?

R133 is neurodivergent

R135 My personal line doesn't involve excluding entire groups of people just because I don't want to fuck them.

I may not like someone's everyday life, or understand it, or want it on my dick, but I still support their personal freedom to be who they are. I don't sleep with lesbians, but I support their freedom and dignity. I don't do drag, but I abhor their mistreatment this summer. I don't have kids, or trans kids, but who they want to be is none of my damn business.

You should learn how to do that before you die of old age.

Wow, R134 - R136 is the same idiot. Who could've known?

R137 you completely missed the point. Trans people have nothing to do with being gay. They don’t belong in our group. Gays, trans, blacks, Asians, Latinos, they are all discriminated against in various ways. Does that mean they should all be grouped together into one group and are they are all the same?

The Victim Class

R137 is too far gone. Its posts are the equivalent of a glassy stare.

I think part of the aqua hair movement that’s infuriating is that they want to be labeled freaks and run an endless circus, lots of LGB people just wanted to be integrated into mainstream society and live a low key life. The T is like “not so fast! Back into the circus tent. You’re one of us! What’s your drag name? Yaaaasssssss!”

Thank you trans and terfs for tanking this thread. Typically everything is always about only you two groups of cunts.

R139, before gender confirmation surgery most transsexuals have sex with people of their own biological sex. That makes them gay or lesbian.

CDC has never done AnythIng to protect the LGBT community.

[quote] you're misrepresenting what the poll findings were:

r111 Believe me, I understand your point.

But my point is that perhaps this is a new dawning where people can finally be honest about their sexuality. And people in my generation who would never admit to themselves they are gay or bisexual, are acknowledging the truth now. The stigma is being removed and Gen Z teenagers can be honest.

Growing up gay in the 80's I just knew there were more of us than the stats said.

People my age lied to pollsters. These youngsters feel no reason to lie anymore.

If 20% of teenagers are now gay and bisexual, do you think the sexual orientation of the population has really changed? Nah, we've always been 20% or more.

Whoever shat on this thread by bringing up trans issues ought to be ashamed of himself. And whoever thinks that its people who lived through the front lines of AIDS in the 80s and 90s are bringing racism and hatred to DL also should be ashamed of himself. These are obvious efforts to diminish and devalue the painful and life-altering experiences of many of the people who read and participate at DL.

Poll after poll after poll has shown that gay men of all ages are overwhelmingly liberal in their politics, less racist than their heterosexual peers, and generally tolerant of people whose sexual orientations and proclivities don't fall into the neat categories that heterosexuals think they should. When I see other viewpoints here, the terrible grammar, spelling and word order almost immediately identifies those posters as trolls, often from other countries. Yes, there's a lot of pointless bitchery here (it is the raison d'etre of the site). Usually it's somewhat mean but funny stuff. When it gets vile and vicious, there's something else afoot, or someone's mental issues are coming to the foreground.

The steep increase in reported GLBT with the Z generation with the new Gallup data is interesting .

The biggest increase with this Z group over the older M group is found in bisexuals. It jumps from 5.1% to 11.5%. Over double. Driven a lot by female respondents.

Lesbians jump from 0.8% to 1.4% (not double but close)

The next jump is with the trans. They jump from 1.2% for the M generation to 1.8% for the youngens.

Gay men are almost the same with virtually no movement going from 2.0 % M to 2.1% for the Z.

The “other” group also remains the same 0.4% to 0.4%

It will be interesting to see the movement with these groups next time around. Will Bi s and lesbians and trans continue to increase in % and will gay men follow suit or remain virtually constant.

These speculations don't really belong in this thread, but I'll bite enough to say that maybe younger people are just being more honest about their sex lives - meaning that if they have had some sexual experimentation with same sex, they will describe themselves as Bi, whereas previous generations would have just dismissed those experiments as nothing. I tend to think of BI people as being sexually attracted to both sexes throughout their lives, but I think this current generation is calling even a brief period of being sexually attracted to same sex as putting them into the Bi category - even though their essential orientation is probably heterosexual and they will end up having long term heterosexual relationships.

Being “bi” is like totally cool, yaaassss! I made out with a girl once, I was drunk and all the guys were watching, but I’m marrying a man.

This WAS a good thread! RIP!

OP why did you copyright aids? Are you trying to make some argument of how capitalism help combat the aids epidemic?

Some good news. Based on the last two years of data, Australia is now 11 years ahead of the internationally agreed date for eliminating the spread of HIV. A 57% decrease in new cases among gay and bi men in the last 10 years, and new cases are virtually eliminated already among drug users and female sex workers. This expert says we could do even better if we put the foot back on the pedal to market to young gay men that it is no longer a death sentence, so they should be tested regularly so cases are picked up earlier.

I vividly remember the terror of the period in the mid-late 80s when the authorities knew it was fatal but didn't know how it worked or how it was transmitted. As with Covid, all kinds of wrong and contradictory information was put out just because they were learning, and thus changing their minds, all the time. The medical staff dealing with AIDS in that period were absolute heroes, even moreso than those who cared for Covid patients in 2020.

I lost a couple of people, and some closer friends were lucky with the timing of the drugs, but the thing I remember most about that time was what Russell Davies recently depicted: all the closed-minded parents who pushed the friends and long-time lovers of dying men out of their lives when they needed them, who fought legitimate Wills to make sure the lover got nothing. People were evicted from houses for which they had been paying half the mortgage for years. I went to a funeral where cause of death was repeatedly said to be cancer and the dead guy's partner didn't get to sit with the family or take part in the service. I'm sure that happened all over.

I like to think the fact that so many partners, friends, doctors and nurses of dying gay men remembered that, led directly to the social and legal changes that ended in marriage equality. That people could be so hateful, even to the dying, in the name of morality that you HAD to provide legal protections against them.

I was born in the late 70s so AIDS and gay were basically synonymous terms for me growing up. When I came out, I was so scared of getting it. Even though my activities were always low risk, I worried that every single cold I got from the time I became sexually active was seroconversion.

PREP is an absolute miracle. I feel personally sort of glad that it didn’t exist when I was younger because I’m not sure I would’ve settled down as easily as I did, and my husband really is the best thing to ever happen to me. But I’m so glad that younger people don’t have to operate with the same fear.

