February 12, 2025 • 42 mins
In this recap of our season's coverage of AIDS, we weave together the different voices of our guests — and their memories — of surviving the AIDS Crisis.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
But We Loved is a production of iHeart Podcasts and
the Outspoken Podcast Network. Hey, this is Jordan with a
quick note. After this episode, we just have three more
before our season officially ends, and I have two things
to ask you. First, if you haven't already, go follow
me on Instagram or TikTok at JR Underscoregan Solve this.
(00:23):
That's a JR underscore g O N s A l VS.
That way we can keep in touch and you can
stay with me on this journey. And two, for our
finale episode, I want to hear from you. Send me
a voice note on Instagram or email it to me
at butt Weloved at gmail dot com and tell me
what the show means to you. As always, I couldn't
(00:46):
do this without you, so thank you for the support.
Now let's get into the show.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
And there was one science magazine that had a cover
story on everything that was known about the disease, and
I snatched that up and read it on the plane
about three times. And when we got to our hotel
outside Disney World, I broke down and just started sobbing.
(01:12):
And the guy I was dating was also named Peter,
and he was so scared for me he didn't know
what was going on or how to come for me,
and I said, it's part of me. It's genetically integrated.
I'm fucked.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
As a gay kid. Growing up religious and in the South,
I thought being gay was the worst thing I could
ever be. Now, as a journalist, I'm trying to unlearn
that by seeking out our history, and what I've found
are people and stories full of courage, perseverance, and love.
In this episode, we'll recap our season's coverage of the
(01:54):
AIDS crisis, hearing about the epidemic through the people that
lived it, the people that grie through it, and the
people that fought against it. From My Heart Podcast, I'm
Jordan and Solves, and this is what we loved. We
(02:32):
are approaching the end of season one and we've done
a lot of coverage around AIDS, and this episode is
really a reflection and an oral history of that coverage.
You know, growing up, I genuinely had no idea how
profound the loss of the AIDS crisis really was. I
really didn't realize it until much after I came out,
(02:56):
when I was in my early twenties. One year around
that time, when I was living in San Francisco, I
was volunteering with my company and we were helping to
clean up the AIDS Memorial Grove, which is the nation's
official AIDS memorial. It's this ten acre plot in the
city's Golden Gate Park dedicated to the lives touched by AIDS.
(03:17):
I had never been there before, and I wanted to
explore a bit, so I wandered off for a moment,
and I stumbled upon an area called the Circle of Friends.
It was cozy with a bench, and in the ground
there was this long spiral of what seemed like thousands
of words engraved. I leaned in closer to read the words,
(03:42):
to see what they said, and I realized they were names.
They were the names of people who had died from
the disease. I remember feeling so lightheaded all of a sudden,
I had to sit down. I didn't really that there
was a whole generation of queer people that just vanished,
(04:07):
and here they were, their names, right in front of me.
When I set out to make this show, I didn't
know that the AIDS crisis would touch almost every interview
I conducted. It has become so clear to me that
the lives lost have profoundly shaped our culture. Whether we
(04:28):
know the history or not. So these are the stories
of those people lost and the ones they left behind.
Our episode actually begins before the AIDS crisis in the
(04:48):
nineteen seventies. Stonewall had just happened, and it changed everything.
Most gay people were no longer being arrested simply for
being gay. The American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its
list of mental illnesses. Gay people felt empowered, so in
nineteen seventy they organized the very first Pride March in
(05:10):
New York and ended up in Central Park. For Martin Boyce,
who was our very first guest on the show and
who was actually at the Stonewall riots and who attended
that very first Pride March, the feeling of seeing gay
people in the daylight for the very first time was
exhilarating and true enough.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
In the south part of the park were all getting
in and the hills were covered with gay people, well
covered with gay people.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Now, we never saw each other before in the daytime.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
Really, we're when we knew about each other, We imagined
each other, we knew all that, but we never really
looked at each other. And multitudes of gay people covering
the hills and Bertie looked at me and said, you
know what, I think, we're people.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
At this point, the gay rights movement began to organize
nationally for the first time ever. In the late seventies,
the first ever national March for Gay rights happened in DC.
The momentum was building. Young queer people from across the
nation heard stories about gay life in the big cities
of America New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Atlanta. Moving
(06:31):
there seemed like a fantasy, a life where they could
finally be unashamed, now that being gay was no longer
a mental illness or a crime. The seventies after Stonewall
in these cities seemed like a giant party, and the
gays were ready to party. Danny Ingram, a gay soldier
in the army, remembers what it was like.
Speaker 4 (06:54):
Being gay was a party. It was a party. Our
whole social life centered around the bar and the disco.
My favorite group was.
Speaker 5 (07:05):
Abba and With Dancing Queen Dancing Queen. When one of
their songs came on, we would take a hit of
poppers and just go wild on the dance floor.
Speaker 4 (07:21):
It was hot and sweaty, you know, lots of guys
dance with their shirts off. It was all joy and happiness,
just a big party.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
It might seem superficial, but partying was a big deal.
Gay people could finally form community with each other without
the fear of being arrested. These bonds would quite literally
carry them through the AIDS crisis just a few years later.
But this time of pleasure and indulgence in the seventies
(07:51):
had one other element, sex. With wider access to oral
contraception or the pill, and a Supreme Court decision called
Roe v. Wade which legalized abortion, there was a new
attitude towards sex for straits and gays alike.
Speaker 6 (08:09):
It was sex without consequence.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
That was how Rubinstein, the famous stylist and Studio fifty
four regular, talking about sexual freedom. Before AIDS, it.
Speaker 6 (08:20):
Was all about flirting. It was all about attraction. You
went out to dance and you went out to get
laid just because of the sexual revolution. It wasn't like
you had the option to go home with all these people.
You actually had the responsibility.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
I'm not joking. You had the.
Speaker 6 (08:35):
Responsibility to go home with as many people as you
could because you were just spreading the love. Literally, the
whole idea of Going to these clubs was to celebrate.
It was to celebrate your liberation, was to celebrate your sexuality.
Was to celebrate your desire to sort of express yourself
and dance and to listen to them to music that
(08:55):
made you really happy.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Bath Houses were grinder back then.
Speaker 7 (09:00):
They were you know, it was just a sex place, right,
I mean, that's what it was for.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
That's Larry Colton, a man whose life was deeply impacted
by the AIDS crisis in San Francisco. Here he is
talking about the role of the bath houses in the seventies.
