WASHINGTON, Aug 7, 2006 (AFP) - The US gay community won credit on the run-up to a UN AIDS conference for mobilizing against a virus that decimated its ranks in the 1980s and for raising society's awareness as well as state funding for research.
"What the gay movement in the US did was to galvanize people around an issue," Achmat Dangor, director for advocacy and leadership at the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), told AFP.
"Paradoxically, it started off an anti-discrimination fight, to say 'this is not a gay disease, it's everybody's problem,' and that is probably the most important" thing, he said ahead of the 16th International AIDS Conference to be held August 13-18 in Toronto.
The gay community began to live out "its worst nightmare" in June 1981 when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention detected the first cases of AIDS in four gay men, said Craig Thompson, executive director of AIDS Project Los Angeles.
That AIDS was first detected among gays and spread within that community not only stigmatized sufferers but also forced America to face uncomfortable questions about sexuality, Thompson said.
"If you think of America, which is a sort of puritanical, Victorian society, AIDS forced America to confront a lot of issues around sex and drug use," said Thompson, who tested positive for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, in 1983.
"And this was even more challenging because not only were the first cases identified among gay men, but the epidemic throughout the 80's continued to be primarily an epidemic among gay men with a smaller epidemic developing among drug-using homosexuals," Thompson said.
After a period of panic and denial, right-wing Americans sought to ban gays from teaching in California schools and even called for a quarantine of the community.
Some proposed public bathrooms for AIDS victims.
This prompted the community not only to come out in support of a battle to win government funding to fight the disease, but also to win broader rights and acceptance of the US gay and lesbian community in society as a whole.
"Suddenly the gay community, even if they didn't see AIDS before as a health threat for them, saw for the first time that the right was going to use it as a threat to their civil liberty, their right to employment," Thompson said.
"We were going to discriminate against people based on the fact that they were gay, not because they were a carrier of AIDS," he said.
Then came the explosion in mortality figures. In June 1982, recorded AIDS deaths stood at 184.
The figure reached 7,699 at the end of 1984 and 20,849 in June 1988, the majority of the deaths recorded among gays and bisexuals, according to official statistics.
This in part forced a conservative country to take a more sympathetic look at a community that had largely been ostracized, Thompson said.
"Even people who weren't particularly sympathetic to gay rights were sympathetic to the actual physical destruction of a human being caught by AIDS," he said.
"It was very personal, very obvious: young people in their 20s and 30s, in the height of their life."
In 1985, Hollywood also brought home the disease with the death from AIDS at the age of 60 of Rock Hudson -- a legendary US sex symbol who never acknowledged being gay.
Superstar actress Liz Taylor went to Congress to lobby for federal financing for AIDS research and prevention.
The same era saw the birth of ACT UP -- an energetic and at times militant AIDS prevention group that spread across the country on private donations and local community support.
Seeking media attention, ACT UP interrupted trading on the floor of Wall Street and mobilized a massive protest outside the White House in October 1987.
This was soon followed by a demonstration outside the Capitol where the first colorful quilts from across the nation featuring names of the dead were stitched together into one giant list for the country to see.
One of ACT UP's most powerful slogans was also its most simple: "Silence = Death."
Politicians from major cities that were hit most such as New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, joined public appeals from Congress to act.
But the tipping point came in the case of Ryan White -- a teenage hemophiliac from a rural community in the Midwestern state of Indiana who became infected with HIV during a blood transfusion and was then barred from attending school.
His case was carried to Congress, which in 1991 adopted a law in the teenager's name that provided the first federal resources for AIDS victims and research.
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