OP answer me. Why did you copyright AIDS?

In 2021 over 36,000 new Dx with HIV in the US.

In 2021 , 13,000 , people died of AIDS in the US

The only thing really important with a thread like this is how we deal with the present and maybe more. Important how we deal with the future.

Datalounge is not designed to function as some kind of policy institute. (Indeed, I shudder to think of a world where criminal justice was performed in accordance with DL's belief that attractiveness is the most important indicator of innocence or guilt.) This website is much better-suited to old queens trading memories and barbs.

R157 Before the Trans Trolls took over, the rowdiest this place got was during arguments over caftan patterns and who was the better replacement "Angel": Tanya Roberts or Shelly Hack.

God I miss that filth.

How come the big gay bear hasn’t shown his tubby ass in this thread? He usually can’t refuse giving his 2¢, which is quite a bit considering that’s all he has.

OP why the fuck did you copyright AIDS.

^^^ OP has copyrighted this thread so he can sue us all for infringement.

R160

It just seems weird and a bit offensive to copyright the disease that killed so many without any constructive reason.

R163 Weird, yes. But offensive? I think you’re reading a bit too much into this.

We all do understand, don't we, that whatever its intent the copyright symbol above is totally meaningless, right?

Alright, Aspies! The copyright symbol was a little bit random and a scattered thought of how the gays have become big pharma business, the corporate nature of Pride now, PrEP, how it was probably a man made virus to exterminate us… you know since the timing just happened to fall a decade after Stonewall… awfully convenient, etc.

There was no malicious intent. Chill.

HIV/AIDS was an attempt at eugenics

R166 thank you. That’s all I needed to hear.

R168 are you tiresome in real life? You probably have a name like Gregory and go by the full name, no Greg.

R150, hates women with a passion

R169 no I’m not but sometimes I get cunty on here. And I swear I’m not Greg.

Are you insinuating that I sometimes get kunty on here?

R170 shut up, cunt

I was a top in my youth during that era. The first person I knew who had AIDs circa 1988 is still alive but others were not so lucky. I can think of 3 people I was close to who died from complications from AIDS.

Bump

I wonder if we will ever know how long HIV and AIDS had been in the US before we realized it was killing people.

I know of at least one young gay man, a relative of a friend, certainly a bottom, who died in the late 1970s with a bevy of symptoms that the doctors could make no sense of. Now many seen as classic aids symptoms.

In retrospect it sure sounded like an early pre 1981 aids death.

Yes it was R176. Here's an interesting summary of what we know:

Starting around 1981 my husband and I, between us, had a floating group of about 30 gay male friends we partied, traveled, and hung out with. Now it's just us, with survivor's guilt: why them and not us?

The last one died in 2004. Try wrapping your heads around that: everyone you knew and cared about in your youth is gone. We still have families and co-workers, but all of our old friends are dead.

One thing I remember so well from those days , were those medical people , and concerned lay people , sounding the alarm in the early 1980s and being called homophobes and anti-sex.

Somethings never change

r176, I met a guy in the summer of 1978 who announced before long that he'd been seeing a doctor because he had this disease whereby he'd been losing weight and they couldn't figure out why. We were only in our late 20s. Eventually, he moved back to his parents' house (Portland) from where we were living (LA). Because it was the '70s, we lost track of each other.

R179

Modern Progressive Gays: “Believe the science… unless it has to do with Transgenders & biology or I can’t bareback!”

R159, because he just saw this thread and he didn’t want read it for fear that it’s full of sad stories and memories and probably misinformation.

And KEEP MY NOT-MY-NAME OUT YOUR GODDAMNED MOUTH!

Your posting history is psychotic.

R176 Bless you dear, but you typed your question on the "Internet" on a chat board, seemingly without any clue that you could type your question into a "search engine" on the "Internet" and discover not only the answer, but that the rest of us, who have basic but active intellectual curiosity, have known for years and years the answer to your question.

^ A feeble attempt.

R183

Thank you for your kind and informative replay. But I was not wondering what the wiki page might say since I knew the basics already my question was about what we don’t know yet,

And my guess is that there is still a lot more we don’t know about the earliest days of transmissions and might never know. And that would include an accurate death toll.

R185, use Ignoredar and you'll see that he's always a miserable twat. Once you've seen a few of his cunty (but never actually amusing) posts, you'll recognize them from then on.

You're chancing your query.

"I wonder if we will ever know how long HIV and AIDS had been in the US before we realized it was killing people."

WE KNOW THE ANSWER. HAVE KNOWN FOR YEARS NOW.

R187

All caps lets me know how serious a poster you are. I still believe there is a lot about the early days of aids we still do not know. Including very early deaths.

I am so sorry I phrased my post in such a way as to upset you.

There is pretty good evidence that AIDS may have been in the US as early as the 50s from preserved tissue harvested from patients with inexplicable symptoms; dig for it on the internet, and you will find it.

R189 the liberation movement, like a PrEP 1.0, unleashed all the butt sex that caused it to explode

R190

Not so much the liberation movement.

Jack Campbell had more to do with the explosion of AIDS than anyone in the US. Jack was a charming friendly man with a great business sense I might add

[quote] he liberation movement, like a PrEP 1.0, unleashed all the butt sex that caused it to explode

r190 I blame Vaseline.

I blame testosterone and Wheaties.

And liked the results.

[quote][R189] the liberation movement, like a PrEP 1.0, unleashed all the butt sex that caused it to explode.

Sorry. My bad. I promise not to do it again 🙋🏼‍♂️

But PrEP 1.0 worked. Damn more effective than in the trials and that’s weird. (Happy now, R159? I’ve entered the building like a vampire you invited in).

r193 I was gonna make a joke about K-Y Jelly but thought better.

AIDS/HIV devastated our community. We need to bow our heads and remember all those who died.

I didn't know anyone personally, but it broke my heart when Arthur Ashe went on TV to announce he had it. Back then, it was a death sentence. I was about 17, on the high school tennis team, and had a massive crush on him.

R195

According to CDC over 30,000 new Dx of hiv each year and approx 13,000 aids deaths in the US each year.

And one sexually transmitted disease after another is growling in significant numbers within the community and growing in resistance to Rx.

