David Hunt:

What do you know about the history of AIDS, the acquired immune deficiency syndrome?

If you’re like most people, you know that it emerged as a public health threat in the 1980s, that it struck down millions of people worldwide, including thousands of young gay men in the United States and other developed nations.

You may know that the LGBTQ community — and its allies — mobilized to combat this relentless killer. Today, it’s the stuff of legend, the story of an oppressed community fighting for its very existence in the face of social stigma, media disinformation and government indifference.

I’m David Hunt.

It’s easy to romanticize the AIDS generation — the fearless, sometimes lawless, activists who shut down the New York Stock Exchange to protest drug companies profiteering from the epidemic. Who stormed the National Institutes of Health in Maryland to speed the delivery of new treatments. Who raised millions of dollars for AIDS research and created a social-service infrastructure to care for the ill and the dying.

But at the beginning of the crisis — in 1981, 82 and 83, all of that lay in the future. In the early days of what would become a global pandemic, the gay and lesbian community struggled to coalesce in response to a new, confounding — and frightening — disease.

It’s a story of the best — and worst — of human nature. The story of AIDS — from the beginning.

Robert Bland:

When I asked my doctor what my mortality would be, he didn’t have an answer.

David Hunt:

Robert Bland wasn’t alone. Nobody had reliable answers to questions about a mysterious disease that began to afflict gay men in Los Angeles and several other big cities in the U.S. in the early 1980s. When he sat down with me for a radio interview in early 1983, Bland had — at least — learned the name of his ailment: AIDS.

By September, he had the answer to his question. He was dead.  

The disease outbreak that would claim the lives of Robert Bland and more than 40 million people worldwide was first described in the medical literature on June 5, 1981, in a U.S. government publication: The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report published by the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Between October 1980 and May 1981, the CDC reported, five young gay men had been treated for a rare form of pneumonia at three different hospitals in Los Angeles. Two of the patients had died.

“The fact that these patients were all homosexuals suggests an association between some aspect of a homosexual lifestyle or disease acquired through sexual contact,” the report said.

The Associated Press picked up the story immediately, reporting on June 5 that researchers were baffled by the puzzling outbreak among five otherwise healthy gay men in their 20s and 30s.

The Los Angeles Times also tackled the story that day in a page 3 article by medical writer Harry Nelson. He noted that the type of pneumonia described in the CDC report — pneumocystis pneumonia — is caused by a parasite that usually affects only cancer patients.

It was the first clue that the outbreak might be related to an underlying problem with the immune system — an immune deficiency that might have any number of causes.

A month later, on July 3, 1981, the CDC had more troubling news. Ten additional cases of pneumocystis pneumonia had been reported in gay men; four in Los Angeles and six in San Francisco. And now, doctors in New York and California had diagnosed a rare form of skin cancer — Kaposi’s sarcoma or KS for short — in 26 gay men. Some of these patients had been diagnosed as early as 1979. Eight had died.

And, in the same report, the CDC said four gay men in New York had been diagnosed with aggressive herpes simplex infections. All four showed signs of “cellular immune deficiencies.” Three had died. 

That got the attention of the New York Times. Medical writer Larry Altman interviewed Dr. Alvin Friedman-Kein at New York University Medical Center, who said the number of KS cases in gay men was continuing to climb. “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals” the Times reported in an article on page 20. 

The Times story sparked a flurry of coverage in the gay and lesbian media, which in the early 1980s consisted of just a couple of national newsweeklies including the Advocate, headquartered in San Francisco and Gay Community News, based in Boston. There were local newsweeklies for gays and lesbians in most major U.S. cities, such as the New York Native and the Washington Blade. But few had the resources — or the expertise — to provide comprehensive, ongoing coverage of a complex, evolving medical story.

I began covering the story at that time for IMRU, a weekly gay and lesbian news program that aired on Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles. 

“A rare form of cancer has struck at least 26 gay men in New York and California in the past 30 months, resulting in nine reported deaths.”

And I contributed regular news reports to Intergay, a global LGBTQ radio program produced at Pacifica Radio in New York. 

Ironically, the Times quickly backed off the story after its initial coverage. America’s newspaper of record would not print another word about the disease outbreak for five months, until Dec. 10, 1981, when it published a wire service story on new research findings. Research that linked the “strange infections” in 19 gay men to a weakening of their immune systems. The Times and several other U.S. dailies would later acknowledge their failure to adequately cover the early years of the epidemic.

By year’s end, 337 cases of what was then described as “gay cancer” and “gay pneumonia” had been reported. 130 patients — nearly 40% — had died. The vast majority of those diagnosed, 94%, were young gay men.

And so it would continue into 1982, with the number of new cases increasing by five or six a week — while the national media seemed largely unconcerned and the Reagan administration remained silent on the topic.

