On July 3, 1981, the New York Occasions introduced the approaching plague with a brief information merchandise tucked into Part A, Web page 20: “Uncommon Most cancers Seen in 41 Homosexuals.”
No one knew the purple Kaposi’s Sarcoma lesions the article described have been the mark of a virus that eviscerated the immune system and left the physique susceptible to opportunistic infections. A quote from the dermatologist Dr. Alvin E. Friedman-Kien described the outbreak as “fairly devastating.”
Hundreds of thousands would die from what docs first referred to as GRID, or Homosexual-Associated Immune Deficiency, a reputation that linked gayness with demise. However when it turned clear the mysterious sickness affected individuals aside from homosexual males, it was renamed AIDS, or Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome.
A French virologist found HIV in 1983, however the Facilities of Illness Management and Prevention wouldn’t record it as the only AIDS-causing agent for one more two years.
Ten extra years handed earlier than researchers introduced a breakthrough: protease inhibitors, the primary really efficient HIV remedy.
Sufferers who might tolerate the medicine astounded their docs. Some have been pulled from the brink of demise. They referred to as it the “Lazarus impact.”
AIDS arrived simply 12 years after the Stonewall Rebellion. Anonymity gave solution to a radical imaginative and prescient of public parades and sexual freedom. Many felt fucking in bathhouses, bookstores, public parks, and golf equipment weren’t simply revolutionary acts, however a part of a revolutionary duty. This sentiment collided catastrophically with HIV.
The virus first consumed homosexual males in sexually liberated New York and San Francisco. Circumstances climbed exponentially in 1981, and the epidemic quickly exploded. Males who appeared wholesome on a Wednesday could possibly be useless by Sunday.
Nurses and docs have been disgusted and afraid of the sickness and the individuals who had it. They allowed sufferers to languish in dirty mattress sheets and die alone, whereas bigoted visitation insurance policies separated them from pals and lovers. Within the first story about AIDS to air on a significant tv community, 27-year-old Ken Ramsauer advised Geraldo Rivera that he heard nurses’ aides outdoors his hospital room speculating “how lengthy the faggot in 208 goes to final.” Ramsauer died 4 days later.
The reason for why younger, wholesome homosexual males have been dying was years away. With little outdoors assist, the neighborhood devised its personal options, together with a model new thought referred to as secure intercourse.
Dr. Joseph Sonnabend really useful a biopsy the day he found swollen glands throughout Richard Berkowitz’s physique. Berkowitz, who’d left grad faculty for a extra profitable gig as a sadomasochistic grasp to suburban males, didn’t take his physician’s recommendation till studying one other hustler had died. Berkowitz quickly yanked his adverts from the Advocate, a nationwide homosexual journal, and minimize his enterprise line.
When Dr. Sonnabend, who had already suspected the approaching epidemic, fingered equally arduous lymph nodes on Michael Callen’s neck, he weighed his favourite affected person’s promiscuity towards his chance of musical success, and advised him to depart New York, prompting an indignant response. Callen, after a cellphone name from an apologetic Sonnabend, agreed to donate a small blood pattern for Sonnabend’s research of homosexual males of an analogous profile: swollen glands, a historical past of STIs, and no lesions. Assessments revealed a compromised immune system. Callen referred to as dwelling and advised his mother and father he’d be useless of most cancers in six months.
Dr. Sonnabend finally related his two sufferers, who shared a need to unfold the phrase and a perception of their physician’s “multifactorial” idea of AIDS. Sonnabend theorized repeated publicity to STIs and human cytomegaloviruses, which trigger chickenpox, herpes, and mono, higher defined the whole immune collapse than the emergence of a brand new virus (the then-unknown HIV). He noticed sexual liberation as enabling this demise by one thousand cuts. Callen and Berkowitz concluded homosexual males didn’t know the doable hazard of intercourse.

Feeling a duty to sound the alarm, they printed “We Know Who We Are” within the New York Native, a homosexual newspaper in Greenwich Village. Warning readers towards intercourse in bathhouses, they wrote, “What ten years in the past was seen as a wholesome response to a sex-negative tradition now threatens to destroy the very cloth of city homosexual male life … the plain and rapid answer to the current disaster is the top of city homosexual male promiscuity as we all know it right this moment.”
