Bay Windows - June 1, 2006
Ethan Jacobs, ejacobs@baywindows.com

If my peers and I were sheltered from AIDS during our elementary school years we got a slight dose of reality once we hit middle school, when we had our first real sex ed classes. Yet there was a certain amount of cognitive dissonance involved in learning about AIDS during suburban middle school and high school sex ed classes geared toward straight teenagers. On the one hand, one of the earliest and most consistent messages we learned about sex is that it can kill you and that the only healthy sex is the kind that comes shrink-wrapped in latex; on the other hand, I never saw any visible evidence of AIDS among my peers, no one getting sick or dying, no one taking AZT. It was hard not to see the messages about AIDS as alarmist at the time.

The only person I knew who had died of AIDS was an adult family member, a gay male cousin who passed away when I was 14, and while it was a traumatic time for myself and my family I never got the sense that his illness had anything to do with me. At that age I had yet to really conceive of myself as gay, and since my cousin lived out of state I didn't see enough of his day-to-day life or understand what his gay identity meant to feel like that was our common bond. By the time I actually began to think of myself as gay, the memories of his illness and death were no longer fresh enough to make me draw the connection between AIDS and my own life.

In my teen years the only images of people living with AIDS in the media were of people well into adulthood, mainly Pedro Zamora on the Real World, the assorted drag queens and drug addicts in Rent, Magic Johnson and the straight couple from TLC's "Waterfalls" video. Even the HIV-positive speakers my middle school and high school brought in every couple of years to put a human face on the epidemic didn't make AIDS seem any more immediate to my life. As a semi-closeted gay boy I didn't see myself in the adults who told us how they had contracted the virus.

Many of the popular culture references to the AIDS epidemic became so embedded in the mainstream that all their original meaning bled out of them. Dionne Warwick's all-star rendition of "That's What Friends Are For" was one of the earliest and most popular AIDS tribute songs in the mid-80s, recorded to raise money for the American Foundation for AIDS Research, but by the early 90s it had become the definitive Massachusetts bar mitzvah anthem. At every bar or bat mitzvah I ever attended, including my own, the party always ended with everyone gathering in a circle and swaying back and forth while Dionne, Elton, Stevie and Gladys sang from the sound system. None of us had any idea that we were celebrating our entrance into adulthood with a song recorded to recognize the AIDS crisis. And I don't think any of us recognized the irony that the song was usually preceded at some point during the party by the Village People's gay sex anthem "Y.M.C.A."

By the time I came out in my late teens and actually began traveling in gay circles in college, AIDS was a very different kind of epidemic. Even though the campus sex educators continued to hammer home the message that we were all at risk, the advent of "drug cocktail" therapies had made AIDS a largely invisible disease, at least in my relatively privileged liberal arts world. My generation of gay men was likely the first since the start of the epidemic to enter our twenties without seeing scores of our friends and lovers die from AIDS. If any of the gay men I knew were HIV positive there was no way to tell. Most of them seemed more in danger of dying from smoking than from AIDS, but for all I knew half of them could have been infected. What other people discussed with their boyfriends, girlfriends and hook-up partners stayed behind closed doors, but among friends AIDS never really came up. I dutifully attended safe-sex workshops, learning how to roll a condom on a wooden model penis with one hand behind my back and learned how to be safe, but there was a sense that the epidemic had ended, even though intellectually I knew that was not the case.

I still feel that way, even though I have every reason not to. Although I cover the epidemic for an LGBT newspaper, although I've handed out condoms and lube in clubs as a safer sex educator, although I have daily contact with people living with HIV, there's still that cognitive dissonance. Everyone in my personal circle seems healthy, at least on the outside. People get tested, but AIDS never seems to come up in casual conversation among friends, and none of my friends has ever said they've tested positive. No one I knew even went to see Rent when it finally arrived on the big screen.

I hoped that putting together content for Bay Windows's coverage of the 25th anniversary of AIDS could help change my perspective on the epidemic. I already understood the impact of AIDS on my community on an intellectual level, but I thought that looking back through the years would make me feel more of a sense of urgency about the epidemic. Bay Windows launched in March 1983, two years after the New York Times first reported on a mysterious cancer killing gay men in New York and about a year before scientists first isolated HIV, then known as HTLV-III, as the cause of AIDS. I knew most of the history, but there was something surreal about seeing it unfolding week after week in the pages of a newspaper and knowing that it had occurred parallel to my own childhood. Some of the stories seemed to show surprising foresight, such as a July 1983 column by Fenway Community Health's J.B. Molaghan, who responded to an Ann Landers advice column in which she wrote that anal intercourse may be a factor in the cause of AIDS. Molaghan took Landers to task for passing off her opinion as accepted scientific consensus, writing, "The inference that anal intercourse causes AIDS is inaccurate and needs to be discussed. There are instances in which anal intercourse may be a factor in the transmission of the 'agent' that causes AIDS; however, the act itself is not the cause of AIDS." Molaghan recommended his readers wear condoms during anal sex, prescient advice coming more than half a year before the discovery of HIV. Other stories, in hindsight, seem painfully naive, such as a May 1984 story headlined, "Hepatitis B: A greater threat than AIDS?"

Yet more than the articles, what stand out the most about those old issues from the 80s and mid-90s are the obituaries. By the mid-80s there's a steady stream of obits, usually at least one per issue and in some cases clusters of as many as three to five in any given issue. Many show photos of healthy looking men, most in their 30s, lost to the epidemic. Most obituaries list grieving family members and friends, and some list life partners left behind. A Nov. 20, 1986 obit for John W. MacDonald, Jr. of Cambridge says that he was survived by his lover of nine years, Ron Schreiber but notes that Schreiber's name was omitted from the obit that appeared in the Boston Globe at the request of MacDonald's father.

It's impossible to wrap my head around all those deaths. As I read one name after another, looked through the clusters of names and photos, I wondered what it would have been like to live in a city where people you know are dying left and right, where going to funerals for men in the prime of their life becomes a ritual, where you wonder how long before you're next. I tried imagining all of my own friends and acquaintances in place of all of the men in those obits, but I didn't have enough names. My entire social circle would have been wiped out in a few months' worth of Bay Windows. It's like some terrible paranoid science fiction movie, like Outbreak or The Stand, only it actually happened.

I expected looking through all those obits to be some sort of cathartic moment that would help make the AIDS epidemic seem more real, more immediate to my life, but it did just the opposite. What happened in the early days of AIDS was so alien to anything I have experienced, so alien from the reality of the epidemic today, or at least from its impact on my day-to-day life, that I have a hard time relating to it on a personal level. It's like imagining life during the Holocaust or during the Jim Crow era, something too horrific and inhuman to imagine actually took place in my own lifetime, let alone while I was playing with my Transformers. I'm guessing many people my age feel the same, and I don't know what that means for health officials and activists trying to keep the community active in the fight against AIDS. The epidemic is clearly taking its toll on my generation, as it has on the generations before it, but that toll is harder to quantify when people are living longer and with fewer visible symptoms. I may be cynical, but I don't think my generation will ever see AIDS as our problem, no matter how many of us are infected, and once the activists who lived through the dying years pass on or retire there will be no one willing to pick up the torch. AIDS may not be as immediately fatal as it was back before combination therapy, but I wonder if in the long run my generation's apathy won't prove just as deadly.

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