But not everyone was indifferent to the health crisis. 

In a news report in June 1982, I noted that members of the House subcommittee on health and the environment had come to Los Angeles looking for answers. The subcommittee held hearings in April of that year at the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center in Hollywood, where they heard testimony from CDC officials and doctors from UCLA Medical Center, among others. 

One Democratic lawmaker — subcommittee chair Henry Waxman— sounded the alarm, declaring that a public health crisis was on the horizon. Waxman said budget cuts by the Reagan administration would have a dire effect on efforts to find the cause of and cure for the disease.  

Dr. James Curran, head of a CDC task force on the outbreak, testified to the subcommittee that the cases to date represented “only the tip of the iceberg.”

Why wasn’t more being done to address the emerging epidemic? Waxman thought he knew why.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that if the same disease had appeared among Americans of Norwegian descent, or among tennis players, rather than among gay males, the responses of both the government and the medical community would have been different,” he said at the hearing.

Today, Waxman is still shocked by the seeming indifference of the Reagan administration.

Henry Waxman:

When this disease first hit, it was a fatal disease. There was no cure, there was no treatment for it. It was a death sentence. The response from the Reagan administration was always muted because the political people in the administration and the president himself didn't want to deal with the AIDS epidemic. This was a gay men's disease. They didn't like gay men. He didn't want to have much to do with it. And even President Reagan himself didn't utter the word AIDS until he was about to leave office after eight years as president.

David Hunt:

Geraldo Rivera, then a correspondent at ABC News, said the U.S. would pay a heavy price for allowing bigotry to slow the response to the epidemic.

Geraldo Rivera:

If the identity of the original victims of this epidemic were anyone else or children or any mainstream group, I think that you would have seen news people and government people and medical and scientific people falling over each other trying to do something about it. I think that because the original victims were homosexuals, the disease had a bizarre and deadly head start.

David Hunt:

U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop — who would become increasingly frustrated by the administration’s hands-off approach — acknowledged that White House officials saw gays as the enemy. He would later write, “the Reagan Revolution brought into positions of power and influence Americans whose politics and personal beliefs predisposed them to antipathy toward the homosexual community.”

Among them was conservative firebrand Patrick Buchanan, who stated: “The poor homosexuals. They have declared war on nature and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.”

In the middle of 1982, the CDC settled on a formal name for the disease, dubbing it AIDS, the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. It was a welcome change for members of the gay community, who found that terms like “gay cancer” and “gay-related immune deficiency” had placed a target on their backs, assigning them blame for the epidemic.

In reality, it wasn’t just gay men who were suffering. Douglas Wright, a former medical researcher and the editor of Out Magazine in Washington D.C., was one of the founders of the Gay and Lesbian Press Association. At the group’s annual convention in San Francisco in March 1983, he disputed the notion that AIDS had ever been simply or exclusively a gay disease.

Douglas Wright:

In the very first article that the New England Journal of Medicine published, they indicated stated that they felt this was a homosexual disease. However, in a footnote at the end of their article, a footnote which was about that big, I found this: Since submission of the manuscript, we have documented this syndrome in two exclusively heterosexual men. The news media around the country, both heterosexual or mainstream and homosexual, that picked up on this story, did not see that footnote. And as a consequence, we had headlines like this in the San Francisco Examiner on June the 11, 1982, ‘homosexual male cancer spreading to heterosexuals.’ That is one of the most devastating and dangerous political weapons which people like the Moral Majority in this country, have been handed on a platter. 

David Hunt:

Media coverage of AIDS took a sharp turn in the summer of 1982, when doctors diagnosed cases in three children with hemophilia — a blood disorder that requires the regular injection of a blood clotting protein called Factor 8, a product then made by pooling plasma from thousands of donors.

At the same time, researchers began reporting cases among Haitian immigrants to the United States, and among people — straight and gay — who injected recreational drugs such as heroin.

Instead of ignoring AIDS, the media began sensationalizing the disease. “Gay plague hits America,” one headline announced. “Infant may have gay plague,” said another.

“We couldn’t . . . get the press interested (at first),” said Walter Dowdle, the CDC’s deputy director. “Then, when the press finally did pick up on it, it was a sort of a blood, sex and politics approach.”

The media coverage generated more heat than light. 

Reporters played up various theories about the cause of the disease. Maybe the immune system could be overloaded to the point of failure by repeated bouts of venereal disease or by some aspect of the fast-lane lifestyle popular among urban gay men. Maybe the disease was triggered by the inhalants some gay men used to enhance sexual pleasure. Perhaps a usually benign virus found in more than 90% of gay men had mutated and become lethal.

