How Did The AIDS Crisis Affect The LGBT Community?

Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) was first recognized as a new disease in 1981 when increasing numbers of young homosexual men succumbed to unusual opportunistic infections and rare

One of the big factors early on is that no one wanted to be associated with AIDS due to the fact that it was considered a homosexual man’s disease. There was a lot of fear, denial and anger surrounding this disease. In 1981at the CDC Dr. Guinan asks that a report about an epidemic with gay men had broken out and he wanted it published in the medical journal. The fear of the word “homosexual” was marked off and not used for that article. It took a long time for the realization that this disease could affect everyone from homosexual males, IV drug users, blood transfusion patients, women and even babies. Even though it was initially considered the disease came from gay men and their sexual practices it crossed all borders as time went on. Still today there is some prejudice regarding AIDS. (Spelling, Vincent &

With headlines in the news such as The Sun dubbing AIDS as the ‘gay plague’ it was an irresistible red rag to the bull for the media, even though in Africa other populations were infected right from the beginning. (Dowsett, W, Gary. 2009) In an excerpt from Simon Garfield’s The end of Innocence Britain in the time of AIDS, Roy Greensdale the assistant editor of the Sun from 1981 to 1986 recalls that ‘AIDS appeared to be just desserts for being involved in deviant sexual behaviour. It was quickly realized that it came about due to anal sex, and heterosexual executives on the Sun thus fed in the fact that it was a gay plague. AIDS tended to suggest that it might stop all that kind of behaviour, and might lead to fewer gays being about.’ The gay community has always been an easy target for hostility throughout history and when the controversy surrounding the AIDS panic began to surface it became another way in which to ostracise them for their ‘wages of sin’. (The Daily Telegraph). 1983).

According to Stanley Cohen (1972, pg. 9), moral panics occur when a “condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests”, and is useful for explaining the hysteria in Western society towards the ‘pandemic’ of HIV/AIDS. Sociologists argue that there was a social construction around it’s meaning and the way in which it was perceived caused by an apparent social anxiety or prejudice against homosexuals and other minority groups. This essay will attempt to recognise the definition of ‘moral panics’ and its application to HIV/AIDS and its social construction.

It is often cited that the HIV/Aids epidemic that hit the United States in the 1980’s (though there is some evidence that it started even before then), came into light due to several high profile incidents and the eventual loss of several thousand lives. Many believe that due to

Though incurable, there is medication that can be used to help an infected person live a relatively normal life, but the medication is extremely expansive. Thus the number one prevention method is education. The United States government’s response to the entire disease in a medical, social and economic way were consider major failures as millions were left to suffer without support. Unlike today, where one can search the Internet to learn about their disease and how to handle it, back in 1980’s and 1990’s people were being infected and given no guidance from the government on how to handle it. This caused great fear in Americans and many misconceptions about the disease started to develop. People were unaware that the disease could only transfer through the contact of bodily fluids so people with AIDS were socially exiled out of fear that they might infect others. Thus this disease affected the gay community that was already stigmatized by society more than any other single demographic of people.

inevitable that AIDS would be defined in political and cultural terms as well as medically, and

The AIDS panic seems unbelievable in retrospect but was all too real in the 80s; people were forced off their jobs, children were barred from schools, and anyone who belonged to the "4-H club" (homosexuals, hard-drug users, hemophiliacs, and -- incredibly -- Haitians) were treated like pariahs. The secrecy and denial in dealing with the crisis helped it to spread persistent.