Speaker 7 (09:17):
They would be given a towe when they came in.
They had a locker, they would just rope put their
taels on and they'd start walking around. And they had
private rooms, and they had public spaces, and they had sanas,
and they had steam rooms. And in San Francisco, the
original bath house I first went to, which was in
an alleyway, was really fancy. They had like a like
(09:40):
a mini restaurant. They had a wall, aquarium wall, huge waterfalls.
I mean, it was very fancy and people would stay
all night. I mean would just stay for like a
day or two. But it was very popular and just
packed and especially after the bars at two, I mean
you'd have a line out the door, start between two
and three, you know, in the morning.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
But at the peak of all this fun, a mysterious
illness began affecting gay men, at first a severe flu,
but then rashes and fungal infections in the mouth, painful
purple lesions all over the body, and severe weight loss
called wasting. Here's Geen Carlo Musto, a filmmaker who was
(10:26):
part of the small but mighty group of lesbian activists
during the AIDS crisis, describing what she saw in New.
Speaker 8 (10:34):
York and in the East village where I lived at
the time. You would see these guys, these walking skeletons,
who had, you know, these markings that they showed ks
or who just looked like they were old men, and
they were these young guys.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Here's Larry again.
Speaker 7 (10:55):
It unfolded first and foremost at the bars. People started
losing weight. Somebody would come in with a blotch on
their face or on their arm. You know that that's
carposi sarcoma thrush. People would get rashes in their mouth,
and you just saw people. You'd say, well, where's I
(11:18):
remember the first one? I'm like, where's Larry? Where is he?
I haven't seen it for a while. Oh he's sick.
It was like out of a classic movie. Simultaneously, you're
starting to see obituaries in the San Francisco Chronicle. Then
you're saying that the real obituaries in the bar magazine,
and you realize this is really picking up steam and
it is very serious.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
On July third, nineteen eighty one, The New York Times
ran a small article on page twenty of the paper
titled rare cancer seen in forty one homosexuals. The cases
were mostly in New York in San Francisco, but eight
people had already died. That article created a caricature of
who was being a fan gay men who had up
(12:02):
to quote ten sexual encounters each night, up to four
times a week. At one point, the disease was called
GRID gay related immune deficiency. It would eventually become known
as AIDS. In a moment, it felt like this long
chapter freedom and hedonism had ended. The party was over.
(12:24):
Here's how again. What did it feel like for you
that this decade of liberation had sort of come to
an end?
Speaker 6 (12:34):
Oh god, it came crashing down. My friends started getting sick.
You banded together, but now you were abandoned together. Not
in celebration, you abandoned together in fear. And that changed everything.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
We'll be right back in the mid eighties. Although most
people in the gay community knew about AIDS by this point,
it still felt far away, or at least it did
(13:10):
for Peter Staley, who would go on to become a
legendary AIDS activist.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
The first kind of conversation about AIDS I remember was
that summer in eighty three at a gay bar with
a guy about my age and I'm twenty two, who
was also pretty closeted, and he says, are you hearing
about age? And I said yeah. He said kind of scary.
What are you hearing? And he said, I hear it's
(13:38):
only really happening to the older gays who have s
up with like a thousand guys.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
In the early days of the epidemic, there wasn't much
information about the virus, and that led to a lot
of conspiracy theories. Richard Burns, the current board chair of
the American LGBTQ Museum, says it made everyone scared to
go about life the way they once did.
Speaker 9 (14:01):
I remember sitting at dinner with some friends in San Francisco,
and there were all these theories about how you got
AIDS because this is before the discovery of the HIV virus. Okay,
like no one knew anything. And there was one theory
that like, well, if you have more than a thousand
sex partners, your immune system could collapse. Where that came from,
(14:24):
or an excessive use of poppers that could cause ace.
I mean no, people, you know, we all believed that
I stopped using poppers.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
It felt far away until suddenly it wasn't. Here's Larry
again talking about going on vacation with this partner Joe.
Speaker 7 (14:42):
Joe and I used to go to Mikono's. We went
each year because we just loved it, and our best
friends Gene and Dave would go with us. And they said,
come over to our pool and we'll sit around the pool.
And so we went, and Joe and David, our friend
my best friend actually were and his partner of eight years.
(15:03):
You know, it was not a new relationship, although I'd
been an open relationship. Was sitting next to Be in
a chaise lounge and said turned his arm over and
looked and said, Larry, look at this mark I have
on my arm. I knew what it was right away.
I mean I'd done my research enough to know what
it was. And he said, what do you think that is?
And of course I said, Gene, I have no idea,
(15:25):
but you need to get a check when we get back,
no question. And he was the first, the closest person
that we'd known that was then at that point infected
with AIDS. And he got back and very rapidly he
developed tax tax taxio plasmos i camember when it was
a brain disease where you know, he went crazy. I
(15:49):
mean they had institutionalized him and he just he he
died very quickly.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
But things really began to hit home when people partners
received diagnoses. Here's Larry again.
Speaker 7 (16:05):
So that night we went to bed and when I
woke up the next morning, the sheets were soaked and
I knew, I knew as that was it. And when
that was one of the major symptoms when heard about
you know, it's night sweats. And I woke up and
(16:28):
Joe wasn't awake yet and I was lying in sweat.
I'm like, oh my god, he's got AIDS.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
Of course, people who were diagnosed with the virus themselves
felt their own lives changed forever. Here's Olympic gold medalist
Greg luganis often considered the greatest diver of all time.
On the moment he was diagnosed.
Speaker 10 (16:50):
I was having some problems with my ear ear infection
or something, and then I went into the doctor and
I said, oh, by the way, I'd like to do
an HIV tests. And it was my thought that if
I was HIV positive, then I would pack my bags,
go back to California, lock myself in my house, and
(17:11):
wait to die, because that's how we thought of HIV AIDS.
And so when he came by and gave me the
results that I was HIV positive, I mean, it was
like ringing in my ears. I couldn't really hear anything,
I wasn't really absorbing anything, and I was thinking, oh
(17:32):
my god.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Peter again on his diagnosis.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
On November fifteenth, nineteen eighty five, I got called at
my trading desk by the nurse in my doctor's office
at work at work, and he's like, we need you
back from more blood work. And I said what is it?