Curran, head of the CDC task force, told reporters he suspected AIDS was caused by an infectious agent — probably a virus — and very likely could be spread through sexual activity. But some newspapers were reporting the opposite. The Berkeley Gazette, for example, told readers, “There is no confirmed evidence gay men's disease is passed sexually, according to doctors. It does not follow the geometric progression of … gonorrhea.”

The gay media, in particularly, was slow to report the latest and most accurate information about the disease. In April 1982, the Seattle Gay News was still reporting that just 26 cases of K.S. had been diagnosed — and that the cancer was generally not very aggressive.

When I interviewed random men in West Hollywood for Pacifica Radio, it became clear that accurate information about the disease wasn’t cutting through the misinformation.

Man #1: “What do I think causes it? There were some theories that had that said it had something to do with the actual male hormones. That actual male hormones, you know, will depress the immunity system.”

David Hunt: “Have you read up much about it?”

Man #2: “A little.” 

David Hunt: “Do you have any idea what causes it?” 

Man #2: “I think in part, poor hygiene.”

David Hunt: “Have you heard about AIDS?”

Man #3: “Yes, I certainly have.”

David Hunt: “And are you worried about it?”

Man #3: “Well, I'm concerned as to why we of the gay community are creating AIDS at this particular time, because I feel that nothing happens in life unless there is a reason. So the question is, why are we doing this to ourselves?”

David Hunt:

In a year-end news roundup, I noted that no story had been as widely reported — or as little understood — as the epidemic of unexplained ailments afflicting hundreds of gay men.

The advantage of covering AIDS for Pacifica radio was that the progressive network was one of the few media organizations welcoming queer perspectives — and had done so since the 1950s. As a broadcast medium, radio gave me the opportunity to present the voices and experiences of some of the first gay men diagnosed with the disease — men who bravely and honestly recounted the struggles of living with what was then likely a fatal illness.

In the early years of the epidemic, especially, the mainstream media focused on the pronouncements of public health officials, medical researchers and political leaders. People with AIDS — people like Robert Bland — were seldom given space to tell their stories. Thanks to KPFK’s 110,000-watt transmitter, atop Mount Wilson northeast of Pasadena, California, my conversation with Bland reached thousands across Southern California.

Robert Bland edits the newsletter of the lesbian and gay rights chapter of the ACLU. He was diagnosed with AIDS in February. Robert has been undergoing chemotherapy at UCLA to combat the rare skin cancer which often accompanies AIDS. He has also temporarily developed a tremor in his right hand, seriously impairing his ability to write. Part of his treatment included a spinal tap. 

Robert Bland:

The only thing that I don't recommend about a spinal tap is that you don't try to get up for the next four or five days. I was told that I would have a headache, a spinal headache it’s called and after, you know, for about a day or so. And then all I’d have to do is take some Bufferin to get rid of it. 

David Hunt: 

That was that was maybe an understatement. 

Robert Bland: 

Quite an underestimation of the length of time it takes for the spinal headache to go away. It took almost a complete week, during which time, all you can do is lie flat on your back. It is more depressing than anything to have to lie still. And in case you get a headache, you should lie with your head lower than the rest of your body to fill your brain up with this cerebrospinal fluid that had been taken out. I don't expect to have this disease too much longer and expect the Kaposi’s to be gone completely. And I have great confidence in medical science, especially as I've seen it at UCLA, that cures for cancer will be discovered. Maybe this is a fool’s confidence that’s necessary for optimism, but when I look at the statistics, there's still a good edge of the people who've had AIDS or Kaposi’s who haven't died. And as a healthy AIDS patient, I still think that I'm on that edge. 

David Hunt:

What kind of support are you getting from your friends? 

Robert Bland:

I haven't told the people at the ACLU, except for a few whom I have to work with very closely. In fact, I haven't told too many people, partly because the phone started ringing and you spend sometimes two or three hours explaining to people how well you really are rather than how sick. And they are all worried about whether or not you're going to die instantly. Well, AIDS does leave one weaker and more fatigued and less capable of finishing in a day what one usually would accomplish. And so I've had to cut down on a number of my sympathy calls and I have not encouraged any further ones. 

David Hunt:

Do you get angry at the side of people who want to show you pity?

Robert Bland:

Pity upsets me. I don't see anything about the disease that really merits that much pity. I'd rather see my friends spend their time in gay political activities, particularly in warding off the right wing oppression that I think is upon us at the moment.

David Hunt:

Across the country, in New York City, B.D. Colen —  a science writer for Newsday who later won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on bioethics issues — did what only a handful of reporters were willing or able to do. He jumped on the story, determined to report accurately and fairly about this medical mystery.

Now retired, Colen talked with me recently by phone from his home in Canada.