The backlash was immediate and scathing. As creator and former Native workers author David France wrote in his 2016 ebook The way to Survive a Plague, the boys have been referred to as “sex-negative hysterics” and “self-flagellators” within the paper’s subsequent editions. Articles within the Village Voice denounced them. An editorial printed in a Toronto homosexual paper accused them of spinning 200 diagnoses of “GRID” right into a disaster, stating that twice as many homosexual males had died in site visitors accidents in the identical time interval. Callen and Berkowitz have been, after all, proper—AIDS was sexually transmitted and gravely critical—however typically it’s not what you say, however the way you say it.
The inspiration for one of many earliest secure intercourse guides for homosexual males got here with a bang at Berkowitz’s door. A former shopper had pushed from Connecticut in a frenzy to ask if Berkowitz was okay. Berkowitz, who defined what AIDS was, anticipated the person to freak out. As an alternative, he requested if Berkowitz would placed on his leather-based and boots whereas he jerked off.
“I used to be in shock!” Berkowitz advised The Stranger in a cellphone name final month.
As a intercourse employee, Berkowitz might think about a extra expansive sexual world, the place intercourse might take many types. His shopper reminded Berkowitz security and pleasure weren’t mutually unique ideas: “It was an schooling to me to see what number of alternative ways there have been for males to get sexual pleasure that had been haunting them, that they have been yearning for, the place they’ll entry it and pay for it and never be ashamed of it.”
With assist from Dr. Sonnabend, Berkowitz and Callen began work on a booklet they referred to as The way to Have Intercourse in an Epidemic: One Strategy, printed in 1983. Dr. Sonnabend insisted the booklet start with a scientific rationale for homosexual males to change their sexual conduct. Callen and Berkowitz adopted that clarification with sensible recommendation.
Whereas the science is dated, the nonjudgmental, sex-positive tone is modern.
Folks would proceed having intercourse regardless, so that they inspired readers to deal with their companions with love (even for an evening) and their very own well being as treasured. The steering met individuals the place they have been at.

For example, Sonnabend observed his sufferers who have been bottoms who appreciated being fucked have been extra more likely to get sick. The authors suggested readers on the dangers of receptive anal intercourse. They acknowledged that some homosexual males have been defensive about these warnings due to homophobic stereotypes. (“Keep in mind that the problem is illness—not intercourse,” they wrote.) They defined that sperm might carry a virus and infectious brokers can simply penetrate the rectal lining. Offering a condom to your accomplice was one of the best ways to remain secure, they suggested. For tops who couldn’t regulate, they steered one other compromise: “Let your accomplice fuck you with out a rubber and be sure that he both pulls out or places a rubber on earlier than he cums.” The way to Have Intercourse in an Epidemic offered equally frank steering on ethics and duty, choosing companions, washing up earlier than intercourse, shopping for and promoting intercourse, blowjobs, fist fucking, no-risk strategies like mutual masturbation and fingering, dildos, and S&M. They addressed the fact that males with AIDS have been having intercourse:
“AIDS sufferers are human beings and wish affection and human contact. AIDS sufferers object to being handled like lepers and a few find yourself taking this anger and frustration out to the baths and backrooms. The problem of AIDS sufferers having intercourse should be seen from two views: the chance to the affected person and the potential danger to the accomplice.”
France, creator of The way to Survive a Plague, remembers the booklet altering the tradition in New York Metropolis almost in a single day.
“It was night time and day,” he mentioned. “It didn’t simply provide the guidelines of issues to not do, nevertheless it mentioned, ‘That is how we are able to construct a life’ on this extremely darkish time.”
Unbeknownst to Callen and Berkowitz, a protesting band of nun behavior carrying drag queens in San Francisco referred to as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence got here to the identical conclusions about secure intercourse and condom use the 12 months earlier than.
The Sisters’ 1982 zine “Play Honest!”—black, white, and pink and illustrated with comedian nuns—launched readers to STIs like syphilis, herpes, hepatitis, and intestinal parasites, in addition to Kaposi’s Sarcoma and pneumocystis pneumonia, two signs of the “extreme issues with immune methods” arising for homosexual males in massive American cities. (The Sisters additionally added “guilt” to this record, “SYMPTOMS APPEAR: 2 to three years of age and persist in lots of circumstances all through one’s life.)
It’s doable that one booklet written by two AIDS sufferers and their physician, and one other written by drag queens, saved hundreds of lives, and that their affect continues to be felt in each bowl of condoms in a homosexual bar or well being clinic in America. (Furthermore, we’ve got a man from Connecticut with a leather-based kink to thank). The idea of sexual hurt discount influenced mainstream medication.
