Twenty Years
One columnist in The Village Voice called it “the despicable attempt of The New York Times to wreck the July 4 holiday break for every homosexual in the Northeast.”
Twenty years ago today — July 3, 1981 — a legendary article appeared deep inside the Times: “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” The piece was about 900 words long and only one column wide.
Early in the movie Longtime Companion, written by Craig Lucas, there is a montage in which different characters read the article to each other after coming across it on that July morning. Apparently it wasn’t the first article about AIDS to appear in the mainstream press, but it is the most famous.
It begins with a simple paragraph:
Doctors in New York and California have diagnosed among homosexual men 41 cases of a rare and often rapidly fatal form of cancer. Eight of the victims died less than 24 months after the diagnosis was made.
From deeper inside the piece:
The medical investigators say some indirect evidence actually points away from contagion as a cause. None of the patients knew each other, although the theoretical possibility that some may have had sexual contact with a person with Kaposi’s Sarcoma at some point in the past could not be excluded, Dr. Friedman-Kien said.
Dr. Curran said there was no apparent danger to nonhomosexuals from contagion. “The best evidence against contagion,” he said, “is that no cases have been reported to date outside the homosexual community or in women.”
You can read the entire article here. In today’s paper, Lawrence K. Altman, M.D. — the article’s author — has a follow-up piece, “Recollections on the Age of AIDS.”
As someone who is enthralled by history, I’ve often tried to put myself in the position of someone in the past, to try to experience the unfolding of events without the benefit of the hindsight we all have — to experience the banality of the president’s trip to Dallas in November 1963, or the election of a new chancellor in Germany in January 1933. I can’t imagine how I would have felt upon opening the newspaper one Friday morning in July 1981 and reading that article in the New York Times. Would I have felt uneasy? Worried? Dismissive?
I think to myself how lucky I am that I was born in 1973 and not, say, 1960. Because if I had been born back then, there’s a strong chance that I would have caught it and that I’d be dead by now.
I remember watching “Longtime Companion” on tv when I was 19 years or so. It was one of the most touching movies I have ever seen, beacuse it lacked any kind of sentimentality in Hollywood style.
I also remember very well that I was shit scared after seeing the movie, confirming all the stories about the AIDS epidemic in the Dutch newspapers (it was at its height in The Netherlands at that time). I decided then en there, that evening when I could not sleep, that I would never ever have anonymous sex / one night stands… and I did.
I remember reading that article–a friend called and told me to read it in the Times (very Long Term Companion)and we talked about it that night waiting for the fireworks to explode over the East River with some other friends. Mostly we assumed it was something that was weirdly coincidental and would never be an issue for us but there was some genuine discomfort since we had all heard about guys from the Saint (the disco of the moment for the hard partying set of which we were clearly a part)who had gotten very sick very suddenly.
All of the guys I was with that night are now dead….
I nursed a few of them, held almost all of them at some point as they cried, arranged a funeral, called one family to tell them that their son had died, and was one of the last calls for the one who calmly announced he loved me like a brother, wanted to go swimming with me in every ocean on the planet and dance til dawn together until we were too old to walk but couldn’t face the pain of his withering body and planned on killing himself that night. Three or four calls more and he blew his brains out in the bathtub.
All before I was 30.
Its impossible for me to believe its only been 20 years–its been my entire life — losing men I love.
i was unaware of the article at the time, going to college in Alabama; but by the time I was planning to move to NY in ’83, vaguely aware, and of course not at all aware, really. A truely horrible way to become so close to so many good friends, some here still, and too many, obviously, gone. It was then, in the 80’s, that I realized how little I had in common with str8 people; lost my str8 friends because of their foolish worries, remarks, and stupid paranoia. My family tried their best to deal with my alienation, my fears, grievings, mounting losses. My parents could only relate as if their son was going thru a war, with a scarey enemy that was coming at me and my friends form all sorts of unexpected places….. I tried not to be angry at them, or other str8 people, but I did resent them, and their enviable position of not having to think about it constantly. I saw something on PBS last week “Since Stonewall” or something like that, and the shock of seeing a close friend briefly on the t.v., only a few weeks before he passed, looking horrible, and not at all how I remember him, and yet, his eyes, those beautiful eyes I used to look into when we’d plan the next sit-in, or fight over who got the window seat on the bus on the way to (another) demo in D.C. It’s unimagineable how much flashes thru your head when you see a few seconds on a tv screen, or a paragraph in a blog, and your mind races to sort it all out, and tries to put it in some neat place, but it won’t happen, and it shouldn’t. We can’t forget; we have to find the strength to know what to do in this oddly peaceful, yet scarey time when many of us are relieved it’s “over”, when it’s not, it’s just there, in the background, hovering.