B.D. Colen:

When I saw the first report of what is this? And it, at that point it was, what is this? I think, what was it? Five gay men in L.A. And I wrote about it. I mean, it was a, not a, a major story, but wrote about it and then started paying attention to what the CDC was publishing … And by the fall of … 82 or summer fall, I got turned loose to really take a look at what this was all about. Went down to the CDC a number of times, got to know the people on the task force.”

B.D. Colen:

But it just struck me as a good story. I mean, how important it was or wasn't gonna end up being was still at that point up in the air. But for anybody paying attention, something fairly scary was happening. And, you know, my assumption is that it was being ignored because it was in what minority communities or ignored communities.”

David Hunt:

In September 1982 Colen wrote a four-part series of articles on the epidemic for Newsday, explaining in exhaustive detail the workings of the human immune system — “one of the least understood, most complex portions of the human body,” he noted — and illuminating the CDC’s tireless efforts to make sense of a disease targeting a diverse set of high-risk groups. 

“Although AIDS is still largely confined to subcultures of the American population,” Colen reported, “public health experts glumly acknowledged that any new disease will inevitably spread to all segments of a community.”

“So what does all of this add up to,” he asked. “An epidemic of a usually fatal disease that the most optimistic investigators think will take an absolute minimum of another year to understand, and that many others think will not be controlled for 10 to 20 years.”

It was a brutal assessment, essentially a death sentence for people with AIDS.

“Researchers believe victims have less than a 10 percent chance of surviving five years,” Colen wrote.

That wasn’t the only bad news in the series. The fourth article, published on Sept. 15, 1982, was headlined: A Potential Threat to the U.S. Blood Supply.

Although three cases of AIDS had been found in children with hemophilia, Colen reported, “top health officials in Washington desperately hoped that those three cases were statistically meaningless aberrations.”

But there were troubling signs. Colen noted that 20% of AIDS cases had occurred among IV drug users who may have shared hypodermic needles. That “raises the possibility of disease transmission by exposure to infected blood,” he wrote.

“If AIDS is caused by a virus and can be carried by blood, it is probably only a matter of time before it infects blood supplies.”

A few months later, on Jan. 4, 1983, Colen covered a public meeting at CDC headquarters in Atlanta, where health officials pressured representatives of blood plasma companies and blood banks to take measures to protect the blood supply — by screening out donors who were at risk for AIDS and by testing donated blood for Hepatitis B. There was no test for an AIDS virus. But officials reasoned that blood contaminated with one common blood-born virus had a chance of being contaminated with whatever caused AIDS.

It turned out to be a contentious meeting.

B. D. Colen:

Curran sort of pounded the table and just did not want to hear it from the blood industry that this was not a blood-born infection.

David Hunt:

After the meeting, the blood banks issued a statement saying they did not want to ask donors about high-risk sexual practices, calling the idea, “inappropriate” and unethical. They emphasized that the “possibility of blood born transmission was still unproven.” 

That was true, strictly speaking. But there may have been other reasons for their reluctance to confront the issue. For one thing, gay and bisexual men were a reliable source of donated blood, accounting for about 25% of donors.

And neither blood banks nor plasma companies were in any danger of being sued for causing harm — or even death. So-called “blood shield laws” passed in the 1950s and 1960s exempted blood products from liability.

Curran had good reason to pound the table. By the end of 1987, the CDC would estimate that of the 15,000 people then living with hemophilia in the U.S., 9,465 — nearly two-thirds — were infected with the AIDS virus. An estimated 12,000 people who had received transfusions in the early years of the epidemic were also infected. 

Thousands had died.

You’re listening to Tell Me, David — Queer Stories Past and Present. I’m David Hunt.

In 1983, as the U.S. entered the third year of the epidemic, the gay and lesbian community struggled to respond to the growing crisis in its midst. San Francisco Supervisor Harry Britt, appointed to the board after the assassination of Harvey Milk in 1978, was — like Milk — openly gay. He said some members of the community feared that publicizing the AIDS crisis would fuel homophobia in a city already traumatized by antigay violence.

Harry Britt:

There have been people in our own community who would have played down the need for education because of their fear that somehow the world is not going to like us if they find out about our lifestyle. If you spend time with the men who have this disease, as I have spent a lot of time with them, and their lives are more important and the lives of the rest of us who may not have it yet but are very vulnerable. Their lives are so much more important than any other issues on the edge of this. Any fear of homophobia, any kind of of unwillingness to raise the questions around this disease. We've got to make our first priority to save the lives of our gay brothers and anybody else who's going to be killed by this disease. And we cannot be afraid of the truth. 

David Hunt:

Randy Shilts, an openly gay reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle — a rarity in those days — reported that it wasn’t just fear of a homophobic backlash that impeded efforts to raise awareness in the community. Some had a profit motive for downplaying the danger.