And he said A low white budsuck out and I said, well,
what could that be? What might that mean? He said, ah,
he'll talk to you about that, and I'm up, really,
(17:58):
you know, I'm on my trading desk. I'm pushy as
all hell. I'm an aggressive bond trader, right, and I'm like, na,
you can tell me what might mean. I really pushed him,
and he said, well, we do see that a lot
in our patients with HIV. And in a flash, all
(18:20):
the denial and ignorance and youth and innocence just emptied
out of me. I was actually I had a guy
i'd met in Amsterdam was staying with me and I
was taking him to Disney World that weekend. He even
knew less than I did, and were heading down. We
(18:42):
had to LaGuardia. I scoured the news stand for anything
about HIV, and there was one science magazine that had
a cover story on everything that was known about the
disease from a scientific standpoint, written in layman terms, and
I snatched that up and read it on the plane
about three times. And when we got to our hotel
(19:07):
outside Disney World, I broke down and just started sobbing.
And the guy who was dating was also named Peter,
and he was so scared for me. He didn't know
what was going on or how to come for me,
and I said, it's part of me, it's genetically integrated.
I'm fucked.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
To be diagnosed was terrifying. By the late eighties, tens
of thousands of Americans were already dead. The CDC said,
if you had AIDS, you'd likely only have five years
to live. One particular moment that illustrated just how much
death had occurred was in nineteen eighty seven, when the
AIDS Quilt was laid out at the National Mall in Washington,
(19:49):
d C. For the first time, people across America were
asked to send in a quilt for the loved ones
they lost to AIDS. Each quilt or panel would be
three by sax feet, the approximate size of a coffin.
All together, laid out, the AIDS Quilt, essentially a patchwork
of all those lost to AIDS, was bigger than a
(20:12):
football field. Here's Derek Codle, the leader of the New
York Buyers Club, on the moment he saw it for
the first time.
Speaker 11 (20:19):
Here was this quilt that you could walk across and
look at panels that were intensely personal memorials. Really, and
people who were walking across that quilt were just uniformly weeping.
It was the most emotional experience I had ever had before,
(20:41):
and it really connected with me that this is about death.
These are all dead people, and they're all thirty or forty,
and the tragedy just overwhelmed me.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Even though so many were dying and many were already dead.
The reaction of the United States government was slow and negligent.
The president at the time, Ronald Reagan, was a staunch
Conservative who had been elected in a landslide largely due
to evangelical Christians, and AIDS was a disease centered around
(21:19):
drugs and gay sex. It would be several years into
the crisis before the President even said the word AIDS publicly.
In the early eighties, his Press Secretary Larry Speaks was
asked about the AIDS crisis in a White House press
briefing and responded, laughing, saying, quote, I don't have it,
(21:40):
do you. Queer people across America were furious. Here's Richard
Burns again.
Speaker 9 (21:46):
You also have to remember, in the minds of the
government and the media, like mainstream media and in corporate America,
gay people were completely disposable. And the fact that as
it emerged that AIDS affected intravenious drug users and gay men.
There was a perception that, like, well, maybe we're better
(22:08):
off without those people. William Buckley in the New York Times.
He was the editor of the National Review, and you know,
one of the leaders of the right in America, the
intellectual right. He in an essay and the Times said
that people with age should be tattooed.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
You remember how you felt when you read that.
Speaker 9 (22:26):
We were so enraging, you know, And the fact that
the Times would publish that shows you what they thought
of us.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
But all of the sadness and grief was being transformed
into rage. And out of that rage a group was
born that would change everything. Act UP. It stood for
the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, the premier AIDS activism organization,
(22:54):
and on March twenty fourth, nineteen eighty seven, Act UP
held its first protests on Wall Street during the morning
rush hour to capture and direct the attention of Americans
towards AIDS. Jean Carla Musta, a filmmaker and lesbian AIDS activist,
heard about the protests from her friends, so she grabbed
her camcorder and headed downtown.
Speaker 8 (23:16):
I knew people were angry and I knew people were
starting to feel like it wasn't enough. I went down
to Wall Street. It was kind of a cold March day,
and people are chanting and a leaflitting, and all of
a sudden, a bunch of them got in the middle
of the road, sat there with their signs and holding
(23:40):
hands with each other and just started chanting.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
The middle of Wall Street.
Speaker 8 (23:52):
In the middle of Wall Street, they stopped traffic. They
were protesting. They were doing a dye in. Basically, they
were laying in the street, in the middle of Wall Street,
and they weren't moving. The police were there, they were
trying to get them out.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Of the way.
Speaker 8 (24:08):
They basically were hauling them out on stretchers, and people
weren't moving. Everybody was determined that they were going to
get arrested. I remember this energy just made me go
into a different frame of mind. So I was just
dodging around them with the camera and I was shooting
(24:30):
between the policemen's legs and what not, trying to get
trying to document this because it was just so important.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
At this point. The top priority for most activists was
to keep people alive, since the likelihood of death was
so high. People diagnosed were desperate for any experimental drugs,
but there were two groups standing in the way. The
first was the FDA, who's slow approval process wasted time
(25:01):
that AIDS patients didn't have. So activists like Derek Hodle,
the leader of the New York Buyers Club, took matters
into his own hands. He would smuggle the drugs from
other countries to get them into the bodies of AIDS patients.
Speaker 11 (25:18):
This system is insane where people who are dying of
infections can't get access to an experimental drug because it's
experimental and it might harm them. But in the meantime,
we're going to smuggle this drug in through the mail,
and you know, please do stop us if you're so inclined.
And so we set up a system where at first
(25:40):
it's just insane, but with the fluconaisol, we set up
a system to mail individual packages back through the mail,
addressed to people in the health group. And so the
mail man would come with hundreds of boxes of drugs
and and it never got like, it never got seized
(26:02):
at customs.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
The other enemy was the pharmaceutical companies. Activists felt that
they made experimental drugs expensive and unaffordable. They could do
that because in America, people dying of AIDS was a
market and their desperation for life saving drugs was a demand.
So act UP targeted them too. Here's Peter Staley again
(26:27):
talking about a protest in nineteen eighty nine against Burrow's Welcome,
the pharmaceutical company that developed AZT, which at the time
was the only drug thought of that could treat AIDS.
But the company Burrows Welcome the pharmaceutical company. The pharmaceutical company.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
They slapped this obscene price, was it. It seems low today,
seems cheap, but at that time it was the highest
price of any drug in history, ten thousand dollars a year.