Whereas scientists cracked the biomedical puzzle of HIV, AIDS nonetheless kills. At the same time as researchers develop evermore efficient HIV therapies, together with injections that may substitute months of day by day capsules, developments are meaningless with out entry. Primary human issues of poverty, homelessness, and convoluted healthcare methods have stymied efforts to finish the pandemic. (Such a factor is doable. In 1980, the World Well being Group eradicated smallpox, some of the lethal sicknesses in human historical past, via vaccination).
Donald Trump’s administration is radically hostile to public well being and bodily autonomy. Simply weeks into his time period, he’s already threatening HIV drugs for individuals outdoors the US. Trump via PEPFAR, which provides HIV remedy to twenty million individuals in poor nations. Stopping these drugs can finally kill or result in the emergence of drug-resistant strains. By means of govt order, Trump withdrew the US from the WHO, ending many years of our worldwide collaboration on healthcare.
A gag on well being businesses capability to speak with the general public, the doable freeze on federal grants, the anticipated cuts to applications that don’t align with Trump’s ideological priorities, and (as of publication time) doable Senate affirmation of vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to guide the nation’s healthcare system, are all worrying indicators that this administration is a menace to correct well being info and equitable entry to healthcare providers. That’s true for straight individuals as nicely. Trump revoked Biden’s govt orders that directed the federal authorities to guard entry to abortion.

For queer People who grew up in an period of extensively obtainable, government-subsidized medicine to stop and deal with HIV infections, ready for a therapy that will by no means come as pals, lovers, and homosexual rights pioneers sickened and died is almost unfathomable. Folks lived for years with out realizing HIV induced AIDS. They lived 15 years with out a really efficient drug, by which period the virus had killed at the very least 343,000 individuals within the US.
For a lot of that point, homosexual individuals nonetheless lacked many elementary rights and contended with federal and native authorities officers detached to their struggling. Sodomy was nonetheless unlawful in lots of states, and public opinion was not with gays. The Christian proper noticed gays as bodily and spiritually contaminated, and AIDS as biblical justice.
Nonetheless, individuals with AIDS gave the final weeks, months, and years of their lives working towards a future they may not see for individuals they might by no means meet. Their political braveness was rewarded with one brighter than many might have imagined—for a time—however look the place we’re right this moment.
We should always take classes from the early AIDS activists who took issues into their very own palms. The story of AIDS, and homosexual rights, is commonly advised as David slew Goliath, that homosexual rights triumphed over bigotry and introduced the federal government and its establishments to a heel. However for years, neighborhood response stored individuals secure. Alive. We now face the potential for the federal government abandoning a fair wider swath of the inhabitants. We’ve taken duty for our care earlier than, and it labored. However it isn’t 1981. We have to determine what that appears like in 2025, retaining key classes in thoughts:
Progress just isn’t linear, political victories are usually not last, and territory, as soon as claimed, should be vigorously defended. Who you’re can determine whether or not the federal government helps you, or doubtlessly hurts you. When methods fail, assist the individuals round you. Passivity and inaction are non-options. Small actions might be significant, even the smallest gestures, or just occupying house.
Sister Roma joined the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in 1987 after an opportunity encounter at Midnight Solar, a bar within the Castro. In walked a personality who appeared like a showgirl nun. Gregarious, flirtatious, and smiling, Sister Luscious Lashes ordered a drink from a bartender she clearly knew. Roma thought she hadn’t seen something like her when she walked over and referred to as Roma by her “boy identify,” which she by no means makes use of anymore. This nun was her good buddy Norman Schrader.
Sister Roma was ushered shortly into the order, and fell in love. Wanting again to her years in San Francisco earlier than the Sisters, Roma mentioned she acted like she was in a “homosexual sweet retailer,” the place life revolved round partying and boys.
“I will need to have been unbearable,” she says. “However after I met the Sisters, it was like my head exploded. I used to be like, ‘Oh my God, I care about my civil rights. I care about my neighborhood. I need to assist individuals’ Despite the fact that I used to be raised form of Catholic and went to a Catholic faculty, by no means was I raised to have any sort of spirituality or be of service till I met these loopy fucking drag queen nuns.”
Schrader later died. However Roma and different Sisters continued patrolling the Castro, placing condoms within the palms of strangers in bars. They sought sick individuals, hunched over cocktails at midnight, and engaged them in dialog. Typically these males would ask for hugs. The Sisters all the time mentioned sure.
