So it's been thirty years since AIDS assumed a form that warranted a diagnosis.
There's been an odd sort of commemoration, largely by medical professionals and long-term survivors. There've been no end of movies.
But if you had to live through it, these three decades were an era of indifference, and occasional hatefulness, among the general population.
The government didn't really recognize the disease back then, and the flip side was people in power wishing more of "them" would die.
In the early 80s people suddenly got sick and in a few weeks they were dead. As time went on and the drugs got a little better, people got diagnosed and killed themselves.
I went to a remarkable number of funerals.
I couldn't tell where I was going at work. It'd get me fired, even when I was a partner in my own business. Just a funeral, I had to say. The law had nothing to say for me. Got handed my hat by my church.
Then in the 90s people took longer to die. I remember a couple coming for lunch in the late 90s. One had been sick for a long time and it was clear to me that we'd never see Gene again. He was there for short periods, and then gone from the conversation.
In a few weeks he was dead.
Over the decades I've had people urge me, somehow, not to get infected, and other, less charitable sorts, urge me to get it and die. Sooner the better.
Family- well, no need to get into all that. Some good, most not so good.
Thirty years.. So many lives.
There's been an odd sort of commemoration, largely by medical professionals and long-term survivors. There've been no end of movies.
But if you had to live through it, these three decades were an era of indifference, and occasional hatefulness, among the general population.
The government didn't really recognize the disease back then, and the flip side was people in power wishing more of "them" would die.
In the early 80s people suddenly got sick and in a few weeks they were dead. As time went on and the drugs got a little better, people got diagnosed and killed themselves.
I went to a remarkable number of funerals.
I couldn't tell where I was going at work. It'd get me fired, even when I was a partner in my own business. Just a funeral, I had to say. The law had nothing to say for me. Got handed my hat by my church.
Then in the 90s people took longer to die. I remember a couple coming for lunch in the late 90s. One had been sick for a long time and it was clear to me that we'd never see Gene again. He was there for short periods, and then gone from the conversation.
In a few weeks he was dead.
Over the decades I've had people urge me, somehow, not to get infected, and other, less charitable sorts, urge me to get it and die. Sooner the better.
Family- well, no need to get into all that. Some good, most not so good.
Thirty years.. So many lives.
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