Country was shocked at the price. Even some government officials
were like, this is that's shocking, and.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
For contexts, this is the only viable drug right that's
treating AIDS.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
So in September of eighty nine, we decided to do
a huge demonstration on Wall Street in front of the
Stock Exchange. But I'm like, hmm, nobody's actually gotten onto
the floor of the Stock Exchange. So I made that
my mission impossible, and within a few weeks we figured
it out how to get in, how to bypass security.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
Yeah, How did you figure that out?
Speaker 2 (27:31):
You know, the great thing about age activism is that
it was a queer movement, queer based, and that gives
you the largest by network in the world.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
You mean to say, there's a gay person.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
We are everywhere. Wow, we are everywhere. There are tons
of us in the White House, and there are endless
numbers of us on Capitol Hill, in the military, on
the stock exchange. I was a bond trader, you know,
we are everywhere. And there was an act up member
that worked not the stock floor trading floor, but there
(28:11):
were commodities floors next to it. He worked on one
of the commodity's floors, and he was my spy. We
discovered an old antique balcony and nobody was up there,
but it was over the trading floor. It was perfect
and nine to twenty five we walk up the balcony.
We kneeled down so that we're below the banister and
(28:33):
can't be seen. When we're up there, we pull out handcuffs.
We handcuffs ourselves through the chain to make it a
little harder to get us out of there. I have
had a huge banner strapped to my belly, a big
black banner that we unfurled that said sell welcome, Burrows Welcome.
And I look at my watch, which is timed perfectly
(28:54):
to the real time. And we had a runner outside
who are already had notified Associated Press that we were
up to something. And at nine twenty nine and fifty
five seconds, I say go and we stand up. We
unfurl the banner and we pull each have a a
(29:15):
pocket sized marine foghorn which says on the side of it,
do not hold close to your ears because in danger
you'll break an ear drum. These things are fucking loud,
and we all raised our hands and boom. Nobody heard
the opening bell was this piercing scream. It felt like
(29:37):
time was standing still. Everything stopped. Every the trader's like,
what what the fuck is this? They're like confused, and
they look up, they see us, they see the banner
sell welcome. Those fuckers got inside. They're in our sanctum.
The faggots got in and they went ballistic. They were frothing.
(30:02):
You know, I'd worked with these guys. I was smiling
from ear to ear. What was the result of the demonstration.
The company lowered the price again.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
Three days later, Wow, boom, and it never gets better
than that, It never feels better than that. It were
activism rarely works that fast.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
Act up In other AIDS organizations were making good progress
and racking up victories, but even though they were winning battles,
they were still losing the war. The death toll was
growing year after year. By this point, most people in
the community knew someone who had died of AIDS, and
(30:46):
for many it was their partner. Here's Chris talking about
his partner Rogers difficult final days.
Speaker 12 (30:54):
So Roger had been home for a few weeks from work,
just bedridden, and I was taking care of him, and
he was starting to would I want to say babbel
kind of talking things that didn't make sense to me,
or it was not part of any conversation. I could
hear exactly what he was saying, but to me it
(31:15):
didn't make sense, and I knew I think. I called
the hospital and they said, just get him here to
the hospital. I had to carry him. He was not
even strong enough to walk. I had to carry him
down three flights of stairs to the car. He was
very like weak and like ready to pass out. So
we get Roger into the emergency room, into a wheelchair
(31:37):
and someone went to go look at Roger and his
lips were blue, and so they were like, okay. They
immediately put him in the back and they intubated him
and they had to strap him down, and it was
kind of a horrible moment to seeing him, you know,
in such a weak state and barely breathing and getting
(32:00):
you know, not getting enough oxygen, and he pulled the
tube out, so they that's why they tied him down,
and they induced coma at that point. And so that
was basically the last time that we could look at
each other. And so when we were aware of each other,
(32:21):
it hope face to face.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
And here's Danny talking about the moment he said goodbye
to his partner Darryl.
Speaker 4 (32:28):
And on Christmas Eve of nineteen ninety three, he said,
we have to go to the hospital and I started
crying and he just he put his hand on my
shoulder and he said, not from you, not from you.
(32:52):
I'll take tears from everyone else, but not from you.
We had to carry him to the car and then
take him to the emergency room and we knew what
that meant. He was going to die. And we sat
there watching that little machine on the wall that beeps,
(33:16):
and it got lower and lower and lower until it
flat lined, and then he was gone. I was holding
him in my arms as he died, and that time
that we had together, we'll always touch my heart.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
Others, like ballroom Legendarcine Pendarvis, lost their chosen families. She
remembered the moment she said goodbye to her legendary house mother,
Avis Pandavis.
Speaker 13 (33:48):
But losing Avis took so much out of me. The
wind was knocked out of me. But I remember her
telling me that she was tired and she wanted to
be with her mother and her sisters. And in that moment,
I knew that she was going to leave me. And
she said to me, it's alright, Racing, it's all right.
(34:09):
And I said, Avis, if you're tired, let go, Let
go you and got to hold or no more. Your
job has been done. You served us as an excellent mother. Well,
and I will tell your story. I will speak your name,
and I will let people know that you will never
be forgotten.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
Aids had shaped an entire generation of queer people. Grieving
the loss of your partner at twenty thirty or even
forty years old was not normal. Not to mention the
grief of losing friends, the chosen family you finally made
after escaping your old life after years of loss, the
(35:00):
AIDS crisis began to take its toll on everyone. Here's
Bill Glenn, a spiritual leader during the AIDS crisis. He
managed the aid support group Continuum in San Francisco during
the crisis and recounted the moment that the tragedy of
AIDS hit him all at once.
Speaker 14 (35:20):
We lost one a week, so in the seven years
I was there that he lost about three hundred and
fifty clients. We created a chapel and we took I
eight by eleven photographs of everybody who we called a member,
anyone who came into the group, and men and women
who IT died. We put their pictures up, began the ceiling,
(35:43):
and when I left, every instant space in that chapel
was covered with pictures of men and women.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
Who IT died.
Speaker 14 (35:53):
I had to stop. That was forty and exhausted, and
I was at a retreat, Trappist religious retreat center in Oregon,
and I found myself on the floor of my little
room in the fetal position, crying, and I knew I
(36:15):
had to stop. I didn't want to I felt some
way I was betrayed, but I'd given fifteen years to it.