Randy Shilts:

Bathhouse business has dropped by 50% in San Francisco in the last few months. Bathhouses are closing down, private sex clubs are closing down and talking to people who run gay papers here in San Francisco, I'm hearing that bathhouses are behind on their bills.

David Hunt:

The fear of contracting AIDS was driving a change in the sexual behavior of gay men in San Francisco — thanks in large part to Shilts’ reporting in the Chronicle. Fewer men were visiting gay bathhouses and sex clubs, the reporter noted, now that public health officials had warned that AIDS was likely a sexually transmitted disease. But Shilts explained, local activists feared that visitors to the city’s large gay pride events in June might not know anything about the disease, especially if they were coming from outside the United States.

Randy Shilts:

They should get a brochure or some kind of warning saying, here's what AIDS is and what specifically you could do to prevent from getting AIDS. Because there's at least enough evidence to at least give us some direction on what to do. And so these activists are meeting privately with bathhouse owners, bathhouse owners refused, said it was our right to, you know, essentially said that they would decide at some future date whether or not they put up a warning.

David Hunt:

Shilts said he was stunned by the attitude of some bathhouse owners.

Randy Shilts:

But I think what they should be concerned with is not the survival of their business, but the survival of their patrons’ lives.

David Hunt:

Ultimately, city officials stepped in — alerted to the controversy by Shilts’ reporting in the pages of the Chronicle. Harry Britt explained.

Harry Britt:

My office initiated some meetings with political leaders and representatives of the bathhouse owners. Their reaction was all over the place from one person who said that none of his customers had gotten the disease to some others who had already gone were way ahead of us in getting information out and distributing condoms and doing other things. Since that time, our health department has begun to require the distribution of AIDS information at the bathhouses, which I think is a very, very positive step. And I believe at this point, we're getting real good cooperation from the people who that.

David Hunt:

By 1985, most gay bathhouses in San Francisco and New York would be gone — some closing their doors voluntarily, others shuttered by court order or legislative action. The baths in Los Angeles remained open — but only after a heated debate that divided the community into warring camps, pitting a politically powerful gay lobbying group against bathhouse owners and advocates of civil liberties.

While the gay and lesbian community struggled to coalesce in response to the AIDS epidemic, fear and panic spread.

Gay men, especially those in big cities — had placed an emphasis on sexual liberation in the decade after the Stonewall rebellion sparked the modern gay rights movement in 1969. 

Robert Bland smiled ruefully as he recalled his life in the 1970s, a life filled with sexual exploits.

Robert Bland:

I used to work on a statistical principle of, well, a thousand contacts this yer and a thousand last year. I must be the sexual prima donna of New York City. I was quite well known in the streets and in the baths, all over the city.

David Hunt:

Mental health professionals now worried that AIDS was striking at the very core of queer identity. I reported on the issue in the spring of 1983.

Laud Humpreys:

Every single gay male I know feels guilty. 

David Hunt:

Laud Humphreys is an author, sociologist and psychologist practicing in West Hollywood. He talked about the guilt and panic sweeping the gay community at last month's meeting of the Lesbian and Gay rights chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. 

Laud Humphreys:

What we do under the pressure of this guilt that the homophobic society has instilled in us is that we activate our internalized homophobia. Internalized homophobia is an illness is a condition that we get, that we acquire because we live in a society that condemns us because we are gay. That's where we get into our little scraps and fights with one another. That's why it's very difficult to keep gay organizations going. That's why we are always scrambling over each other for the little bit of power that the society lets us have. We put each other down. We feel sorry for ourselves. We become alcoholic, we avoid intimacy, and perhaps we even withdraw from social contact. And we do that because we internalize the hatred that the society around us lays upon us. When our guilt is particularly heavy, when we even begin to think we may have participated in the creation of a new disease and in the furtherance of that disease, and perhaps in bringing that disease upon ourselves or our loved ones, then what tends to happen is a primary consequence is the activation of that internalized homophobia that we all have. I got reports the other day that I believe I think they came from a reliable source of a psychiatrist in another city who is instructing his clients to avoid all sex except masturbation across the room from one another to avoid gay restaurants and gay gathering places, to avoid contact with gay people, to try and increase heterosexual contacts because they're safer. That's psychotherapist giving that advice is gay. But Anita Bryant could not have put his advice better. If we withdraw from one another and excoriate one another because of our guilt and our fear, we will only add joy to the heart of every right-wing Bible thumping homophobe in America. The greatest health danger. The greatest health danger facing the gay community is not AIDS. The greatest health danger facing the gay community. Is and always has been, the closet.”

David Hunt:

Not all professional advice was as helpful. At the same meeting, a physician told the audience that an individual’s chance of contracting the disease was slight — from a statistical standpoint. 

