And the Band Played On
Apr. 30th, 2005 01:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
judecorpThis 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.
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.