I was psychically exhausted by the death, and because the
death came at our agency and my my friends so often,
you can't fully grieve.
Speaker 1 (36:33):
That some had to face the harsh reality of planning
for their own death. Here's Olympic diver Greg luganis again.
Speaker 10 (36:43):
I'm not much for surprises. I'm not crazy about surprises.
But my thirty third birthday, I was wasting, you know,
I was losing weight. We couldn't figure out what was
going on. We didn't know, and so I gave my
address book to my then partner and my mom and said, naked,
(37:03):
throw me a surprise birthday party. The surprise was going
to be I didn't know who was going to show up,
but I thought I was saying goodbye to everybody.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
I was prepared to die.
Speaker 10 (37:15):
I wasn't prepared to live.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
By the mid nineties, the community was exhausted. Nineteen ninety
four was the worst year of death yet. But even
through their fatigue, activists kept fighting for treatment, fundraising for research,
and persevering for all the loved ones who were lost.
(37:38):
Peter Staley, who was an act UP was now a
member of TAG, short for Treatment Action Group. They were
working very closely with scientists and the Clinton administration when
a breakthrough happened in nineteen ninety six at the annual
AIDS conference, which was in Vancouver that year. Here's Peter
on that moment.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
We were getting over a billion dollars a year. We
had money to burn, and we just had to spend
it wisely and do the right research. And the TAG
was intimately involved with the development of this new class
of antivirals called protease inhibitors. And then many of us
were in the room when the results got released. We
(38:21):
had been through so many moments of dashed hope, so
many moments that it was it was very hard to believe.
But we also at that point were very adept at
the science and this was rock solid. So it was surreal.
(38:45):
And whenever we went to an AIDS conference overseas, we
would add a vacation at the end of it, you know,
to blow off steam, smoking weed with David on the
beach on Vancouver Island. After the Vancouver IGHTHS conference, I'm like,
so we're gonna live and he's like, I guess. So
(39:13):
it just didn't. It was so hard to wrap our
heads around. But within weeks we all went on the
regimen that had been on the slides, and a month
after that, all of us saw our viral loads go
from the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands to undetectable.
Speaker 1 (39:35):
Today, the landscape around HIV and AIDS is completely different.
It's no longer a death sentence, and it's largely preventable
with breakthrough drugs like prep All. This means that the
fear of HIV is slowly fading away. Amazingly. Experts say
(39:57):
a cure isn't as far away as we think. In fact,
it might be here in the next ten years. One
of my favorite moments of this entire series was when
I asked Peter Staley what he thinks that day is
going to be like for him when they find a cure.
This is his answer, what do you think that day
(40:21):
will be like for you?
Speaker 11 (40:22):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (40:22):
My god, amazing. There's a scene at the end of
Longtime Companion, a beautiful tear jerker AIDS film, where they
ending in like a dreamlike sequence when AIDS is cured
and it's all on fire Island's beach and all the
characters who have died during the film. They're all back
(40:45):
and everybody's hugging each other, so I think there'll be
a lot of remembering of those we lost.
Speaker 1 (41:06):
But We Loved is hosted by me Jordan Gonsolves. New
episodes drop every Wednesday. If you want to write in
to tell your story, email us at Butweloved at gmail
dot com, or you can send me a message on
Instagram or TikTok at your underscore goosolves. We are a
production of The Outspoken Podcast Network and iHeart Podcasts. But
(41:29):
We Loved was originally developed with Pushkin Industries. Our producers
are Joey pat Emily Meronoff, and Christina Loranger. Our executive
producers are me Maya Howard and Katrina Norville. Original music
by Steve Boone. Special thanks to Jay Brunson and Roquel Willis.
If you loved this episode, leave us a rating and
(41:50):
follow us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and thank you
for listening. I'll see you next week.
But We Loved is a production of iHeart Podcasts and
the Outspoken Podcast Network. Hey, this is Jordan with a
quick note. After this episode, we just have three more
before our season officially ends, and I have two things
to ask you. First, if you haven't already, go follow
me on Instagram or TikTok at JR Underscoregan Solve this.
(00:23):
That's a JR underscore g O N s A l VS.
That way we can keep in touch and you can
stay with me on this journey. And two, for our
finale episode, I want to hear from you. Send me
a voice note on Instagram or email it to me
at butt Weloved at gmail dot com and tell me
what the show means to you. As always, I couldn't
(00:46):
do this without you, so thank you for the support.
Now let's get into the show.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
And there was one science magazine that had a cover
story on everything that was known about the disease, and
I snatched that up and read it on the plane
about three times. And when we got to our hotel
outside Disney World, I broke down and just started sobbing.
(01:12):
And the guy I was dating was also named Peter,
and he was so scared for me he didn't know
what was going on or how to come for me,
and I said, it's part of me. It's genetically integrated.
I'm fucked.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
As a gay kid. Growing up religious and in the South,
I thought being gay was the worst thing I could
ever be. Now, as a journalist, I'm trying to unlearn
that by seeking out our history, and what I've found
are people and stories full of courage, perseverance, and love.
In this episode, we'll recap our season's coverage of the
(01:54):
AIDS crisis, hearing about the epidemic through the people that
lived it, the people that grie through it, and the
people that fought against it. From My Heart Podcast, I'm
Jordan and Solves, and this is what we loved. We
(02:32):
are approaching the end of season one and we've done
a lot of coverage around AIDS, and this episode is
really a reflection and an oral history of that coverage.
You know, growing up, I genuinely had no idea how
profound the loss of the AIDS crisis really was. I
really didn't realize it until much after I came out,
(02:56):
when I was in my early twenties. One year around
that time, when I was living in San Francisco, I
was volunteering with my company and we were helping to
clean up the AIDS Memorial Grove, which is the nation's
official AIDS memorial. It's this ten acre plot in the
city's Golden Gate Park dedicated to the lives touched by AIDS.
(03:17):
I had never been there before, and I wanted to
explore a bit, so I wandered off for a moment,
and I stumbled upon an area called the Circle of Friends.
It was cozy with a bench, and in the ground
there was this long spiral of what seemed like thousands
of words engraved. I leaned in closer to read the words,
(03:42):
to see what they said, and I realized they were names.
They were the names of people who had died from
the disease. I remember feeling so lightheaded all of a sudden,
I had to sit down. I didn't really that there
was a whole generation of queer people that just vanished,
(04:07):
and here they were, their names, right in front of me.
