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

All I remember was magic Johnson and we watched a documentary about Ryan White in school. Seemed like it was taking over the world at that age.

I remember in elementary school a kid a year older than me had HIV from a blood transfusion when he was a baby. I felt bad for him because he was just a normal kid but because of what he had you could tell no one ever really wanted to get close to him or make contact with him. He ended up passing away in his teens.

It was known even back then that as long as you were not having homosexual sex or sharing needles during drug use your chances of getting HIV were minuscule. A lot of scare tactics were used against the heterosexual community to try and normalize HIV infection to avoid persecution of homosexuals.

Even kids understood that it was a gay thing. "Haha, you got AIDS"! That was the new *tag* you're *it.*

The panic probably stopped a few swinger parties, but overall the man on the street wasn't that concerned by it.

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Good qeustion. it was strictly a gay plague at first, but then everybody thought everybody could get it easily. Now we know a little different.

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

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Excellent summary!

Without the internet, it was a slow roll as news media continued to increasingly focus on it. But at that time they weren't afraid of "stigmatization" by reporting that it was primarily in the gay community (so much so that at first people believed only gays could get it).

As an example of how much the perception changed, I remember a conversation I had with a gal at a bar in the late 80s/early 90s and she was adamant it could be spread through touching someone else's tears (so, from "only gays can get it" to "passes through contact with tears" in just a few years).

Growing up to find out that AIDS wasn't a hetero thing and the Satanic Panic was all bullshite was a foundational experience of my adolescence (born in 1983)

With Covid, everything was dialed up to ten. AIDS in the 80s was nothing like that. It was more of a slow-burn news story, lasting longer, but nowhere near the bonkers-level craziness of Covid.

Mainly because AIDS was a more compartmentalized situation. The population full of husbands-and-wives, grandparents, and younger folks who stayed with a single steady, really didn't have much to fear, and it stayed at arm's length. The bigger paranoia was accidentally pricking oneself with a discarded syringe. But whatever the case, for the big majority of the population, it wasn't a big fear. For the bar scene and promiscuous bed-hopper crowd, yes, it was a very big factor, and for the homos it was the overriding issue of their entire existence.

The bigger shock to mid-america was when Rock Hudson made an appearance on Doris Day's CBN show, and looked all thin and emaciated, which revealed his AIDS status as well as being a homo. I think it was maybe in 1984. The topic of AIDS in the news jumped a lot right around that time. It had been a more minor but always-bubbling story before that. Something the news broadcasts had been mentioning for a few years, but never the 'top' news story. In fact, it was rarely ever the 'top' news story back then, throughout the 1980s (another example of how it differed big time from Covid.

Johnny Carson started making jokes about the new terminology of 'safe sex' around that time in the mid-1980s. You'd just constantly hear more and more about the homo culture and the victims and all that. Before that time, in the pre-1980s, you'd could go for months without hearing a single reference to homosexuals or their sub-culture. AIDS came along, and it just pushed all that into the daily national discussion. To a wearisome degree, and continued to grow worse with every passing year. That was a big change that happened at that time.

It kind of put a damper on the whole "free love" movement of the late 1960s. It was always there as a teen or a young adult. Most pop culture aimed at that demographic had some element of AIDs testing etc. in it. I can remember having condoms break or in the moment simply not using one at all and having some momentary concern about pregnancy but also AIDs. I am pretty certain the data indicates that people who would have been sexually active based on age in the early to even the mid and late 70s were not as active at that age in the late 70s through fairly recently.....it was concerning. For people around my age, 61, who are not in a committed relationship and sexually active studies show it is still a fear - we were pretty scared when we came of age about AIDs....it was concerning.

It was allowed to become more of a problem because everyone thought it was something that was confined to gay men and as long as you weren't gay you were safe and since it was only gay men who cared? That was an issue that absolutely existed. Many televangelists and preachers went on record saying AIDs was a message from god that homosexuality was a cardinal sin. That ignorance and lack of empathy caused a lot of deaths around the world and that is a well documented fact despite the revisionist historians who still deny the science.

I knew 2 people who died of AIDs, one around 1983 and a cousin I was very close to in the mid 90s. Both were gay. The one who died in the early 80s was my best friend's older brother. His family was not allowed to bury him in Georgia. He could not be embalmed and it cost a fortune for them to have his body cremated. There were no official prohibitions but almost no funeral home or cematary would allow it and crematoriums charged a fortune due to a lack of competition. I did not know he had died of complications associated with AIDS....his family never admitted it. Those of us who knew him suspected it and my friend told me years later that he had died of AIDs. I knew their mother was always very upset that he had "chosen" to be cremated and their father kind of acted like the man (he was about 19 when he died) had never existed. It was pretty damned tragic.

We were pretty ignorant. Most of us initially thought it could only happen to gay men and while they were certainly impacted more initially it did not take long for an awful lot of heterosexuals to be infected. Most of us were convinced it was solely related to anal sex and only men. Again, certainly was more likely to happen but it wasn't required. When the data started suggesting it was not limited to gay men we were equally ignorant in thinking vaginal sex was as risky and even receiving oral sex. We did not know and it has taken many years for the data to be more widely accepted. It was kind of always there for people around my age....not that it kept us from taking risks, as we understood them at the time, but we were more cautious than those who came of age in the late 60s and most of the 70s...and the pop culture that was directed at us almost always had some sort of AIDs issue.

And I think that was due to an intentional publicity campaign by advocates to garner support for research and such, primarily to benefit the many gays who died from it.