Bowing our heads and remembering is hardly the issue people need to be concerned with..

Michael....RIP.. I hope you found a better place. You (and so many others) are still so missed.

r197, I might be wrong by I think I'm detecting a sex-negative tone in your responses. (Your signature is using dx for diagnosis). What you left out of the above post is the CDC information that by far the largest cohort of people diagnosed with HIV in the past 10 years or so and with by far the worst prognosis, are black people coming out of backgrounds of poverty and very inadequate health care. The states with the largest cities with openly gay populations (NY, CA, Il, MA, WA) have much lower rates of new infections and much better health outcomes. Southern states with terrible rates of insurance coverage and medicaid, especially for black men, have far higher rates of new infections and far worse health outcomes. Reduced infections among gay white men, particularly gay white men with adequate health care, is due to the widespread use of PreP in that population. The other thing is that gay white men with HIV who have uninterrupted access to medications to keep their viral load undetectable are not transmitting virus - AT ALL - and study after study has confirmed that.

So "the issue we need to be concerned about" is continuing the education piece about getting tested, getting treatment if infected, and using PreP if uninfected, and making sure that that message and the economic support behind it for the populations of minorities, particularly black but also Hispanic are widely disseminated in those communities along with the resources to make medical care available. Of course safe sex should also be encouraged and supported as well as frequent testing (and treatment if necessary) for other sexually transmitted diseases.

Let’s talk about the PrEP gays and their PrEP privilege. They have it readily available, and they’re showing off and encouraging bareback like crazy, especially pornstars acting like raw is aspirational, to populations that don’t have access to or can’t afford it. That’s a fucked up thing to play with. Not to mention the tons of other sexual health problems that go along with that behavior which require healthcare and medication. They act like everyone is on PrEP, getting tested every 3 months, tested for the bacterial infections every 1.5 months in-between, and have a supply of doxyPEP at the ready. Irresponsible.

“Of course safe sex should be encouraged…”

Thanks for the laugh of the day. That’s a little like saying that driving sober should be encouraged. Or not using meth should be encouraged. Not beating babies should be encouraged. 12 year olds smoking cigarettes should not be encouraged.

Yes lots of things should be encouraged..

R198 I actually recall Michael on Card Sharks and had a crush on him. Do we know his full name?

[quote]“Of course safe sex should be encouraged…”

[quote]Thanks for the laugh of the day.

I am not that poster, but I’m not sure why you find it funny. The only thing we can do is encourage people to practice. SAFER sex. All of the things you compared it to are illegal. Choosing to use a condom or not is not a legal issue.

Even before PrEP, we weren’t allowed to bust down doors and check and make sure everyone had a condom on (and I know some folks that would’ve liked to!)

R203

In the 1990s STD rates in the US dropped to historic modern day lows. Syphilis you could argue might be eliminated as a significant public health threat.

There reasons for that significant drop besides the fact gay men were dying in large numbers. Safe sex Safe sex Safe sex. Also know as condom use.

Those days have passed

STDs within the community are now exploding again. Getting worse every year. And the chance that safe sex now is going to change things for the better is a frigging joke.

No one could be that stupid.

The fact is no one really cares. Bareback anal, even with the multitudes, is defended as if its a constitutional right.

And the straight community does not care just as long as hIV and aids and syphilis and MPox etc stays within the gay male community and does not start to significantly infect the straight community and the lesbians.

No one had to bust down doors to check on condom use in the 1990s because the drop in new syphilis cases was proof enough they were being used and used regularly.

It’s going to get worse. And the barebackers out there today are the reason why.

R204 Speak sister. If only there was a way to protect our healthy reasonable selves against the nihilistic barebackers of Gomorrha. I mean you never know, and they are so stealthy. Tattoos for barebackers? An app on our phones that detects STIs? Something must be done.

R205 They wanted to crucify William F. Buckley for suggesting that ("Tattoos for barebackers?") in the 1980's.

Now we're saying it, and not without reason. plus ça change, etc.

Grindr is about an inch away from linking with some healthcare platform where your recent, official STD test results can be unlocked with your permission for potential partners. Sluts beware.

I had all but forgotten but was recently reminded that funeral homes would refuse to handle AIDS patient remains. Thousands of untold horror stories of our brothers shunned in their last days. It was just awful.

People don’t realize how far we’ve come. The newer generations take so much for granted, as they constantly move the goal posts to be unique.

“If we can’t transition kindergartners, and freely Fist & Felch in the streets, they’ll come for gay marriage next!”

The higher you build the tower, R209, the easier it all falls down...

Only an idiot could fail to see how far we've come, but a quick look at current events shows that we can't rely on "settled law" anymore with out current SCOTUS.

R204, I’m not about to scream “Do you KNOW WHO I AM?” because I’m pretty sure you don’t know who I am, and you shouldn’t know who I am. Nobody here should. But some folks here do and a lot of them hate when I do this, but they know and they made up a name for me.

You’re talking to an HIV/STI expert. Me. It’s not a hobby. It’s a job. And you’re lecturing me and I could respond to you without even having to google a single fact, but I think it’s easier to show you so you’ll understand.

Syphilis was already increasing in all men way before PrEP and almost half of the cases of it are in gay and bisexual men. And half of the cases in gay and bisexual men are already HIV+ and not on PrEP.

So look at the graphs. It’s increasing even faster in women! And even more frightening, look at how fast congenital syphilis is increasing, babies born with syphilis. You know how the women and babies got syphilis? Barefronting. Using condoms and getting pregnant generally don’t go hand-in-hand.

And syphilis is still relatively rare. I’ve met STI nurses in rural areas who have never SEEN a case of syphilis. Look at the numbers of gonorrhea and chlamydia cases in the upper left corner. They are over 10 and 50 times HIGHER than syphilis! And syphilis is treatable. We’re seeing an explosion of multi-drug resistant gonorrhea across the board that is scarier.

And we don’t like seeing STI cases go up, but they are so much higher than HIV and they PRECEDE HIV and actually increase the risk of getting infected with HIV. So when we see a syphilis case in an HIV uninfected gay man who isn’t already on PrEP we’re actually kinda relieved because it means we can recommend they start PrEP before they eventually do get HIV. We’re not happy to diagnose someone with an STI but at least it gives us an opportunity to teach them how to protect themselves from HIV *and* we always tell them that they should use condoms still.