When I set out to make this show, I didn't
know that the AIDS crisis would touch almost every interview
I conducted. It has become so clear to me that
the lives lost have profoundly shaped our culture. Whether we
(04:28):
know the history or not. So these are the stories
of those people lost and the ones they left behind.
Our episode actually begins before the AIDS crisis in the
(04:48):
nineteen seventies. Stonewall had just happened, and it changed everything.
Most gay people were no longer being arrested simply for
being gay. The American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its
list of mental illnesses. Gay people felt empowered, so in
nineteen seventy they organized the very first Pride March in
(05:10):
New York and ended up in Central Park. For Martin Boyce,
who was our very first guest on the show and
who was actually at the Stonewall riots and who attended
that very first Pride March, the feeling of seeing gay
people in the daylight for the very first time was
exhilarating and true enough.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
In the south part of the park were all getting
in and the hills were covered with gay people, well
covered with gay people.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Now, we never saw each other before in the daytime.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
Really, we're when we knew about each other, We imagined
each other, we knew all that, but we never really
looked at each other. And multitudes of gay people covering
the hills and Bertie looked at me and said, you
know what, I think, we're people.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
At this point, the gay rights movement began to organize
nationally for the first time ever. In the late seventies,
the first ever national March for Gay rights happened in DC.
The momentum was building. Young queer people from across the
nation heard stories about gay life in the big cities
of America New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Atlanta. Moving
(06:31):
there seemed like a fantasy, a life where they could
finally be unashamed, now that being gay was no longer
a mental illness or a crime. The seventies after Stonewall
in these cities seemed like a giant party, and the
gays were ready to party. Danny Ingram, a gay soldier
in the army, remembers what it was like.
Speaker 4 (06:54):
Being gay was a party. It was a party. Our
whole social life centered around the bar and the disco.
My favorite group was.
Speaker 5 (07:05):
Abba and With Dancing Queen Dancing Queen. When one of
their songs came on, we would take a hit of
poppers and just go wild on the dance floor.
Speaker 4 (07:21):
It was hot and sweaty, you know, lots of guys
dance with their shirts off. It was all joy and happiness,
just a big party.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
It might seem superficial, but partying was a big deal.
Gay people could finally form community with each other without
the fear of being arrested. These bonds would quite literally
carry them through the AIDS crisis just a few years later.
But this time of pleasure and indulgence in the seventies
(07:51):
had one other element, sex. With wider access to oral
contraception or the pill, and a Supreme Court decision called
Roe v. Wade which legalized abortion, there was a new
attitude towards sex for straits and gays alike.
Speaker 6 (08:09):
It was sex without consequence.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
That was how Rubinstein, the famous stylist and Studio fifty
four regular, talking about sexual freedom. Before AIDS, it.
Speaker 6 (08:20):
Was all about flirting. It was all about attraction. You
went out to dance and you went out to get
laid just because of the sexual revolution. It wasn't like
you had the option to go home with all these people.
You actually had the responsibility.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
I'm not joking. You had the.
Speaker 6 (08:35):
Responsibility to go home with as many people as you
could because you were just spreading the love. Literally, the
whole idea of Going to these clubs was to celebrate.
It was to celebrate your liberation, was to celebrate your sexuality.
Was to celebrate your desire to sort of express yourself
and dance and to listen to them to music that
(08:55):
made you really happy.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Bath Houses were grinder back then.
Speaker 7 (09:00):
They were you know, it was just a sex place, right,
I mean, that's what it was for.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
That's Larry Colton, a man whose life was deeply impacted
by the AIDS crisis in San Francisco. Here he is
talking about the role of the bath houses in the seventies.
Speaker 7 (09:17):
They would be given a towe when they came in.
They had a locker, they would just rope put their
taels on and they'd start walking around. And they had
private rooms, and they had public spaces, and they had sanas,
and they had steam rooms. And in San Francisco, the
original bath house I first went to, which was in
an alleyway, was really fancy. They had like a like
(09:40):
a mini restaurant. They had a wall, aquarium wall, huge waterfalls.
I mean, it was very fancy and people would stay
all night. I mean would just stay for like a
day or two. But it was very popular and just
packed and especially after the bars at two, I mean
you'd have a line out the door, start between two
and three, you know, in the morning.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
But at the peak of all this fun, a mysterious
illness began affecting gay men, at first a severe flu,
but then rashes and fungal infections in the mouth, painful
purple lesions all over the body, and severe weight loss
called wasting. Here's Geen Carlo Musto, a filmmaker who was
(10:26):
part of the small but mighty group of lesbian activists
during the AIDS crisis, describing what she saw in New.
Speaker 8 (10:34):
York and in the East village where I lived at
the time. You would see these guys, these walking skeletons,
who had, you know, these markings that they showed ks
or who just looked like they were old men, and
they were these young guys.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Here's Larry again.
Speaker 7 (10:55):
It unfolded first and foremost at the bars. People started
losing weight. Somebody would come in with a blotch on
their face or on their arm. You know that that's
carposi sarcoma thrush. People would get rashes in their mouth,
and you just saw people. You'd say, well, where's I
(11:18):
remember the first one? I'm like, where's Larry? Where is he?
I haven't seen it for a while. Oh he's sick.
It was like out of a classic movie. Simultaneously, you're
starting to see obituaries in the San Francisco Chronicle. Then
you're saying that the real obituaries in the bar magazine,
and you realize this is really picking up steam and
it is very serious.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
On July third, nineteen eighty one, The New York Times
ran a small article on page twenty of the paper
titled rare cancer seen in forty one homosexuals. The cases
were mostly in New York in San Francisco, but eight
people had already died. That article created a caricature of
who was being a fan gay men who had up
(12:02):
to quote ten sexual encounters each night, up to four
times a week. At one point, the disease was called
GRID gay related immune deficiency. It would eventually become known
as AIDS. In a moment, it felt like this long
chapter freedom and hedonism had ended. The party was over.
(12:24):
Here's how again. What did it feel like for you
that this decade of liberation had sort of come to
an end?
Speaker 6 (12:34):
Oh god, it came crashing down. My friends started getting sick.
