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A virus was invading the culture. No one knew why. You just prayed it didn’t get you. Tony Kushner’s great drama “Angels in America” has brought these memories flooding back, and they break like waves on the shores of a much-changed reality. —Dudley Clendinen, “AIDS after ‘Angels’: Not Gone, Not Forgotten” In 1991 I attended a two-day symposium on AIDS at the New York Academy of Medicine. I got an academic rate at a boutique hotel across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue. It was a beautiful late summer day, so I decided to walk along Central Park to the academy. Everything was still in bloom, the air was fresh and clear, the sun warm and comfortable; it was one of those perfect days you wish could last forever, but at the same time you know summer is almost gone. Bicyclers glided under the parkway bridges; kids played soccer with a serious attitude; and the grassy knolls provided quietude for people deeply involved in their reading, eyeing each other romantically, or simply resting. Once inside the academy I was assaulted by the reality of AIDS. One of the first things that became apparent was the diversity of the audience. The pale academics with their suits were obvious, but a large proportion of the capacity crowd in attendance was different. There was a vast array of people of color, The New Faces of AIDS Chapter 3 65 mostly brown-skinned Latinos but a number of blacks as well. There was clearly a contingent of gays and lesbians who could easily be identified by their conversation and behavior. A few had the visible signs of AIDS—sunken cheeks and brown skin lesions. Young sexy Puerto Rican girls with tattoos, enormous earrings, and facial metal talked incessantly among themselves. This certainly wasn’t a formal academic presentation—it was a happening! The two days of sessions were amazing. It was not just what I learned (which was tremendous) but the feeling I got, the emotions I felt, the empathy and bonding that overwhelmed me. As Paul Farmer and Arthur Kleinman (1989) have said, “If we minimize the significance of AIDS as human tragedy, we dehumanize people with AIDS as well as those engaged in the public-health and clinical response to the epidemic. Ultimately we dehumanize us all” (139). What I saw made it impossible to minimize its significance. There are two occurrences in particular that I want to mention from this experience. Two New York Public Health epidemiologists gave a brief but stark presentation about the transition from the “gay plague” to “dirty needles” and “straight sex.” I viewed them as two New York Police Department narcotics detectives simply giving us “the facts, man.” The story of the discovery of AIDS among intravenous (IV) drug users in 1983 was a real shocker. Monthly mortality and morbidity reports showed a tripling in the deaths of male vagrants, with the curve rising. Besides having needle marks on their bodies, almost all the men were emaciated, and since most were diagnosed as dying from pneumonia, it was assumed they might represent a potential epidemic of TB and related respiratory ailments. Because the increase was so dramatic, autopsies were eventually performed. These men had not died of ordinary pneumonia but, rather, a rare form, pneumocystic pneumonia, the result of the breakdown of the immune system. Another opportunistic infection was found, Kaposi’s sarcoma , consisting of tumors of the skin that left brown splotches on the body and face. In short, this was full-blown AIDS. The epidemiologists had been invited to speak on New York’s number-one talk radio station, WOR, to present their findings. The switchboard was bombarded with hundreds of callers. Most ranted with comments such as “Great, now we can finally get rid of those scumbags !” When it was discovered that the expanding epidemic included not only IV drug users, but also a wider population of women and straight males, the public who use the airwaves gave the same hostile response: good riddance. The other incident was more personal and dramatic. A social worker showed a video of a session she had conducted with a young woman. She was talking to a beautiful Puerto Rican girl, no more than twenty years old, about living with her boyfriend, who was HIV seropositive. Gently but firmly she kept 66 Doctors Serving People [18.220.106.241] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 12...

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