But those rates were going up because all we were hearing from HIV public health workers in the early 2000s were stories about “condom fatigue”. Gay men had already gotten tired of using condoms and were abandoning them and saying they hated that straight people were having sex without them so why do I have to?

We are lucky to finally have a biomedical prevention method for HIV that works. It means that we can tell someone they need to protect themselves by wearing condoms, getting tested, talking about their status with their partners (just like we always have) but finally we have another tool in the toolbox to help stop an incurable disease.

And if you’re the person who posted above that guys on PrEP are getting tested every month and a half, then I know you don’t know anything about STIs or HIV. The recommendations for sexually active gay men not on PrEP are to get tested annually. On PrEP, to test every three months. Nobody is recommending getting tested every six weeks. The time from syphilis infection to symptoms can be three weeks. If we were testing people every six weeks, we would have so many false negatives, and it would be so cost ineffective.

And if you were that guy, I have to agree with menluvinguy at r199. If you came into a thread about people’s experiences with the AIDS epidemic just to spread misinformation, then you are being sex negative.

So if you’re that concerned, my recommendations are take all of that, put a condom on it, and shove it up your ass.

And have a nice day

I remember in the early 90s some gay men with HIV were purposefully getting tattoos of the hazardous waste symbol on their arms. To some it was a political statement, to some it was to let people know they weren’t ashamed, (to some, it may have been a sad statement that they were a “gift giver”) but whenever I saw one, and I saw a number of them, it always broke my heart. Not just because they were infected and we were still a good few years before 1996 and the triple ARV regimen, but because they chose a symbol that meant “I am toxic”.

I saw more plus signs than hazardous material tattoos and those were brave. I definitely felt better seeing those and things like red ribbons. Still made me sad, but I couldn’t stand the idea of someone thinking of themselves as being toxic waste (even if that thought never crossed their mind). I just don’t think anybody should have to feel that way.

I found an article from 2011 and they don’t even really discuss the fact that it’s not a very hopeful or positive symbol. Or that tattoo artists don’t tell people “hey, I can’t understand what you’re going through right now, but I want you to think about this and come back in a few days, because this is for life. And we could talk about other designs if you want. In a few days, if you still feel the same way, I’ll be here to do it for you.” But tattoo artists aren’t counselors. If they were, people wouldn’t be getting “I’m a toaster“ in Chinese tattooed on them thinking it’s their name.

[quote] Bowing our heads and remembering is hardly the issue people need to be concerned with..

r197 We can take more than one tack. My point was that we are joking about it now. I said I refrained from a K-Y Jelly joke. So with the levity must also come acknowledgement of the suffering of many, and those who still suffer.

R211

There are over 175,000 new US syphilis each year now. Less than 3000 of the over 175,000 syphilis cases are congenital syphilis,

Approx 83% of all new P&S syphilis are now with men. At one time in the 1950s the ratio of men to woman was more normal expecting 7male cases to every 5female cases, now it’s closer to 9 to 1. Males to female.

And you are correct the rise in syphilis cases in the late 1990s did not start with PrEP . The decrease in cases stopped and the increases began once we had a treatment for HIV. That is when the condoms came off.

The syphilis cases , and other STIs continued to go way up after PrEP. And will be higher next year. And the year after.

And btw you are confusing posters you think you are replying to.

R211

And where do those less than 3000 woman who had a baby with congenital syphilis get infected with syphilis you ask ?. Not from other woman that is a given.

I do know there is a reason cdc has no syphilis data published on gay men. The cdc always looks at MSM —-Men who have sex with Men —not Gay men. Many of these MSM will also have sex with woman.

Condoms would have prevented virtually every one of these over 176,000 new syphilis cases last reporting year

. Just as condoms lead to the drastic reduction in new Syphilis cases in the 1990s. And just like the lack of condom use has lead to the explosion of syphilis and other STIs today.

It’s going to get a lot worse. And the cause of this getting worse will have not much to do at all with woman .

Syphilis was a much bigger problem in the 19th century than it is presently. What does that say to me? It says to me that men, who are ALWAYS the more promiscuous sex, spread syphilis around. There is some evidence that the reason the Victorians went into hyper prudery about all things sexual was that syphilis was so rampant that huge swaths of people acquired it congenitally. Therefore, men were not allowed to be alone with women before marriage, and sex was generally frowned upon and discourage, as though it weren't a basic biological drive. It seems to me that some posters above would like us to return to Victorian mores. But human nature is always going to rear its ugly head, which is to say that men are going to have sex with whomever, whenever and however they can, consequences by damned. I also suspect that cases of syphilis among women are going unreported because they are asymptomatic and might be one of the reasons why the statistics are skewed. It used to be automatic that couples were tested before marriage, and I think women used to be tested when pregnant. But that is not happening anymore, and might need to be reinstated - well, in any case, 1 out of 2 births is to an unmarried woman, so there wouldn't be the premarriage syphilis test for a lot of them anyway. In the long run, the best hope is that a vaccine can be developed for these sexual diseases, just as it has been for HPV. As another poster wrote above, we can only encourage people to practice safer sex, there are no police to enforce it, which means that sexually transmitted diseases will be with us always until there are vaccines available for them.

R216

Not just until a vaccine is available. The condoms will come back on when diseases like gonorrhea can no longer be treated. Then men who previously refused to use condoms will start to use them. Exactly like they were doing in 1996.

Do you know why states stopped doing premarital blood tests? They were very much a waste of time and money. Those tests were a terrible way to try and find syphilis. You need to test the high risk if you want to find syphilis.

And you are correct about no one, even the community insisting on condom use at least today. As long as the STDs stay mainly in the msm or gay male community and don’t become a major concern for lesbians and straights it will stay that way.

With woman you are correct, like a bottom male, that initial P symptom can often not be noticed. But Secondary syphilis symptoms are very noticeable. You may not know what those symptoms mean but you know they mean something bad going on.

And you also have contract tracing with syphilis. Many woman who overlooked their secondary symptoms are likely to be contacted by someone in the health dept and referred to testing and or treatment..

