The Gay Disease

Did my title get your attention? Well, it was meant to. First of all, I would never refer to any disease as a 'gay' disease, but I will use the terms this 1982 article used, and put the words that are particularly offensive to me in (parenthesis). I chose this title because I knew it would draw attention.

I found a reprint of an article written in 1982 in the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper by a man with AIDS. His name was Randy Shilts. It was one of the first articles on AIDS, but, back then, it was called GRID for "gay-related immuno-deficiency diseases." The editor's note (apparently written recently) said of the article, 'Some of the ideas about AIDS may seem infuriating and ignorant to us more than two decades later, but this was the beginning of the war on AIDS, and Shilts was one of the first war correspondents'.

At the time the article appeared in the Chronicle, Shilts was 45, living in San Francisco, Ca. He writes that he doesn't even look in the mirror any more because each day, new purple spots appear on his arms, face and chest and it makes him contemplate the death sentence they might indicate.

In the early AIDS years when this article was written, scientists lumped together the gay-related immuno-deficiency diseases and used the acronym GRID. The public health officials were baffled as it was the most startling health problem to hit the United States since Legionnaire's disease first broke out in 1976. The men affected with GRID were passing epidemic proportions and frightened public health officials as well as everyone else.

Just 11 months after the first case of Kaposi's sarcoma--which was called a rare skin cancer at that time--was reported, GRID had struck 335 Americans almost all of them gay, killing 136. The Chronicle reports that this death rate figure is higher than toxic shock syndrome and Legionnaire's disease combined.

In 1982, Shilts wrote that the GRID diseases, which had never been heard of among healthy young men, offered slim hope for survival and that only 15% of the men diagnosed in 1979 with (gay cancer) were alive at the time the article was written three years later. Two-thirds of the reported1980 victims have died.

Stilts went on to say that the overall death rate for patients with (gay pneumonia) which was then the deadliest GRID known, was at 50%. The public health officials were also discovering a long list of other strange diseases striking (gay men) that they believed were associated with the immune system.

"Even more mysterious than the fact that these diseases are attacking a group with few, if any,common genetic, physical or racial characteristics, is the fact that the geographic regions where GRID victims have been found are so isolated. About half come from New York, with another quarter split almost evenly between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The remaining quarter is scattered throughout smaller centers of gay populations around the country".

The public health officials were worried that so far they have seen only the 'tip of the iceberg' because the GRID diseases were increasing so frequently that only about 86% of cases were being reported, and that the federal Centers for Disease Control were averaging one new case a day, The scientists feared the GRID problems may spread to the mainstream population before they found an answer to what was happening. They were also starting to see new figures which were showing a growing number of women and bisexual or heterosexual men who were getting one of the mysterious diseases.

One physician reported that in San Francisco it's an epidemic 'beyond anything that's acceptable'. Clinics were quickly being established in the Bay Area and weekly discussion groups were forming. Victims were receiving severe backlash for having a cancer associated with a (stigmatized minority) and were hearing remarks that they were ('only experiencing what God does to the immoral'). Families of stricken gay victims were forbidding partners to see their dying loved ones.

The public health department was worried, saying, "...But nothing seems to work, so we just have to keep experimenting." The most researchers knew at this point in time, 1982, was that GRID diseases are attributed to the massive break down in the victims' immune systems, The body is stopping its ability to arrest the development of cancer cells, pneumonia or other invading organisms which most people are exposed.

The Federal health officials ran profiles of 130 risk factors on the GRID victims and found that the typical patient had about twice the sexual activity of a normal gay male and was involved in bathhouses and esoteric sexual activities. They also believed it was due to the fact that the victims indulged in heavier use of drugs, alcohol and "poppers", the nitrate-based stimulants popular in gay circles. They admitted that it was unclear whether sexual practices, drugs, diseases or treatments for diseases--or a combination of all these--are the cause of the epidemic.

The Democratic Congressman from Los Angeles and chairman of the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment, said, "There is no doubt in my mind that if the same disease had appeared among Americans of Norwegian descent, or among tennis players, rather than among gay males, the response of both the government and the medical community would have been different,"

This was the early days of AIDS. The first case in the United States was reported in 1981 and since has become a major worldwide epidemic. More than 900,000 cases of AIDS have been reported in the US since that first case in 1981 and as many as 950,000 more Americans may be infected with HIV. One-quarter of these are unaware of their infection.

Worldwide, it is estimated that over 65 million people are infected with HIV and the prevalence levels for this virus will continue to rise globally.

At the present time, NIAID, which is a component of the National Instirutes of Health, is working on an HIV vaccine, and scientists are also investigating exactly how HIV damages the immune system. This research is identifying new and more effective drugs and vaccines including chemical barriers and topical microbicides.

Never in the history of the world have we witnessed a more horrendous devastation from a disease that we have only known for 26 years and have done so little to control.