Happy 30 years of protease inhibitors and combination therapies!
Every year I post an item in remembrance of World AIDS Day. I’ve been doing this since 2018. I do this to shine a light and educate on this issue close to my heart (btw, I’m not HIV-positive because, let’s face it, stigma still exists) and to help fight the stigma that is still around 44 years later.
Over the past few months, I spent a lot of time researching source footage from the 80s.
As YouTube commenters have posted under numerous videos, “YouTube is the closest thing we have to a time machine.”
(It’s fabulous for those of us who love history and are curious about it.)
It was interesting to hear news reports with people pronouncing it “A-I-D-S” or later, “HTLV-III,” which was the American name for the virus that causes AIDS before the agreed-upon use “HIV” by an international committee in the mid-80s. The French name was “LAV”, named when Paris-based Pasteur Institute identified the virus that causes AIDS in 1983.
After all these hours of research, a new-to-me thought appeared.
And this is the “theme” of this year’s item: “It could have been us.”
Any person who had the opportunity to give birth as well as those of us born between 1979 – early 1985 could have contracted it, easily.
In a previous essay, I believe from 2022 or 2023, I discuss the impact of the absence of people who entered the 80s full of optimism only to have their lives cruelly stolen from them and how we are worse off as a society as a result of their absence. I also discuss having 80s survivors guilt. I made it out of the 80s, as did a lot of us. Ariel, who I will talk about very soon and was four months older than me, and many others, did not.
Some of us are old enough to remember the advocacy of the late Elizabeth Glaser. She also spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 1992 [link] before POTUS 42 was elected.
But, first, a content warning. (Mentioned: traumatic birth)
Two months after the initial report in CDC publication Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report about five young gay men in Los Angeles presenting with a certain rare type of pneumonia with comorbidities, Elizabeth Glaser, the wife of a popular 70s TV show actor Paul Michael Glaser, contracted HIV in August of 1981 during a blood transfusion during the birth of her daughter Ariel.
Ariel and her younger brother Jake who was born in 1984 each contracted HIV via breastfeeding and in utero, respectively. (Their story is well-documented on the Internet if you want to learn more.)
At that time, AIDS wasn’t called AIDS, it was called (cringe incoming) GRID (gay-related immune deficiency) and a host of homophobic, bigoted and xenophobic monikers that were okay to say in 1981 that I won’t repeat here. An aside, GRID was renamed to AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) in September of 1982 to communicate to a public who was mostly indifferent to the epidemic that anyone can acquire it.
Los Angeles County was a geographical “hotspot” in the very beginning of the AIDS epidemic, along with New York and San Francisco. Ariel was born in Los Angeles County in 1981. I also was born in Los Angeles County in 1981, four months after Ariel. Yet, my mother and I were spared. And, my mother was spared again as well as my younger sibling in 1983. From 1981 through very early 1983, scientists weren’t sure how HIV/AIDS was transmitted, let alone the blood supply wasn’t checked. The blood supply wasn’t checked for HIV until early 1985. All of us were vulnerable.
Anyone giving birth or who were born between 1979 – 1985 could have contracted it as the blood supply was not screened for HIV until March of 1985.
So this is why I write, “it could have been us.”
“It could have been us.”
# # #
Check out and add to a Google spreadsheet I’m curating that documents safer sex messaging in 90s media: https://bit.ly/90sPSAs. (I have three rows I need to add, so check back often.)
There’s also a Spotify playlist: https://spoti.fi/4cDKByg
A three-part sidebar:
- From my observation — but, of course, through the lens of an 80s baby who had consciousness during that decade but from the perspective of a baby, toddler, and kid — certain mainstream voices were selectively amplified meanwhile certain voices were excluded during the 80s, but I don’t have enough evidence to double-click on this hypothesis. I watched a news report circa 1982 about a black woman and her toddler son enduring this diagnosis. We do not learn their names or any update on them. However, fast forward to 1986, we learn about Sunnye who was dying at age 36 playing with her infant niece on camera with Connie Chung. A few years later we learned about Alison Gertz and her story about a 1982 consensual encounter with a bartender named Cort Brown who worked at Studio 54. In other words, it wasn’t until December 1994 until when Rae Lewis-Thornton graced the cover of ESSENCE magazine (see below).
- During this year’s research, I learned about the viatical-settlement industry in the 90s before protease inhibitors and combination therapies arrived on the scene in 1995. Happy 30 years of protease inhibitors and combination therapies that have greatly improved the quality of life and outlook of people enduring HIV and AIDS journeys.
- Apparently the ban of men in the LGBTQI2S+ community donating blood was lifted in 2023. The ban started in 1985. From hiv.gov:
May 11 [, 2023]: FDA updates its blood donor eligibility guidance, ending longstanding discriminatory policies that excluded gay and bisexual people from donating blood while maintaining appropriate safeguards to protect recipients of blood products.