It’s recommended that all pregnant woman have syphilis blood tests. Like men on PrEP sometimes the suggested tests are not done.

[quote][R211] There are over 175,000 new US syphilis each year now. Less than 3000 of the over 175,000 syphilis cases are congenital syphilis.

OMG, whoever you are, you are so wrong that it’s driving me crazy. I know exactly where you got that number and I know that you’re misusing it (you’re right on one thing, it is more than 175,000. It’s actually more than 176,000 now though).

There aren’t 175,000 “new” infections a year. At least 76,000 newly [bold]identified[/bold] infections are latent or tertiary syphilis that was acquired more than a year before it was identified. Some more than 10 years before they were identified. And tertiary syphilis isn’t transmissible. And even with those numbers, rates were still going up in men way before PrEP. And it’s always been that way. Which actually means that a lot of the infections that you’re talking about occurred before PrEP was even available. And if those guys were on PrEP, then they would be tested for syphilis, and we could prevent latent and tertiary cases. So your argument that PrEP alone is increasing STIs is actually a fallacy. PrEP can be used to break the transmission cycle and reduce them.

And I’m pretty sure I know who you are now. You’re a DIS that I got into an argument with on another thread who doesn’t know the differences between HIV and STI surveillance or the difference between risk and identity. I remember how confused you were about the difference between MSM and gay men, and what the division of STD records. And I also remember that you didn’t know that local jurisdictions collect STI data on the BRFSS.

You are a DIS, right? Tell me I’m right.

You are so wrong, and you are spreading misinformation, so I only skimmed your second post at me (if that was you or somebody else).

This is a thread about people’s recollections of the AIDS epidemic and I don’t think they appreciate us arguing over data. So if you wanna start a thread on that, I’ll be happy to teach you something, but I’m not doing it here. The other posters here don’t want to read it.

^ I need to correct myself. It’s always been that way since 2000.

R218

Those over 176,000 are new first time syphilis infections as far as a first time syphilis Dx. All Dx within a one years time period.

You want to quibble that some of those were infected in previous years so be it. It’s that way every year.

R220, I don’t want to quibble and it’s still a much lower rate than chlamydia and gonorrhea. And it still was increasing before PrEP. And guys on PrEP get tested for syphilis every three months and it still gives us an opportunity to treat them and break the cycle of transmission.

And I still don’t want to talk about it on this thread.

Randy Shilts was so passionate about 'Patient Zero' that I'm almost sure they fucked.

Sad. This could have been a thread about remembrances and discussing our own losses and triumphs over this horrific disease. Instead it became a debate on syphilis. This is why we can't have nice things..

R225, it became a debate on trans people first and the OP is throwing out anti-trans hate posts. He ranked his own thread.

ranked=TANKED

Gay men today think they are exempt from STD damage . I see another deadly virus coming

If they fucked, it meant that Gaetan was not looksist because Shilts was a troll by any standards,.

R228

In various studies up to 90% of men with hiv and syphilis are developing or have neurosyphilis based on spinal exams. 22 year olds not 82 year olds with neurosyphilis.

It may not be something new that will cause extensive health problems it may be a combination of infections already here and already epidemic.

If public health knows these men are infected with HIV AND syphilis, why aren't they treated for both?

[quote]Did you internalize the fear?

Fuck you, OP, and the copyright shit, you asshole.

Being insolent and stupid while expecting people here to share experiences shows you to be....

what you are.

The brain of this turd OP:

The AIDS© Thread How has it affected your life? Did you know people who died? Did you internalize the fear?

The AIDS© Thread R40 did you come out eventually? Did you finally have gay sex? How did you avoid the plague?

The AIDS© Thread R44 a G vaccine is in the works. C going ab-resist with no recourse is highly likely. Something new and viral is definitely a threat but bacterial is happening fast. Mgen is the new one spreading around like wildfire.

The AIDS© Thread Significant antimicrobial resistance presents a major challenge to the treatment of M genitalium infection. Because M genitalium lacks a cell wall, antibiotics targeting cell wall biosynthesis, such as beta lactams (eg, penicillins and cephalosporins), are ineffective against this organism

The AIDS© Thread Were most of the survivors tops? Did any slutty bottoms survive? Were they immune?

The AIDS© Thread R64 you should get tested for the gene

The AIDS© Thread R67 maybe host a gangbang with only unmedicated, poz tops then check the results later

The AIDS© Thread R69 Shut the fuck up! You don’t know anything! I listen to the science.

She "listens to the science."

Idiot.

Michael on Card Sharks was cute. Bet he was a hot lil pass around bottom.

R231

It’s normally during treatment or exams and testing that someone would be found to have syphilis that already has, or is now seen to also have, HIV.

So someone would be treated for the hiv , and not for syphilis as such , but for neurosyphilis as well.

The recommendations I have seen are to now assume the pt has neurosyphilis or is developing , if they have both syphilis and HIV infections ( avoiding a spinal exam) and treat accordingly.

The treatment is a lot more extensive than a shot or two. This could impact 10,000 s of men.

Are there 10s of thousands of undiagnosed American men nowadays?

R237

The 10,000s , includes men already impacted and treated for both, those being treated now, and those that will be treated in the future. For years to come.

Total HIV numbers continue to grow and we live with a syphilis epidemic that is getting worse every year. And the perfect storm is the lots of men that have both HIV and syphilis infections.

I have no idea if this is a big problem or just another issue to be dealing with, A combo diagnosis of HIV and syphilis does have more adverse issues associated with them than just neurosyphilis.

Powerful AIDS Memoirs

Borrowed Time - Paul Monette

Later - Paul Lisicky

r237 - probably - and most of them are part of the cohort of black and hispanic MSM who don't have community support or access to testing, counseling, and treatment.

The most powerful one is Eighty-Sixed by David Feinberg.

R238

r243 It looks like both r238 and r239 both disappeared. What does one have to say here to get their entire post zapped?

I can see them, r244. r239 is grayed out.

r245 That's weird. Now r238 is grayed out but r239 is still gone. WTF? Different views for different members?

R244 et al That's why I just entered the post number. There were a couple more post numbers upthread missing, too. The flow from response to response seemed jerky until I started seeing the gaps.

The DL is getting weirder and the moderation more inexplicable. The silenced syphilitic shouter isn't nearly as far off the beam as some of the people entertaining themselves here.