In March 1983 I traveled to San Francisco to attend the Gay and Lesbian Press Association convention. There, I recorded a panel featuring Bobbi Campbell, an AIDS activist who wrote a regular column called Gay Cancer Journal for the San Francisco Sentinel. Cambell, the 16th person diagnosed with AIDS in the city, hoped to demystify the disease and put a human face on the epidemic. He wore a button that proclaimed, I Will Survive.

Bobbi Campbell:

I'm a nurse and a graduate student at the University of California, San Francisco, and earning a master's degree as a nurse practitioner with a focus in the health care of gay men. So that when I heard about these AIDS diseases, it was right up my alley. Unfortunately, I was in the alley at the time when truck came through. I had shingles, herpes, zoster in February of 1981, which is very unusual for a man who at that time was 29. I was hospitalized and put on steroids …  Then in September, I noticed the spots in my feet that looked like blood blisters, and they didn't go. And I just been hiking, so I didn't pay any attention to them. But a few weeks later they were still there. The story was raging in the Chronicle and the Examiner and so I went in to have a biopsy with Marc Conant. And in fact, the results came back that I did have Kaposi’s sarcoma. So I was plunged into this whole story that has led me to be here today. And my reaction to that was I was stricken. I mean, it was a horrible experience to hear that I had cancer, that I had this disease that was potentially fatal and at the same time, I felt okay physically, and I still do. I feel great.

David Hunt:

Campbell asked the assembled journalists to remember the real people behind the headlines.

Bobbi Campbell:

I think for me, the biggest problem that I face is depression. I mean, this is really a downer. I have to deal with this syndrome to pick up the paper or or our paper or anything that I pick up will have something on AIDS. Every issue. It has become the topic of 1980 to 1983 … And I think that it's important for us to realize that there is a human component to this ailment. It is not simply a headline. It is not simply something that sells advertising space. There are people that are suffering, and I am. I know that there are some horror stories about people with AIDS who have been disenfranchised of their basic rights, that their roommates have kicked them out, they've been served on paper plates, that bartenders refuse to serve them drinks, that their lovers have kicked them out, that their families have disowned them. It is horrifying.

David Hunt:

Underscoring how divisive the AIDS issue was at that time, two women who attended the press association convention stood up and objected that the organizers had devoted 90 minutes to the panel on AIDS featuring Campbell but just 60 minutes to a panel on women’s issues. On the other hand, lesbian activist Ivy Bottini, one of the founders of the New York chapter of NOW — the National Organization for Women — was one of the first activists, gay or lesbian, to demand that the U.S. government increase AIDS research funding. And, she was one of the first to push back on the idea that gays were responsible for the epidemic.

Ivy Bottini: 

This is not a gay disease. It is not a gay disease.

David Hunt:

For all the divisiveness, San Francisco was, in some ways, at the forefront of the gay community’s early response to the AIDS epidemic. Colin Clews, a young gay man from the East Midlands region of England, visited San Francisco in the summer of 1983. It was, he now says, a revelation.

Colin Clews:

I'd gone from Sleepy Hollow to the center of the, of the hurricane. And it was, it was it was extraordinary. But I mean obviously, but extraordinary in lots of ways, not least about the way that the community was organizing.

David Hunt:

Clews attended an educational workshop about AIDS hosted by Bobbi Campbell and picked up a flyer titled, “Can We Talk” that explained how gay men could reduce their risk of contracting the disease. 

Colin Clews:

And it was, the leaflet started up by saying, we've got a really serious problem here, guys. And we need to change things. But then it was about things we need to, to stop doing and what's safe and what's not safe. But they all made little cartoons of these recommendations, and it was, oh my God, you'd be shot in Nottingham if you, if you were seen to be making cartoons about something like aids. I mean, we were still, you know, almost kind of pre impact just waiting for the whole thing, the whole tsunami to hit us.

David Hunt:

Returning home to the U.K., where he published Gay East Midlands magazine, Clews began running articles on the distant epidemic. And he helped launch the Nottingham AIDS information project, which ran a telephone helpline.

The communication tactics he picked up in San Francisco ruffled some feathers, but Clews persisted in sounding the alarm, hoping to spare his community from the worst of the epidemic.

Colin Clews:

I was accused of scaremongering by somebody who was regarded as a major figure in the community. I was very surprised that he told me, said that to me. And and I kind of sort of thought about it for a, for a day, then I sat down and wrote this really angry response which started with, I've been told this, talking about this scares people, but I'm far as I'm concerned, you can't talk about it enough. So this is what else we've got to talk about.

David Hunt:

Clews wasn’t the only gay man starting to get angry.

In New York City, the novelist Larry Kramer, one of the founders of a volunteer service organization called Gay Men’s Health Crisis, wrote what would become one of the most influential articles in the history of gay media.