The dawn of the AIDS crisis in the early 1980’s prompted delayed waves of responses sweeping out across America. First impacting a scattering of gay men in San Francisco, the disease gained the stigma of being a “gay disease” that fascinated the nation as health systems and communities struggled to cope with its rapid spread. However, one man, seemingly unaffected by the mix of panic and curiosity, did not react. The Ronald Reagan administration has historically been criticized for its lack of response to the AIDS crisis. Many different aspects of society were instead forced to step up and carry the burden of slowing and responding to the crisis, in a reactionary shift. The Reagan administration’s lackluster response to the AIDS crisis of the

When the AIDS and HIV virus crept its way into the human-race, it quickly, and without warning, claimed the lives of millions. Then when its destructive wake had finally been abated, it left behind several untold mysteries. Throughout the course of this class, all the new material we have been exposed to has added some unique piece to the puzzle of the AIDS epidemic. Each puzzle pieces have ranged from speculations on how the AIDS epidemic had begun, to what exactly has the epidemic done. We have also tackled the question and how it forced a change in society. Our newest piece of the puzzle is the documentary “The Age of AIDS,” by William Cran. Although this documentary did not surprise me in its content, it did, however, affirm certain types

According to a report published in the February 1998 edition of “Nature”, scientists identified what they believe is the earliest case of AIDs in a man from the Congo in 1959. (Lerner and Hombs 39) By the end of the year 1980, 80 men would have been diagnosed with at least of the opportunistic infections that are a characteristic of AIDs. (Lerner and Hombs 40) AIDs cases in the 1980s increased dramatically not only around the world but in the United States, primarily in larger cities like Los Angeles, New York City and San Francisco. The numbers of AIDs diagnoses and deaths spiraled out of control throughout the 1980s and towards the end of 1989 there were 117,500 cases of AIDS reported and 89,000 related deaths.(Lerner and Hombs 54) In the

Jerry Falwell, an American Southern Baptist pastor, was considered the leader of the fundamentalist anti-gay movement. In almost every speech Falwell made, there were references to the “growing clout of homosexuals.” Once Reagan was elected President, Falwell took credit for Reagan’s win and vowed to continue his pro-life and anti-gay agenda. Following Reagan’s inauguration, Reagan’s budget spending posed significant cuts to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), which would pose a threat to the growing epidemic. In April of 1985, the Director of the Department of Health and Human Services, Margaret Heckler, spoke for the extent of the Reagan administration’s involvement with the disease saying, “We must conquer AIDS before it affects the heterosexual population…the general population. We have a very strong public interest in stopping AIDS before it spreads outside the risk groups, before it becomes an overwhelming problem.” With Heckler’s statement, the Department of Health and Human Services changed their name to The Department of Health and Heterosexual Services. The reasoning towards the federal government’s homophobic response to AIDS is examined in the book Inside Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories edited by

In the 1980s, a mysterious disease began to take the lives of Americans. With the cause unknown, a fear grew among Americans. An unusually high rate of people was becoming sick with strange and rare diseases. When experimental treatments failed to work, people died. This mysterious disease is what we now know as HIV–Human Immunodeficiency Virus. In the past thirty-five years, the HIV has taken many turns in history. Although we do not hear about HIV and AIDS now, it is still a prevalent issue in the United States and in the world.

Recently, the Safe Schools Coalition, a program funded by the federal government to promote the acceptance of LGBTI children, has been questioned by politicians and some members of the community on the appropriateness of the program. Consequently, the issue of whether or not the Safe Schools Coalition should be supported has arisen, and is discussed in the opinion piece “Safe Schools Coalition – what is the Christian Right afraid of?” published on the 26th of February 2016 in The Conversation (Australia). The editor, Timothy W Jones, supports the Safe Schools Coalition program, and uses rational and critical tones to outline to parents how conservatives are misleading when attacking the Safe Schools Coalition.

More people may have begun to contract this disease, but less people also died from it and had a chance at 40 or 50 more years of life to live than an agonizing death. The mystery and unknown caused gay men to be outed and targeted causing irreparable emotional damage that just added to the stress of what agonizing manifestations AIDS lead to, but with the help of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and other literatures a light was shined onto AIDS. With this light the gay community began to protest, society saw what life was really like for someone with AIDS, change to better the lives of those infected, and government intervention began to finally end an epidemic. In the late 1900s AIDS was a very apparent disease that was hard to hide, yet was worryingly avoided, but today it is nearly an invisible disease that is well-known and no longer feared by society or appointed blame to the gay