The government put this in gay and black communities as genocide.

r246, I still see r239 grayed out and r238 intact. I wonder if your dial is set to Asbestos Eyeballs, Delicate Flower, or somewhere in between. And I agree with r247. Compared to some of the shit people are posting of late, what's a little discussion of syphilis among friends?

- r245

r247 r249 Okay, now r248 's comment about a government conspiracy is lined out. Why the hell would a gay forum cancel out ideas that there are some rather troubling concerns that oppressed minorities may have been targeted? This a fucking queer forum. The AIDS conspiracy theory may be complete shit. But we are not allowed to discuss it?

r250, I can still see r248. It has not been grayed out (yet?) Check your Asbestos Eyeballs / Delicate Flower setting.

I only touch other humans with back scratchers so I’m safe.

I'm generally not a conspiracy theory person, but when I first heard the theories about deliberate spread of the virus it kinda tracked. Many gay men were very working class and would have used clinics not only in a "free clinic" setting but perhaps would have done plasma donation, etc. so getting a shot or being part of a trial for something (to be poked/jabbed with the virus) doesn't seem completely irrational. I don't have solid proof and I'm not saying it's true. But on matters like this, for anything predating the Clinton administration, a healthy dose of skepticism is a good thing.

We've learned over the years that corporations set out to target both the black community and the gay/lesbian community.....

[quote] I can still see [R248]. It has not been grayed out (yet?) Check your Asbestos Eyeballs / Delicate Flower setting.

r251 Does DL have such a setting option? Can you tell me how to find it?

r254, in the black bar at the top, do you see a round design that looks like spokes outside of a wheel. If so, click on it. You'll see a sliding bar in the center of the page it takes you to. Adjust accordingly.

r255 Thank you! It was in the middle so I moved it over to asbestos. I can see everything now!

Im lined out because of these touchy elder gays. All I am going to do is create another mafuckin name if my shit gets completely banned. I will not be silenced. Not now, not then, not ever. They tried to silence Megar Evers, Sojourner Truth, Mandela, Muhammad Ali too.

It’s racist to grey-out AIDS conspiracy theorists

r253, your post reminded me of a time back in 1985 when hiv testing was available at free clinics. When asked for my identifying name I used Ronald Reagan- but was told there were 300+ Ronald Reagans before me. For testing result purposes I was Ronald Reagan 387. We were really scared back then as their were threats of a round-up of hiv poz people (by which they meant gay people) . No one really knew what would happen to us once our status was known. Would it be shared?

Nancy never tested POZ because she was an oral slut only. Ronald was a gangbang bottom.

[quote]They tried to silence Megar Evers, Sojourner Truth, Mandela, Muhammad Ali too.

🙄

R248/R257, the US government IGNORED the AIDS epidemic in gay and (continue to) in Black communities but they didn’t PUT IT THERE. But you go ion being Megar Evers, Sojourner Truth, Mandela, Muhammad Ali too. Be Rosa Parks and Malcolm X too. On a gay gossip site.

But comparing yourself to those LEGENDS? When you’re spouting conspiracy theories is the absolute height of absurdity and hubris. I know you’re not an HIV/AIDS activist because they would boot your ass out the second you started spouting conspiracy theories. So just keep it on Twitter please. I’m gonna assume you’re just young and foolish.

And you’re not grayed out to me. But I wouldn’t mind seeing that.

R262 I never said I was an activist bitch. I’m a truth teller. Big ups to all my people living with the illness and surviving and RIP to all those who have died.

[quote] Compared to some of the shit people are posting of late, what's a little discussion of syphilis among friends?

[quote][R247] [R249] Okay, now [R248] 's comment about a government conspiracy is lined out. Why the hell would a gay forum cancel out ideas that there are some rather troubling concerns that oppressed minorities may have been targeted?

Well, I was arguing with the syphilis poster because he was posting misinformation and turning a thread that started off as a thread about our recollections about the AIDS epidemic into an anti-PrEP screed. Not only was he providing bad info, he was discouraging PrEP and I said if you want to talk about it, let’s take it to another thread because people aren’t here to watch us fight. He declined to do that. But I can still see his posts because I have asbestos eyeballs.

I just saw the posts about HIV and the Black community and that is a very important discussion and I think talking about folks perspectives on that and the legacy of racism and even things like medical distrust after Tuskegee should be things we should talk about. But r248 didn’t. They posted an untrue conspiracy theory that causes more stigma, misinformation and medical distrust.

I’m not going to start providing tables and references again. I could. I don’t think this thread is the place to discuss the science (basically this website isn’t the best place to discuss science in general) but then it veered into conspiracy theories and not just that they exist, but someone claiming they were real. Again, that’s something I would push back on with history and research, but I don’t wanna do that in this thread either.

So this thread veered. It veered anti-trans early on and I don’t know why they haven’t returned. But it went off the rails. And PlatonicCaveman, you had posted “AIDS/HIV devastated our community. We need to bow our heads and remember all those who died.” and someone took umbrage with that and I think it was one of the anti-prep, “they’re all barebacking whores” syphilis folks.

I agree more with you. There’s a time and a place to post (mis)information and we stopped talking about our recollections in a way that we were trying to.

And good lord, whoever kept posting Dx and Rx was driving me insane. I could fill a post to the limit with acronyms and drive everyone crazy and nobody would understand what I was saying, so it just seemed like showboating to me (and I’ve have been accused of that myself plenty of times when I didn’t think I was or possibly didn’t realize I was getting jargony). Posts from someone using acronyms because they knew them when it’s not that hard to type “diagnosis” or “prescription” because that’s what they had in their pocket along with a misunderstanding of the data. 🤷🏻

[quote] [R262] I never said I was an activist bitch. I’m a truth teller.

OK, so you’re neither an activist or knowledgeable about HIV. Got it.

Ya delusional little bitch.