You banded together, but now you were abandoned together. Not
in celebration, you abandoned together in fear. And that changed everything.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
We'll be right back in the mid eighties. Although most
people in the gay community knew about AIDS by this point,
it still felt far away, or at least it did
(13:10):
for Peter Staley, who would go on to become a
legendary AIDS activist.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
The first kind of conversation about AIDS I remember was
that summer in eighty three at a gay bar with
a guy about my age and I'm twenty two, who
was also pretty closeted, and he says, are you hearing
about age? And I said yeah. He said kind of scary.
What are you hearing? And he said, I hear it's
(13:38):
only really happening to the older gays who have s
up with like a thousand guys.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
In the early days of the epidemic, there wasn't much
information about the virus, and that led to a lot
of conspiracy theories. Richard Burns, the current board chair of
the American LGBTQ Museum, says it made everyone scared to
go about life the way they once did.
Speaker 9 (14:01):
I remember sitting at dinner with some friends in San Francisco,
and there were all these theories about how you got
AIDS because this is before the discovery of the HIV virus. Okay,
like no one knew anything. And there was one theory
that like, well, if you have more than a thousand
sex partners, your immune system could collapse. Where that came from,
(14:24):
or an excessive use of poppers that could cause ace.
I mean no, people, you know, we all believed that
I stopped using poppers.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
It felt far away until suddenly it wasn't. Here's Larry
again talking about going on vacation with this partner Joe.
Speaker 7 (14:42):
Joe and I used to go to Mikono's. We went
each year because we just loved it, and our best
friends Gene and Dave would go with us. And they said,
come over to our pool and we'll sit around the pool.
And so we went, and Joe and David, our friend
my best friend actually were and his partner of eight years.
(15:03):
You know, it was not a new relationship, although I'd
been an open relationship. Was sitting next to Be in
a chaise lounge and said turned his arm over and
looked and said, Larry, look at this mark I have
on my arm. I knew what it was right away.
I mean I'd done my research enough to know what
it was. And he said, what do you think that is?
And of course I said, Gene, I have no idea,
(15:25):
but you need to get a check when we get back,
no question. And he was the first, the closest person
that we'd known that was then at that point infected
with AIDS. And he got back and very rapidly he
developed tax tax taxio plasmos i camember when it was
a brain disease where you know, he went crazy. I
(15:49):
mean they had institutionalized him and he just he he
died very quickly.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
But things really began to hit home when people partners
received diagnoses. Here's Larry again.
Speaker 7 (16:05):
So that night we went to bed and when I
woke up the next morning, the sheets were soaked and
I knew, I knew as that was it. And when
that was one of the major symptoms when heard about
you know, it's night sweats. And I woke up and
(16:28):
Joe wasn't awake yet and I was lying in sweat.
I'm like, oh my god, he's got AIDS.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
Of course, people who were diagnosed with the virus themselves
felt their own lives changed forever. Here's Olympic gold medalist
Greg luganis often considered the greatest diver of all time.
On the moment he was diagnosed.
Speaker 10 (16:50):
I was having some problems with my ear ear infection
or something, and then I went into the doctor and
I said, oh, by the way, I'd like to do
an HIV tests. And it was my thought that if
I was HIV positive, then I would pack my bags,
go back to California, lock myself in my house, and
(17:11):
wait to die, because that's how we thought of HIV AIDS.
And so when he came by and gave me the
results that I was HIV positive, I mean, it was
like ringing in my ears. I couldn't really hear anything,
I wasn't really absorbing anything, and I was thinking, oh
(17:32):
my god.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Peter again on his diagnosis.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
On November fifteenth, nineteen eighty five, I got called at
my trading desk by the nurse in my doctor's office
at work at work, and he's like, we need you
back from more blood work. And I said what is it?
And he said A low white budsuck out and I said, well,
what could that be? What might that mean? He said, ah,
he'll talk to you about that, and I'm up, really,
(17:58):
you know, I'm on my trading desk. I'm pushy as
all hell. I'm an aggressive bond trader, right, and I'm like, na,
you can tell me what might mean. I really pushed him,
and he said, well, we do see that a lot
in our patients with HIV. And in a flash, all
(18:20):
the denial and ignorance and youth and innocence just emptied
out of me. I was actually I had a guy
i'd met in Amsterdam was staying with me and I
was taking him to Disney World that weekend. He even
knew less than I did, and were heading down. We
(18:42):
had to LaGuardia. I scoured the news stand for anything
about HIV, and there was one science magazine that had
a cover story on everything that was known about the
disease from a scientific standpoint, written in layman terms, and
I snatched that up and read it on the plane
about three times. And when we got to our hotel
(19:07):
outside Disney World, I broke down and just started sobbing.
And the guy who was dating was also named Peter,
and he was so scared for me. He didn't know
what was going on or how to come for me,
and I said, it's part of me, it's genetically integrated.
I'm fucked.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
To be diagnosed was terrifying. By the late eighties, tens
of thousands of Americans were already dead. The CDC said,
if you had AIDS, you'd likely only have five years
to live. One particular moment that illustrated just how much
death had occurred was in nineteen eighty seven, when the
AIDS Quilt was laid out at the National Mall in Washington,
(19:49):
d C. For the first time, people across America were
asked to send in a quilt for the loved ones
they lost to AIDS. Each quilt or panel would be
three by sax feet, the approximate size of a coffin.
All together, laid out, the AIDS Quilt, essentially a patchwork
of all those lost to AIDS, was bigger than a
(20:12):
football field. Here's Derek Codle, the leader of the New
York Buyers Club, on the moment he saw it for
the first time.
Speaker 11 (20:19):
Here was this quilt that you could walk across and
look at panels that were intensely personal memorials. Really, and
people who were walking across that quilt were just uniformly weeping.
It was the most emotional experience I had ever had before,
(20:41):
and it really connected with me that this is about death.
These are all dead people, and they're all thirty or forty,
and the tragedy just overwhelmed me.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Even though so many were dying and many were already dead.
The reaction of the United States government was slow and negligent.
The president at the time, Ronald Reagan, was a staunch
Conservative who had been elected in a landslide largely due
to evangelical Christians, and AIDS was a disease centered around
(21:19):
drugs and gay sex. It would be several years into
the crisis before the President even said the word AIDS publicly.
In the early eighties, his Press Secretary Larry Speaks was
asked about the AIDS crisis in a White House press
briefing and responded, laughing, saying, quote, I don't have it,
(21:40):
do you. Queer people across America were furious. Here's Richard
Burns again.
