Unlike the 404,000 USA combat-related deaths in WWII, which were evenly distributed across the country, AIDS deaths were highest in major cities with thriving gay communities with a far higher proportion of gay male residents than the national average. "ACT UP NEW YORK: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987 - 1993" by Act Up Oral History Project is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Devastating numbers of AIDS deaths in major cities They agitated for better responses from the federal government and the scientific communities, drafting an AIDS patients’ bill of rights, launching information campaigns, and establishing community-based systems of care for people with HIV / AIDS. Gay men, with others’ support, organised around the HIV / AIDS crisis, forming such direct-action groups as ACTUP. This was unfolding in a political context intensely hostile to gay men and women, with, in the USA, conservative forces condemning people living with HIV / AIDS as ‘immoral’, and President Reagan notoriously avoiding public mention of AIDS until 1985. Silence = Death: Direct action in response to the AIDS Crisis In the USA, by 1995, one gay man in nine had been diagnosed with AIDS, one in fifteen had died, and 10% of the 1,600,000 men aged 25-44 who identified as gay had died – a literal decimation of this cohort of gay men born 1951-1970. Decimation of gay male baby boomersĪs I and colleagues established, the epidemic hit male baby boomers much harder than it did older and younger men, causing high numbers of premature deaths, especially among those aged 25-44 (and, in this age group, among those aged 35-44), with gay men suffering ‘the most AIDS deaths by far at the epidemic’s height’. AIDS killed 324,029 men and women in the USA between 19. “Riot (Sticker)” by Gran Fury (Art and Activist collective) via NYPL.įor them, the high number of AIDS deaths at the epidemic’s peak (1987-1996) shaped their personal, social, psychological, and community lives, during the epidemic, throughout their life course, and into later years. AIDS killed 324,029 men and women in the USA between 19 (death rates began to drop in 1995, with the introduction of effective anti-retroviral medications in 1996 fuelling this decline).
While these older gay people were aged 50-70 in 1980, when HIV / AIDS emerged in the west, gay male ‘ baby boomers’ (born 1946-1964) were aged 34-16. Gay rights demonstration, NYC 1976 Peak of the AIDS epidemic
For gay men and women born before 1930, whom I interviewed in 1995 and who came of age in an era of political, medical, and scientific oppression, the emergence of gay liberation (which, sparked by the 1969 Stonewall and similar uprisings, formed a new celebratory lesbian and gay culture based on the open expression of, and pride in, same-sex relationships) was the most significant event shaping their experience of gay life. In the 20th century, the gay community saw such watershed moments as the targeting of gay people by the psychiatric enterprise and the McCarthy era witch-hunts, the birth of gay liberation, lesbian feminism, and queer culture, homosexuality’s decriminalisation and demedicalisation, the legalisation of gay marriage, and the overturning of bans on gay people serving in the military.Īs with all watersheds, these events’ impacts were filtered through such characteristics as gender, ethnicity, class, and age at the time of the event.