I was so ignorant and so deeply closeted (in the Navy at the time) that I actually thought it was a disease that you could get BECAUSE YOU WERE GAY. No sex, just being a homosexual. Like we were genetically predisposed to it. It didn’t matter that it was originally a straight person’s disease. The Navy had mandatory testing right after Rock Hudson died. I couldn’t sleep the day before. I gave blood but I went and asked the corpsman how you could contract it. He explained to me how it could be transmitted through sex and blood. He gave me the oddest look. Maybe because I shook his hand so hard it almost fell off. I was so grateful. Fuck, I was just nineteen years old. Looking back I realized that the traumatizing homophobia I went through as a boy had made me paranoid.

The worst was yet to come. I was on a large amphibious ship and more than a few guys tested positive. One Airedale (aviation) this impossibly hot Mexican American guy, went AWOL to Mexico and tried to hide from the MPs. He had just reenlisted and bought a new car with his reenlistment money. He had to go to mast for going AWOL. Another guy, this beautiful Blatino, also an Airedale, tested positive and some of his bunkmates broke into his locker, stuffed his belongings in his duffel bag and actually put it out on the pier! Seriously. There were a few other people but remember, this was an 800 foot, 55k ton ship, not unlike a small city so I didn’t see what happened to the others.

One thing that happened was that the number of guys getting discharged for being gay increased. It was a witch hunt. Fucking rednecks in the Pentagon thought if they threw out as many homos as they could they would cut back on the number of cases in the military. One good friend of mine, who I met earlier in Japan had it. But they didn’t discharge him, just had him on limited duty. I was on limited duty as well but for some cardiac issues. I ran into him at Peacock Alley in San Diego. I didn’t tell him that I was gay when we were in Japan but he knew. He was very worldly. At the time he didn’t tell me that he was positive. I remember that he had gotten extremely buff and fit. The picture of health. We’d go into the bars together and no one would see me, just him. I was so young and silly that I didn’t care. I was just glad that I had a friend who knew about me. A year later, he called me at work to tell me that he was in Balboa Naval Hospital. I asked him why and he said nonchalantly that he had cancer (lymphoma). I never left his side. My friends told me that he had AIDS but I didn’t believe that. I didn’t want to. He then got sicker. He developed fungal growths in his fingernails. He said it was from making bread (he was a Chief Mess Specialist). One day we were in the line at the movie theater waiting to see THE PRINCE OF TIDES and fainted. Stupid people who were there asking me if he was drunk. I cussed them out. He recovered but his whole attitude changed. He was discharged from the military and I saw him off at the airport. He gave me a big hug and said “thanks for being my friend. Now forget about me.”. Of course I didn’t. I was discharged a month later. I wrote to the address he gave me but got no response. On my birthday that June I got a call from his bff, a rather blunt lesbian friend he knew since childhood. She told me that he had died. The first thing that came out of my mouth was, “AIDS?”. She confirmed it. I went to his funeral in Virginia. He had a closed casket because he had deteriorated so badly and he didn’t want people to see him like that. It was sad, very sad. If anything it taught me how important friendships are. I haven’t had a friend like that since. Sometimes we’d argue about silly shit and he’d tell me to get a backbone, be more assertive. I like to think that when I am, that it’s him guiding me. I know….MARY!

r266 Thanks. Very real account.

My first ex is HIV positive but I haven't talked to him in years.

Thank you r267. Was your boyfriend positive when you met him?

r268 No, this was in the 80's. After we split up we remained good friends. But he fell in with some rather trashy queens. He was always a top. Not quite sure how he acquired it.

Feinberg tried too hard to be funny in all his writing. Borrowed Time is more powerful and personal.

A terrible time and truly traumatizing

I saw no one on this thread attacking PrEP.

That is completely wrong or someone saying that is just a cheap tactic to discredit others . PrEP saves lives.

It’s what people do , or in this case don’t do , that are on PrEP that is the issue, lots and lots of no condom unsafe sex that leads to lots of other STIs.

It’s the unsafe high risk disease causing sex that is the public health disaster not the PrEP itself.

My thanks to OP for this thread. It has brought back a lot of memories good-and-bad. It’s nice to have a place here at DL to discuss.

r272 What sort of self-hating gay man would oppose a cure for AIDS?

Oh, we must have a guarantee that gay men will not be promiscuous!!!

What utter bullshit. Stop putting pseudo-religious conditions on healthcare.

[quote]I saw no one on this thread attacking PrEP.

R272, look at r200. Their post starts:

“Let’s talk about the PrEP gays and their PrEP privilege. They have it readily available, and they’re showing off and encouraging bareback like crazy, especially pornstars acting like raw is aspirational, to populations that don’t have access to or can’t afford it. That’s a fucked up thing to play with. ”

And then goes on and on blaming guys for not using condoms when he’s already made it clear that it’s all because of PrEP.

Guys had stopped using condoms before PrEP was available and we were not seeing a reduction in new cases. The rate was very steady and slightly rising from 2000 to about 2007 somewhere below 60,000 cases a year. In 2007, the WHO released a plan to reduce the number of new infections by 25% as a goal and coincidentally CDC released a back calculation of new cases and revised their estimates of the number of new infections by almost exactly 25% the same week. I was at the conference the week they reported that they were revising the way they estimated cases and I remember a plenary speaker saying “The WHO has recommended reducing new infections by 25%. CDC managed to do that just a few days ago, but that doesn’t mean we met the goal.” That’s the mark you see on the graph here.

We needed PrEP. We needed TasP. Those are the only things that have started to slow the epidemic. And r200 thinks that’s a bad thing. Stopping a disease that was killing approximately 1,000,000 people a year worldwide.

HIV kills about 12,000 people a year in the US now. Syphilis kills about 50. And that poster went on a tirade about barebackers spreading syphilis.

Which number do you find more disturbing? If you had to choose between them, which would you work to prevent? Obviously reducing both would be the best thing, but if you were r200 and thought that PrEP was responsible for exceptional harm because of syphilis and decided that PrEP was the problem, would you make it unavailable?

And fuck me for saying I wasn’t gong to post any more graphs or numbers.

I guess I made it about 4 hours at least.(But look at what I did on the Dentist who transmitted HIV thread. That’s what happens when I get REALLY irritated).

