History Boys

Frontdesk by David Waggoner

They called AIDS “gay cancer” way back when—twenty-five years to be exact. In June 1981, the CDC first reported the appearance of pneumocystis carinii pneumonia in five gay men in the Los Angeles area. By the time the report came out, two of them had died. In this issue of A&U, we are marking the anniversary of this historic announcement by checking in with some of our magazine’s past cover story subjects about what has been accomplished and what still needs to be done, as well as who or what has given them hope in the midst of the pandemic.

It’s an important question—how far have we come in the fight against AIDS? But while we’re on the subject of history, now is the perfect time to look back and ask what we’ve learned from the past. Unfortunately, many have seemed to learn that sexual freedom is in need of severe discipline.

“The first clusters [of AIDS] in this country struck mostly among gay men living a fairly bacchanalian lifestyle that set the stage for viral chaos,” writes Carla McClain in the Arizona Daily Star. While this kind of reporting may seem innocuous, it repeats a kind of cause and effect logic—first came the party, then came the consequences—that is not entirely accurate and often quite dangerous. Many understand AIDS as the ultimate moral consequence of a decade or so of free love, drug experimentation, anti-Establishment thought, and civil-rights and antiwar activism, among other movements. There seemed to be too much liberation, they like to remind. The party is over. Turn up the lights.

You can hear the echoes of this line of reasoning in some of the critics of gay circuit parties and the linking of crystal meth to HIV risk. You can hear the echoes in the media’s tsk-tsking of men on the down-low, who apparently pursue sex at all costs. The subtext is: These men lack a sense of maturity when it comes to sex; these men lack a model of responsibility—and, of course, models are offered, yet often they are ones based on religious morality and individual shaming.

But a careful review of history makes clear that there has been a strong tradition of community among gay men from the beginning of, and even before, the epidemic. It was this sense of responsibility that lead many gay men to seek out STD testing in the seventies to protect their own sexual health and that of their partners. At the City Clinic in San Francisco circa 1978, for example, many gay and bisexual men who used the clinic’s STD services were recruited into several San Francisco Department of Health-sponsored hepatitis B studies, including a hep B preventative vaccine trial. Later, when the appearance of AIDS made people scramble for a grasp on the condition, the studies helped people early on establish that AIDS was caused by an agent that could be sexually transmitted. The City Clinic’s HIV Research Section pushed forward and contacted the men who had been in the hepatitis B study to participate in a new cohort study. With their consent, researchers tested the earlier trial’s blood samples for HIV antibodies and a history of HIV infection in some of the men came to light.

My point is that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to prevention and keeping tabs on our own sexual health. As an AIDS community, we can draw from the tradition of responsibility already threaded through the gay community and other at-risk groups. True, we have a better understanding of addiction, self-esteem, and risk factors than we did back then, but let’s not ever think we’ve been partying with reckless abandon from the get-go. Let’s rather keep our tradition of care alive.

June 2006