The story, on page 1 of the New York Native March 27, 1983, was titled “1,112 and counting.” That was, of course, the number of AIDS cases that had been diagnosed to date since June 5, 1981. A number that was rising exponentially — then at a rate of about five a day.  

The article began:

“If this article doesn’t scare the shit out of you, we’re in real trouble. If this article doesn’t rouse you to anger, fury, rage, and action, gay men may have no future on this earth. Our continued existence depends on just how angry you can get … Unless we fight for our lives, we shall die.”

The article touched a nerve. 

Within weeks — in May 1983, candlelight demonstrations were held in five U.S. cities to raise awareness of the epidemic and to pressure the federal government to increase funding for research and treatment programs.

I reported on the protests for Pacifica Radio.

In New York, 6,000 people in black armbands marched down Lower Broadway in Manhattan at a rally near the United Nations. Gay activist Bob Cecchi, who has AIDS blasted President Reagan.

Bob Cecchi:

You are not pleasant at this march, and I hope somehow you will hear me. I am a man with AIDS. I'm a feeling, thinking, God-loving man with AIDS. I've always known what I could do to raise the quality of life of the people around me. Even with his illness, I continue that work, and I don’t always have the strength to do the job that I did before I became ill. But I do have the strength and the will and the need to pick up the phone and talk to another patient, to walk through a hospital and visit someone who is alone, afraid, and maybe dying. But the caring, the love and the concern are not enough. Many of the people we took care of are dead. Many of the people we are taking care of now are dying. It saddens me, Mr. President, because all the love in the universe is not stopping the dying and will not bring back the dead. There is pain in my body, but I can live with this. There is pain in my heart. And that is what is so unbearable. Love helps fill the lonely hours and love helps mend the heart. But love cannot fill the stomach and love cannot mend the bodies. Only money can do that. The very same money over which you have influence.

David Hunt:

In San Francisco, more than 10,000 gays and lesbians swarmed down Castro Street in a rare show of solidarity. Gay bars and businesses closed down for the march. And here in Los Angeles, 5,000 demonstrators rallied at the Westwood Federal Building. 

Woman at march:

It’s very frightening to think, more often than not I’ve read that the average lifespan after diagnosis is two years. And I’d hate think I’ll lose my brother at 24.

David Hunt:

One of the organizers, Matt Redman, made the opening remarks to the crowd. 

Matt Redman:

When we began plans for this march six weeks ago, the response from Washington to the AIDS crisis had been deplorable. The federal Centers for Disease Control, which is responsible for surveillance and epidemiological research, claimed that the amount of money which they spent last year would suffice for this year as well. But the CDC itself predicted that there would be over 2000 cases of AIDS this year. How can they possibly service that number of cases with the same dollar amount? It has been administration policy all along to do as little as possible, as evidenced by NIH and CDC response to date. We ask in the names of those afflicted, those who have died, those who mourn and those who are threatened for a crash AIDS program which would combine the nation's finest minds and provide whatever funds are necessary to support their efforts. And we pledge to continue our efforts until we have the answers which we seek and can go on about the business of living.

David Hunt:

The man responsible for the rally, Daniel Warner, made an impassioned call for action.

Daniel Warner:

Today we are marching, as are others across America, and we shouldn't have to be. Tonight, we are pleading for our lives and the future lives of Americans, and we should not have to be.

David Hunt:

Bill Bader spoke of the pain of having AIDS and told of his optimism for the future. 

Bill Bader:

I was diagnosed with AIDS last December. First of all, I'd like to say thanks for any of you in the audience who might be thinking, Gee, he looks pretty good for having AIDS. But what I really wanted to say in coming here tonight is a thank you on behalf of all the patients in the country, everywhere who have AIDS. The worst part of having this disease for myself, and I think this is true for most other AIDS patients is not the physical hassles. They're bad. But the worst part is the sense of isolation and the incredible loneliness and the times of indescribable hopelessness in combating this disease. But as I look out tonight and talking to people before all I felt was a sense of faith and hope and a lot of love coming from all you people, and right now I don't feel any sense of isolation or loneliness and I don't feel any sense of hopelessness. And it's this kind of concern, the kind that brought you people here tonight that makes me able to stand here and say, I know I'm going to win over this disease.”

David Hunt:

Back in Washington, Representative Waxman’s work in Congress was finally beginning to pay off. The day before the Los Angeles demonstration, he and his Democratic colleagues, notably East Los Angeles congressional representative Ed Roybal, were successful in pushing through a supplemental appropriation, adding $12 million in AIDS research funding to the federal budget.

The Reagan administration was furious. Budget director David Stockman, then looking for programs and services to eliminate, took exception to adding any dollars to the budget for public health.

New York Representative Ted Weiss told me he feared Reagan would veto the measure.

