And the Band Played On

[judecorp]

This morning I watched And the Band Played On (thank you, library!). It was so captivating to think about how there have been people working on HIV/AIDS issues since the mid/late 70s and yet no one ever said a word to me about it until 1987. That was when I entered the 7th grade at the tender age of 11, when we were initiated into the world of AIDS by Mrs. O'Byck, our seventh grade science teacher.

The blurbs about the disease were woven in between making our own batteries, trying to complete circuits, and struggling to fit in at the bottom of a new food chain. I remember that she placed a covered coffee can on her desk so that curious students could place anonymous questions inside for later answering. I remember our hysteria and our misguided information. One day a question was read that I would much later learn was preposterous but was such a sign of our times. Someone with bubbly girl handwriting wrote, "If a person with AIDS had a cut and tried on a shirt at the mall, and I had a cut and tried on the same shirt, could I get AIDS?"

More than ten years after the first patients were discovered, this is what our knowledge entailed. Thank you, Ronald Reagan.

It's hard to believe that in the almost 20 years since I entered the 7th grade (my, that's a scary effing thought) we're in a totally different world - a world of research, of medications, of long life expectancies and vaccine testings. It's hard to believe that HBO created that film the year I graduated from high school. It's hard to believe that it took .so. .many. .deaths. - a decimation of the gay male population, to be sure - to come to the point that epidemiologists were probably eager for from the get go.

Sometimes I forget that people used to talk about "the gay plague." Sometimes I forget about the quilt and the candlelight marches and when Michael Jackson went to visit Ryan White. Sometimes I forget that there used to be bags and bags of tainted blood products. Sometimes I forget about the pictures of people with visible lesions, I forget that doctors didn't always wear latex gloves, I forget that there were posters of children's drawings that read: I have AIDS. Please hug me. I can't make you sick. My, how time flies.

Comments

[thespian.livejournal.com]

I still bawl like a freaking baby when I watch It's My Party, and get sniffly over Jeremy. From time to time I've done volunteer work with teens, and what astonished *me* is the number of teens who think of it as a pain, but not terrible. It's great that it's not a death sentence. But these kids tend to think we were panicking over nothing, and it's hard to make a 20-year-old right now realize that it really was pretty damn scary at the time that no one *knew* what the full vector of the disease could be.

Being 6 years older than you, around the same time you're discussing, I was becoming sexually active, and there were nights where I was just terribly scared - I had gay friends, I didn't know how to ask for a sexual history, and *no one* talked about this to me at all, since my 'family health' stuff was 6-7 years past, in a Catholic grade school. People say, of things like this, 'you just can't understand what it was like.' Normally that gets used for things like coming back from the war, but it's hard, these days, to explain to teenagers what it was like to have that particular threat hanging over you. They have different threats, of course, and I'm not saying 'oh, these kids today', it's more trying to explain what *that* fear was like, at *that* time.

Jeremy and It's My Party help with that a lot, I've found. Even if the kid in question doesn't understand why the movies hit me so hard, they get the 'feel' across.

[judecorp.livejournal.com]

I agree. In all of my work with youth around sexual health, there is definitely a nonchalance about HIV that bespeaks volumes about how the time and knowledge has zoomed by. I'm excited when young people talk about getting tested, but still so flabbergasted that the consequences of a positive test result in their eyes is medication rather than the Cloud of Gloom I think of when I think of HIV. It definitely depends when you were raised and how much information you have, for sure.

I add Philadelphia to your list of movies that make me bawl. I pull my VHS of Philadelphia out every once in a while and I can't even stand it. As soon as Tom Hanks and Antonio Banderas start dancing together in their sailor outfits I totally lose my composure.

I've watched a couple of these movies with young people and I agree that it sobers them up a little bit about the issues and the past, but a lot of reactions are that of disbelief. How could the president have ignored this? How could there have been no funding? How could blood products not be tested? It's like foreign soil.

Granted, I wasn't becoming sexually active in the mid/late 80s... but the things I learned and remembered certainly carried over to the early 90s when I had my turn. Heck, by 1993 (when I, huh huh, did it), the majority of known people living with AIDS were still gay men, and I was still being told I wasn't a significant risk because I was not a gay man and I did not use IV drugs. Still I remember agonizing over my first sexual experience, about the safeties and precautions thereof, the questions, the fears - and this was between two virgins.

As far as I know, it's 2005 and I still can't give blood because I've slept with a man who has slept with a man.

If you wanted...

[supergoat.livejournal.com]

I could lend you my copy of Ryan White's autobiography.
It's one of my favorite books.

Re: If you wanted...

[judecorp.livejournal.com]

Oh, I think I would really like that.

Re: If you wanted...

[supergoat.livejournal.com]

It's good stuff.
Gimme yr address (gmail it) and I'll send it to you sometime next week!
(as long as I get it back when yr done. :)

Re: If you wanted...

[judecorp.livejournal.com]

Of course I will definitely send it back. :)

Completely Off Topic

[bellabooks.livejournal.com]

Olex & I are going to head to the Museum of Science not tomorrow, but the next Sunday. Are you & Jen interested? We're going for 2 reasons: 1. Life could not be happier than when playing with the exhibits in the museum and 2. The butterfly garden is finally open & we totally want to stand in a room with a bunch of butterflies on us :)

Generally we try to get free museum passes from our library, but they don't have any availble on that day. If you decide to come, you might want to ask at your library.

www.mos.org

Let me know.

Re: Completely Off Topic

[judecorp.livejournal.com]

Okay, sounds like fun. :)

[cathboblet.livejournal.com]

What a smart science teacher -- to give people a forum to ask questions without fearing everyone else's reaction.

I remember in 1987 being asked to be on a focus group for the city council, where their health department was trying out new slogans for a youth-focused HIV/AIDS awareness campaign. All the ads etc in circulation at the time were of tombstones and coffins etc. And -- man, now I look back and go 'shit, we were inadvertently wise beyond our bloody years' -- everyone in the focus group said 'you have to find another way to talk about this, because we're teenagers, and we don't think we're ever going to die.'

[judecorp.livejournal.com]

Yeah, for a Catholic school, I went to a pretty progressive place. I was definitely glad to have that outlet to ask questions. I don't remember asking any, but I know I liked hearing my peers' questions.

It's amazing how much of the media was just about death and plague and hysteria. It took so many years before we could actually slow down enough to, you know, discuss the issues.