re: What were the 80s like in regards to the HIV/AIDS epidemic?

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If you contracted it, you were dead.

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TRUE. But Magic magically never showed any signs.

News bulletin! Magic never had AIDS. It was a psyop to manipulate blacks to refrain. AIDS was running wild in that culture.

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Interesting that now Montrose is considered one of the nicer areas in Houston. Quite a comeback story for the gays.

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You always want gay guys on your block, they'll have the nicest yards.

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In hindsight, him and easy e were definitely banging dudes

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Did you hear about Magic getting in a wreck? He blew a Piston and rear-ended a Cavalier.

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Y’all act like hiv is over when probably most of yall live in a place where like 20% of the population has it

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It was basically a death sentence back in the 70s, 80s, 90s, etc.

Nowadays it’s no big deal as long as you take the medication for it.

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You cannot appreciate the magnitude of Magic announcing he had HIV.

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That was wild. Life expectancy after becoming HIV+ was 2 years. I’m guessing that was more than 30 years ago.

How do you imagine people dying with AIDS currently? Spoiler alert: they get a sort of “dementia”, rampant infections, and generally die from pneumonia. It wasn’t pretty then. It ain’t pretty now with the only real change being the ability of anti-virals to delay or “postpone” the mutation of HIV into AIDS

HIV was a certain death sentence until around the mid 90’s when protease inhibitors were prescribed to treat HIV infection.
HIV positive patients inevitably developed full blown AIDS, and it was a horrific way to die- Kaposi’s sarcoma, pneumonias, and a variety of other opportunistic infections would kill them. By the late 80’s most cities had hospices where gay men would basically come and die. Despite what anyone thinks it was a brutal and inhumane way to die- isolated by a disease that everyone feared and family that sometimes would cut off contact.

I’ll also say it wasn’t just a fear among gay men. People were getting infected by contaminated blood transfusions and IV drug use. There were also unfounded theories that it could be transmitted by mosquito bites and casual contact. Fortunately that was disproven.

I found out, through doing research on my family, that one of dad’s cousins died of AIDS. Never knew it, it was some sort of family secret. This past summer my wife and I found his grave in Lexington Cemetery. I mention this because I consider the AIDS crisis a sad period of US history. As I mentioned earlier, nobody deserves to die like that.

I always figured it was the same as serial killers, if you weren’t a hooker or gay, you had to be really unlucky to be affected.

A lot of cooch was had. I was in high school and there a few willing.