Ted Weiss:

I don't know why the Stockman people are opposed. I suppose, you know, cynically you could take that to be the position that what they may be doing is using what they may consider to be a controversial issue in an effort to try to justify a presidential veto of the supplemental appropriation. We're all told. But that's a level of cynicism that I you know, I would hope that they're not guilty of.

David Hunt:

Weiss knew how difficult it was to get money for AIDS through Congress. In 1982 he introduced a bill — the first ever — to allocate research funding for the disease. It died in committee.

But Democrats were getting smarter. This time they attached the allocation to a larger appropriations bill, a measure totaling $7 billion dollars that included $1.2 billion dollars for food stamps, $470 million dollars for the Defense Department and $265 million dollars for the veterans administration. 

Reagan signed the bill July 30.

The same week protestors gathered outside the Westwood Federal Building in Los Angeles, researchers at the Pasteur Institute in Paris announced that they had isolated the virus responsible for AIDS. A virus that came to be called HIV — the human Immunodeficiency Virus. 

It was far from the end of the AIDS crisis. It would be years before scientists developed drug cocktails that could suppress but not eliminate HIV from the body. Even more years before they developed PrEP, an antiretroviral medication to prevent HIV infection.

The Reagan administration would continue to drag its feet, slow-walking efforts to educate the public about high-risk behaviors. When Dr. Donald Francis, coordinator of the CDC’s AIDS laboratory, submitted an initial prevention plan with a price tag of $37 million in 1985, it was rejected by the Reagan administration. Francis later said he was told, “Look pretty and do as little as you can.” Writing in the Journal of Public Health Policy nearly 30 years later, Francis lamented the government’s slow response to the epidemic: “Ignoring AIDS was not a passive endeavor,” he wrote. “It was an active policy of the Reagan Administration.”

But at least, in the summer of 1983, two years into the AIDS epidemic, the gay and lesbian community — and its allies — had finally found their footing. 

Bobbi Campbell and Bob Cecchi would join other AIDS activists in June 1983 at the Fifth Annual National Lesbian and Gay Health Conference in Denver, Colorado. There, they would craft a document that would come to be known as the Denver Principles — a manifesto that empowered AIDS patients to have a political voice in the decisions that would affect their health and their lives. 

Campbell would go on to appear on the cover of Newsweek, forcing Americans to face the human toll of the disease.

Daniel Warner would co-found the Los Angeles Shanti Foundation and serve as program director of West Hollywood Cares, a pioneering AIDS education organization.

Larry Kramer would co-found ACT UP, a national grassroots organization that used civil disobedience and direct action to bring visibility to the plight of people with AIDS. 

Randy Shilts would write a definitive history of the early years of AIDS, a book titled “And the Band Played On.”

Colin Clews would move to Australia in 1987, where he would serve as a social worker in the country’s largest AIDS Unit­ ­— St. Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney. He would establish Australia’s first Day Center for People with AIDS, then work as an AIDS educator and as an HIV/AIDS program coordinator.

Matt Redman would co-found AIDS Project Los Angeles, which would grow from a single telephone helpline into one of the largest nonprofit HIV service providers in the U.S.

Henry Waxman would help secure passage of the Ryan White CARE Act in 1990, a lifeline for people living with HIV/AIDS, especially those who are uninsured or living in poverty.

Protests would grow in the coming years, mobilized by groups like ACT UP and Queer Nation. Federal funding for research, treatment, education and support would increase significantly, with federal outlays reaching nearly $10 billion dollars a year by 1999.

Gays and lesbians, who would lose so many friends and lovers — tens of thousands — in the coming years, would not lose everything. Millions would survive and thrive. They would come out of the closet and live their lives openly and proudly, gaining a greater measure of social acceptance and even some legal protections. 

If there’s a lesson to be learned from the early years of the AIDS epidemic, it’s that individuals can and do make a difference. In the midst of panic, fear, political infighting and denial, some people did what they could, where they could. To raise awareness, to raise money, to raise hell.

Bobbi Campbell, Robert Bland, Bob Cecchi, Bill Bader, Matt Redman, Douglas Wright, Randy Shilts, Harry Britt, Daniel Warner, Colin Clews, Ivy Bottini, Laud Humphreys, James Curran, B. D. Colen, Ted Weiss, Henry Waxman, Larry Kramer — and thousands of others whose names we should but probably never will know. They were there at the beginning. In the end, they helped change the world.

I’d like to thank the Pacifica Radio Archives and the One National Gay and Lesbian Archives for preserving some of my recordings from the 1980s. David Fradkin and Ken Miller assisted with reporting and research back in 1983. Thanks also to Colin Clews, B.D. Colen and Henry Waxman for sharing their memories for this program. For Tell Me, David, I’m David Hunt.