AIDS History Is A Remedy

We weren’t told that former president Ronald Reagan’s then communications director, Pat Buchanan, claimed AIDS was “nature’s revenge on gay men,” or that more than 20,000 Americans died before Reagan began to address the epidemic, after years of refusing to even utter the word AIDSin public. We didn’t learn about ACT UP, the grassroots political coalition largely responsible for putting pressure on the government and pharmaceutical companies to find treatments for HIV. No one told us about political funerals, about activists scattering the ashes of their dead loved ones across the White House lawn. We weren’t taught that most of the 700,000 people who died of HIV/AIDS in the United States were queer men of color who succumbed to state-sanctioned neglect.

How recently did you get involved in AIDS healthcare that this was new to you? Like, unironically, I’m open to the possibility that this doesn’t represent some failing of yours but a new awareness of generational progression on my part, because we were absolutely told this stuff, by the people who lived through it