Overview
- The disease AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) first appeared in the early 1980s, and rapidly became an epidemic among homosexual men. Intravenous drug users who shared needles, blood transfusion patients, and women with infected sexual partners were also at risk of contracting AIDS.
- Activists, particularly in the gay community, responded by creating care and education centers, and by calling for increased government funding to help in the crisis. Though the US government at first did little to respond to the crisis, it eventually committed millions of dollars to research, care, and public education.
- Fear of contracting the disease and discrimination against those with AIDS persisted throughout the 1980s and 1990s, even though the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) ruled out the possibility of transmitting AIDS through casual contact in 1983.
- AIDS deaths increased through the decade. In 1986, 12,000 Americans died of AIDS. By 1988, that figure had grown to 20,000. Aids also proved deadly in Africa and elsewhere in the world.
Emergence of the AIDS crisis
In the 1980s, fear of AIDS spread, and discrimination against people living with AIDS was common. The nation was torn between sympathy for the afflicted and fear that the disease might spread in the general population. Gay activists, HIV-positive individuals, and their allies battle job, school, and housing discrimination.
In 1985 Ryan White, a thirteen-year-old hemophiliac who had contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion, was banned from his middle school in Indiana out of fear that he would pass HIV to his classmates. After a year-long court battle, Ryan was allowed to return to school. He passed away in 1990.
The death of Hollywood actor Rock Hudson from complications related to AIDS in 1985 drew public attention to the disease, as did the 1993 death of tennis star Arthur Ashe. In 1991, basketball great Earvin “Magic” Johnson announced that he was living with AIDS.
Religious and political conservatives often spoke harshly about individuals with AIDS. Patrick Buchanan, a senior advisor to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and a conservative commentator, wrote in 1984 that homosexuals “have declared war up on nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.”
In October 1987, during a march on Washington DC for gay rights, a giant AIDS quilt—with panels celebrating the lives of people that the disease had claimed—was displayed on the National Mall as a memorial to those who had died.
Reagan and the AIDS Crisis
The first congressional hearings were convened on AIDS in 1982, and the next year Congress allocated $12 million for AIDS research and treatment. Within several years, in response to the efforts of gay activists and healthcare professionals, the federal government was committing hundreds of millions of dollars for research, education, care services, and treatment.
Activists condemned President Ronald Reagan for his public silence on AIDS during his first term. Thanks to their advocacy, President Reagan issued an executive order in his second term establishing the President’s Commission on the HIV Epidemic, and signed legislation that increased federal funding for research and education on HIV/AIDS to 500 million dollars.
In 1987, the Food and Drug Administration approved the drug AZT, which inhibits HIV and delays the onset of AIDS. By 1989, Louis Sullivan, the Secretory of Health and Human Services, could say: “Today we are witnessing a turning point in the battle to change AIDS from a fatal disease to a treatable one.” More effective antiretroviral drug treatments were discovered in the mid-1990s.