MY FIRST PANDEMIC
It was 1981 and I was 22 years old. I had just landed my first post-college job. I also was in the middle of acknowledging that I was gay. My first job assignment required me to move from my native Southern California coastal community to a small town in Eastern Montana. I remember very clearly reading a newspaper article about a new “gay disease”. It sounded terrifying, but there were only a handful of cases, all in big cities. Being in a town of 3000 with the nearest town of 1000 an hour down the interstate, made me feel I was safe.
A year or so later, I was back in Southern California and I had made progress accepting my sexual orientation and was introduced to gay bars and the “community” by a co-worker. My memory of the article about the new “gay disease” was pretty much erased and I don’t remember seeing much else in the media. I was focused on my career as well as the new found freedom to be myself. In all honesty, after my first trip to West Hollywood to dance at Studio One surrounded by hundreds of hot gay guys, after years of hiding my feelings, was enough to pretty much blind me from the rest of reality for a while.
One day, my friend from work showed me an article in a gay magazine, The Advocate about what they now started to call AIDS. After reading the article, I was the most scared I have ever been in my life. The article detailed the gruesome deaths and symptoms, and also pretty much said we don’t know what causes it, how to protect yourself, how it is spread, etc. That is the point I realized I was in my first pandemic. By this time, many more gay men (although it was common in straight people in Africa and Hati) had been diagnosed all over the world. Straight people were completely oblivious. Unfortunately, too many gay people also did not see the danger.
I understood what was going on immediately. I saw the exponential rise in cases. I am very good with numbers, I know what this means. Then when it was discovered it was caused by the HIV virus and the antibody test was developed, my nightmare came true, preliminary testing surveys of gay men in large cities showed between a 50-70% infection rate. We were also now learning that the incubation period could be 10+ years, and that eventually most people would die without a treatment.
For the next few years I lived in a constant state of fear. I wasted so much mental energy analyzing my risk, worrying about what people would think if I got it, and similar worst case scenarios. While I understood that I couldn’t do anything if I had already contracted the virus, I very clearly understood that it was up to me to do everything I could to protect myself and if I had the virus, to prevent further spread to others. I understood that the more sex partners I had, the higher the risk not only to myself, but to others.
I was not about to take any new risk, no matter how hot the guy was, until we better understood what was safe and what wasn’t. Most of my gay friends didn’t understand at all. Many told me that they, “just weren’t going to worry about it”. Unfortunately, most of them are gone. Too many wonderful, beautiful people were lost so early in life, whose only mistake was to underestimate a microscopic strand of RNA.
Eventually, I got up the courage to get tested, allowing me to stop worrying about being already infected. I also fell in love with a wonderful guy who I am still with 34 years later, allowing me to relax knowing that our monogamy would protect us from future exposure.
It was frustrating in the early days, the relationship between AIDS and politics began with Regan’s press secretary making “gay jokes” with reporters when the first AIDS question came up at a press briefing. It didn’t get much better for a while. Regan pretty much denied the existence of AIDS both verbally and in government funding for quite a while. I think much of straight society considered gay men useless pansies, so Regan thought no one would care. The reaction from the gay community and their allies proved otherwise. It didn’t take long for the army of gay men fighting for their lives along with lesbians and straight allies to begin changing the political landscape and funding problems. I remember crying when I saw some of the ACT-UP demonstrations. These guys were literally in the streets screaming for their lives.
I remember reading article after article saying a vaccine or new treatment was just around the corner. Only to find another article on how a new discovery about the virus would make the vaccine more difficult. Once sufficient funding was provided, amazingly smart dedicated researchers spent their lives trying to solve this problem. This is science at its best. This is humanity at its best. It was not easy. The virus is a formidable opponent. It seemed at every turn, the virus would throw another curve ball and the latest approach would not work. It took way longer than any of us thought it would. Way more people died than should have. And while today there is a good treatment that works pretty darn well for most people, people still die from HIV.
LESSONS FOR OUR CURRENT PANDEMIC
The HIV virus and the CoV-2 virus are quite different in many ways. How it is transmitted, length of incubation period, and fatality rate without treatment are completely different. But both viruses present many similar problems in how to deal with a global pandemic. As a great diary on this same topic pointed out, it is “Deja-vu All Over Again”. As our current pandemic progresses, I see more and more similarities. We are really at the beginning of the current pandemic, so we can only accurately compare what has happened so far, but I see some trends based on past history.
I look back at the early days of AIDS and realize we knew almost nothing. I hate to say it, but that is where we currently are with Covid-19. There are so many important things we know virtually nothing about. Will antibodies protect against future infection? If antibodies protect, how long will it last? Will the virus mutate and become more or less deadly? Is there an existing drug that will provide an effective treatment? Will any of the vaccines being developed now actually work? Based on my first pandemic, the answer to many of these questions are not the answer we want it to be. Not that there is not hope. Just like with HIV, there is an army of dedicated brilliant people making their life’s work solving this problem. But, just like HIV, it is not easy, remember what a challenge HIV was/is. We still don’t have a vaccine 40 year later.
There are some things we do know. We know a lot about how the CoV-2 virus is spread. We know a lot about how to disrupt the spread. The science behind strategies to disrupt the spread of airborne viruses are well understood. Until there is an effective treatment or vaccine, as it was with HIV, our only power against the virus is to do what we can to disrupt the spread.