I also recall that several really good looking bartenders who were positive. In San Diego and Philadelphia. They’d be the picture of health and then suddenly they’d be thinner and then, just gone. I can see how so many of us became numb to it all. Kids were dropping dead like flies. I knew one guy who was trying to enlist in the Air Force but he tested positive for HIV. From the guy who took his cherry of all things. He was crushed. But he got a job bartending despite being underage. He lived with his parents rent-free. He’d blow his money on drugs and circuit parties. He eventually died of a heart attack at 25, after returning from a trip to Amsterdam. I felt bad for him until I found out that he would make racist comments and jokes about some of the black and Hispanic men who would come to the bar. He kept that side of himself hidden from me. He was always nice to me, but after finding that out about him it was disappointing to say the least.

[quote]I knew one guy who was trying to enlist in the Air Force but he tested positive for HIV.

I knew a guy who entered boot camp, testing negative before being accepted, and then tested positive a few weeks after he graduated and was assigned a post. He was dishonorably discharged, went back to live with his parents, and was dead within four months. I don't know why the disease progressed so quickly in his case.

Maybe he had a bad mutation r278? There was a guy in Australia who contracted it via a blood transfusion in the early stages of the pandemic. He is still asymptomatic after all this time. It never progressed to full blown AIDS.

R277 oh god, you sound tiring. He died of AIDS in the worst of it and your panties are in a twist about some race-based jokes, like you found out he was in the KKK. Mary!

PrEP is a great thing, you stupid cunts, but the behavior it’s causing is a problem and will become more of a problem as time goes by. Two things can exist at once.

[quote]PrEP is a great thing, you stupid cunts, but the behavior it’s causing is a problem and will become more of a problem as time goes by. Two things can exist at once.

Like 55 deaths a year due to syphilis and only 10,000 due to HIV? What do you propose?

And calling people cunts is a sign of a well thought out idea and informed scientific mind and a great way to bring people around to your way of thinking.

R282 you’re fucking stupid and dramatic. You’re making an argument that I’m not even alluding to. It’s about culture and behavior, not saying to ban a helpful drug. Idiot.

Shut your whore mouth r280. You sound tiresome yourself. What a loser you are.

R277 What's the difference between a black dad and a boomerang?

A boomerang comes back.

Good relatively recent documentary about the early years. Not just about Douglas.

I will always be grateful to Princess Diana. Very grateful. I understand that she was far from perfect - like all of us- but you would have had to be alive then to understand the impact that lady had on so many people. Everyone was terrified of catching this mysterious and fatal disease. No one knew if casual contact with an AIDs patient put one at risk. These poor men were dying horrific - and lonely - deaths. People, including doctors and medical personnel, were afraid to hold their hand, hug them. She did hug them, she held their hand. It changed everything. Because of her compassion others became more compassionate. You have to understand that she was the most famous person in the world at that time. What she did mattered to people. I will always admire her for that, she will always have my gratitude and respect for what she did.

R287 are there currently any active monkeypox patients close to the PCH?

Princess Margaret did it before Diana without publicity. Different generation?

Not r277, r280 but how does having AIDS give someone a pass to be a racist?

It doesn’t ^^^just white privilege at work.

Diana was on a worldwide publicity tour with her photographers nearby, trying to preserve her Princess title and privileges. She was afraid she'd have to go back to teaching school.

Some of the republican trolls trying to attack the gay community on this thread for "racism" have a history of dire racism themselves.

One of the sad stories I didn't find out about until late in the AIDS pandemic, is that one of my friends, raised in North Dakota in a religious family who had attended a conservative Presbyterian college, moved to NYC for attend Juilliard for graduate school (he was a fantastically talented pianist who competed in the Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow). He met a man on the airplane on his way to NYC. That man was several years older. They started talking and over the next short while, fell in love. That man became his lover/partner and was the only person my friend ever slept with in his entire life. Of course, the year was 1984 and you can guess the rest. I didn't know any of this backstory until after I was notified of my friend's death in Kansas City in 1994 when I was so stunned I started to make inquiries about how this had happened. I'm sure his partner didn't infect him on purpose (probably had no notion he was infected himself) and I think they died around the same time, but I grow sad every time I think about it. He was 33 at the time of his death.

Had never seen this

It made me less glib about STIs.

r286 I have heard that the Patient Zero theory had been debunked. But after watching that documentary, and seeing Gaetan Dugas appear before a hearing and flatly say he would not stop having sex, despite the fact that he had teh "gay cancer" - sorry, whether or not he was truly the first, he deserves the title.

He was so obviously in self denial because he didn't want to stop having sex. So whether or not he told a man he just had sex with "now you have gay cancer too", he's just as culpable as if he had.

Yes, he was Typhoid Mary. He did the same as she. Why are they defending him?

There were several earlier reports of AIDS patient sufferings in the sixties. One was a bisexual hustler, African American, who reported having sores and a persistent cough and fever. He refused a full medical examination because he didn’t want the doctor to know that he was having anal sex. They saved his blood or tissues and stored them away. He later died. But someone who had a good memory found his slides and sure enough, AIDS. And even before that, several people in Europe died from mysterious diseases that were found to be AIDS later on. How did it mutate in a virus transferable to humans?

r298 You are correct. I linked the story of the 15-year-old boy who died of AIDS in 1969.

Apparently it had been around but just took years to develop into an epidemic.

R299, so sad. The creative world took a gut punch when AIDS decimated the world of arts and entertainment. For a while it showed. Output was dismal in terms of music, fashion and film.

R297

Patient Zero is one among many Patient Zeros. Not everyone who knew they were infectious and likely dying stopped having sex. In fact for many it was a , what do I have to lose now , kind of world. Hopelessness and desperation..

It’s a time that can only make sense if you lived thru it.

Fran Lebowitz on how AIDS devastated our culture. Nobody has ever said it better, imho.

Dugas wasn’t Patient Zero. But it can be argued that he behaved irresponsibly after being diagnosed. But it was a crazy Wild West atmosphere in the early days of the epidemic.

[quote] Fran Lebowitz on how AIDS devastated our culture. Nobody has ever said it better, imho.

r302 I'm a queer supremacist and Lebowitz justifies my stance. When there are less of us, the culture gets dumbed down. Yes, she explained it quite well and better than I can when I rail against reproductive privilege.

I was a teenager having my sexual awakening at the same time AIDS was really becoming more than just a mention on the evening news, more than just oh, here's something that happened way over in NYC or LA.

So it's impossible for me to separate those threads.