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Without good public health information, and with research lagging, they were unnecessarily exposed to the virus. Glossing over the era’s homophobiaĪll this left Mercury and other queer men in a terrible place. In 1985, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher tried to block a public health campaign promoting safe sex she thought it would encourage teenagers to have sex, and, she claimed, they were not at risk of infection.Īll told, it was an absurd response to the major public health catastrophe of our time and to a disease that would go on to kill 36 million people around the world – about as many as died in World War I. There was no test for the virus until 1985, and there was no really effective treatment until 1996.

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government had spent more to get to the bottom of a series of mysterious poisonings in Chicago that killed seven people than to research AIDS, which had already killed hundreds of people in the U.S. As one activist pointed out, two years into the crisis, the U.S. Governments and the general public quietly left people with HIV to their fate.

Lots of straight people had multiple partners in the 1970s and 1980s, but initially, by chance, some communities of gay men were hit harder. But there was nothing about gay sex in particular that caused AIDS.

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Especially in the absence of good public health information about how to have safer sex, your risk of contracting any sexually transmitted infection goes up when you have more partners. The medical profession’s view of HIV was so colored by the idea that it was intrinsically gay that at first they named the virus “ GRID,” an acronym for “gay-related immunodeficiency.” HIV was not, therefore, a threat to most straight people. Gay men, the thinking went, were getting it because of “risky” behaviors like having lots of partners.

The prejudiced initial public health response assumed that many of these people were getting the virus because of whatever was already supposedly wrong with them. and elsewhere, governments mounted almost no public health response.ĭoctors initially noticed the virus in groups of people who happened to already be stigmatized for other reasons: men who had sex with men, drug users and, due to racism, Haitians and Haitian-Americans. In the early 1980s, when an epidemic of HIV first struck a few population centers in the U.S., U.K.

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