With AIDS, once we understood what caused exposure and what didn’t, activist and public health campaigns to educate everyone on how to disrupt the spread were pretty effective. This limited the spread of death among my fellow gay men. But just like today, there were those who “didn’t like how a condom feels” or some other equally stupid excuse for not being safe. So, I guess yesterday’s condom is todays facemask! Like I said, public health experts understand how to disrupt the spread pretty well. Facemasks and social distancing are one part, but the shutdown of non-essential activity is also an important part of shutting down this virus. We saw the exponential growth that started before the shutdown, just look at the statistics from New York City and other dense cities. We can look at other areas of the world (ie Taiwan) where they took action quickly and have largely contained the virus. We would be foolish to think that after a few weeks of shutdown we can just go back to normal life and we won’t also see a return to the exponential growth of virus spread and death.
Both AIDS and Covid-19 are deeply intertwined with politics. Funding for AIDS/HIV research quickly became a political divide. Most Republicans and some Democrats, didn’t want to fund the research because they considered AIDS a just response for someone living their life as a gay man. I remember many politicians justifying their lack of concern about HIV treatment with “these people did this to themselves”, but I don’t remember any of them saying that about heart disease related to overconsumption. Regan’s delay in acknowledging AIDS is no different than Trumps fumbling. Their responses were to first dismiss the problem, pretend it wasn’t happening until it was impossible to ignore and dismiss. Even then, neither was effective in helping to solve the issue.
With AIDS, homophobia (perpetuated by most Republicans and some Democrats) was a huge barrier to early effective action against HIV. Today, Trumps pattern of creating chaos to his own benefit did not stop with a pandemic. Take your pick… creating sensible guidelines (based on expert advice) to eventually open up states, then cheering on protesters wanting their state opened up even though the state was no where near meeting his own guidelines. And obviously the whole bleach and UV light thing. Trumps chaos is at least if not more disruptive to making progress against the virus as homophobia was in the 1980’s. It seems one difference is much of Trumps failures are because he is making decisions based on how to help his re-election chances, not on the public good. But I guess many politicians in the 1980’s thought being seen as helping gay men escape death in the largely homophobic society of the time, would hurt their political fortunes. So, I guess, the problem of self-serving politicians has not changed much in 40 years.
The economic impacts of both viruses also impacted the same portions of society. Poor people, especially poor people of color have been impacted the most by both viruses. AIDS destroyed many individuals financially, before killing them. Partners of victims of AIDS often found they had no rights to the house they were sharing with their partner, and were kicked out. The wealthy or those with connections were the first gay men to get the lifesaving drug cocktails. Covid-19 is destroying small business owners, retail and restaurant workers financially. Big business and wealthy workers are weathering economic impacts much better from the current pandemic with the huge government subsidies to impacted industries. I have yet to hear anyone scold the big corporations holding out their hand for a government hand out, like is commonly done to unfortunate individuals that “didn’t plan ahead”. Both pandemics brought out the “snake oil” pushers. Covid19 has exposed many “leaders” who were downplaying the epidemic while at the same time selling stocks before they crashed. As Trump even said, this inequity is “the story of my life”. I sure wish it wasn’t true, but unfortunately, even in crisis, the privileged always ends up on top.
Both viruses have brought out the best and worst in humanity. Yesterday’s shame includes many refusing to treat AIDS patients, parents refusing to acknowledge their dying son, as well as efforts to prevent HIV positive people from working in foodservice jobs, even though (unless you are planning to have sex with your waiter), it is essentially impossible for him to give you HIV. Today’s shame includes attaching the “blame” for the pandemic on another country (I really don’t remember any politician wanting to hold Africa accountable for AIDS, but most of the victims were just us gays, so maybe that is the difference), spreading obvious lies about the facts that are immediately proven false by expert consensus, providing false hope about treatment without any real evidence it works (or treatments that could kill you), “protesters” exposing law enforcement and others to the virus because they need a hair cut, and a partisan Supreme Court majority that forced citizens to vote in person in a primary election while today the court is being briefed remotely in their safe locations. Different circumstances, but the same principals.
These shameful acts really destroy my faith in humanity. But there are some small encouraging glimmers of hope for us. While much of the “mainstream” society was either oblivious or worse to the AIDS pandemic, there were many examples of individuals and small groups of society that stepped up to the challenge. Lesbians were the sexual group with the lowest rate of HIV infection in the US, but countless lesbians worked tirelessly to help their gay brothers. A few celebrities, such as Elizabeth Taylor went out of their way to help in the fight against AIDS before it became “cool” among the jet setter class. But most of all, the countless health professionals and researchers who dedicated their life to helping others. Especially in the early days, not all health professionals were eager to help, but even then, there were many who put their oath to help others over any judgement about sexuality. There are heroes today also, clearest are the front-line health professionals and researchers. But the list of people stepping up to help others also includes the “essential workers”, making minimum wage and put their health at risk so we can have groceries and other essentials to live.
I find it interesting on how humans will rally around their leaders, nationalistic feelings will swell when attacked by other humans. Yet, this urge to help each other and stand together is splintered when attacked by microscopic strands of RNA/DNA. We are indeed a strange species.
If you take only one thing from this diary, it is that we all must understand how little we know while at the same time acknowledging the power we already have to prevent the spread of virus and death.