Speaker 9 (21:46):
You also have to remember, in the minds of the
government and the media, like mainstream media and in corporate America,
gay people were completely disposable. And the fact that as
it emerged that AIDS affected intravenious drug users and gay men.
There was a perception that, like, well, maybe we're better
(22:08):
off without those people. William Buckley in the New York Times.
He was the editor of the National Review, and you know,
one of the leaders of the right in America, the
intellectual right. He in an essay and the Times said
that people with age should be tattooed.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
You remember how you felt when you read that.
Speaker 9 (22:26):
We were so enraging, you know, And the fact that
the Times would publish that shows you what they thought
of us.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
But all of the sadness and grief was being transformed
into rage. And out of that rage a group was
born that would change everything. Act UP. It stood for
the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, the premier AIDS activism organization,
(22:54):
and on March twenty fourth, nineteen eighty seven, Act UP
held its first protests on Wall Street during the morning
rush hour to capture and direct the attention of Americans
towards AIDS. Jean Carla Musta, a filmmaker and lesbian AIDS activist,
heard about the protests from her friends, so she grabbed
her camcorder and headed downtown.
Speaker 8 (23:16):
I knew people were angry and I knew people were
starting to feel like it wasn't enough. I went down
to Wall Street. It was kind of a cold March day,
and people are chanting and a leaflitting, and all of
a sudden, a bunch of them got in the middle
of the road, sat there with their signs and holding
(23:40):
hands with each other and just started chanting.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
The middle of Wall Street.
Speaker 8 (23:52):
In the middle of Wall Street, they stopped traffic. They
were protesting. They were doing a dye in. Basically, they
were laying in the street, in the middle of Wall Street,
and they weren't moving. The police were there, they were
trying to get them out.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Of the way.
Speaker 8 (24:08):
They basically were hauling them out on stretchers, and people
weren't moving. Everybody was determined that they were going to
get arrested. I remember this energy just made me go
into a different frame of mind. So I was just
dodging around them with the camera and I was shooting
(24:30):
between the policemen's legs and what not, trying to get
trying to document this because it was just so important.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
At this point. The top priority for most activists was
to keep people alive, since the likelihood of death was
so high. People diagnosed were desperate for any experimental drugs,
but there were two groups standing in the way. The
first was the FDA, who's slow approval process wasted time
(25:01):
that AIDS patients didn't have. So activists like Derek Hodle,
the leader of the New York Buyers Club, took matters
into his own hands. He would smuggle the drugs from
other countries to get them into the bodies of AIDS patients.
Speaker 11 (25:18):
This system is insane where people who are dying of
infections can't get access to an experimental drug because it's
experimental and it might harm them. But in the meantime,
we're going to smuggle this drug in through the mail,
and you know, please do stop us if you're so inclined.
And so we set up a system where at first
(25:40):
it's just insane, but with the fluconaisol, we set up
a system to mail individual packages back through the mail,
addressed to people in the health group. And so the
mail man would come with hundreds of boxes of drugs
and and it never got like, it never got seized
(26:02):
at customs.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
The other enemy was the pharmaceutical companies. Activists felt that
they made experimental drugs expensive and unaffordable. They could do
that because in America, people dying of AIDS was a
market and their desperation for life saving drugs was a demand.
So act UP targeted them too. Here's Peter Staley again
(26:27):
talking about a protest in nineteen eighty nine against Burrow's Welcome,
the pharmaceutical company that developed AZT, which at the time
was the only drug thought of that could treat AIDS.
But the company Burrows Welcome the pharmaceutical company. The pharmaceutical company.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
They slapped this obscene price, was it. It seems low today,
seems cheap, but at that time it was the highest
price of any drug in history, ten thousand dollars a year.
Country was shocked at the price. Even some government officials
were like, this is that's shocking, and.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
For contexts, this is the only viable drug right that's
treating AIDS.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
So in September of eighty nine, we decided to do
a huge demonstration on Wall Street in front of the
Stock Exchange. But I'm like, hmm, nobody's actually gotten onto
the floor of the Stock Exchange. So I made that
my mission impossible, and within a few weeks we figured
it out how to get in, how to bypass security.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
Yeah, How did you figure that out?
Speaker 2 (27:31):
You know, the great thing about age activism is that
it was a queer movement, queer based, and that gives
you the largest by network in the world.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
You mean to say, there's a gay person.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
We are everywhere. Wow, we are everywhere. There are tons
of us in the White House, and there are endless
numbers of us on Capitol Hill, in the military, on
the stock exchange. I was a bond trader, you know,
we are everywhere. And there was an act up member
that worked not the stock floor trading floor, but there
(28:11):
were commodities floors next to it. He worked on one
of the commodity's floors, and he was my spy. We
discovered an old antique balcony and nobody was up there,
but it was over the trading floor. It was perfect
and nine to twenty five we walk up the balcony.
We kneeled down so that we're below the banister and
(28:33):
can't be seen. When we're up there, we pull out handcuffs.
We handcuffs ourselves through the chain to make it a
little harder to get us out of there. I have
had a huge banner strapped to my belly, a big
black banner that we unfurled that said sell welcome, Burrows Welcome.
And I look at my watch, which is timed perfectly
(28:54):
to the real time. And we had a runner outside
who are already had notified Associated Press that we were
up to something. And at nine twenty nine and fifty
five seconds, I say go and we stand up. We
unfurl the banner and we pull each have a a
(29:15):
pocket sized marine foghorn which says on the side of it,
do not hold close to your ears because in danger
you'll break an ear drum. These things are fucking loud,
and we all raised our hands and boom. Nobody heard
the opening bell was this piercing scream. It felt like
(29:37):
time was standing still. Everything stopped. Every the trader's like,
what what the fuck is this? They're like confused, and
they look up, they see us, they see the banner
sell welcome. Those fuckers got inside. They're in our sanctum.
The faggots got in and they went ballistic. They were frothing.
(30:02):
You know, I'd worked with these guys. I was smiling
from ear to ear. What was the result of the demonstration.
The company lowered the price again.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
Three days later, Wow, boom, and it never gets better
than that, It never feels better than that. It were
activism rarely works that fast.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
Act up In other AIDS organizations were making good progress
and racking up victories, but even though they were winning battles,
they were still losing the war. The death toll was
growing year after year. By this point, most people in
the community knew someone who had died of AIDS, and
(30:46):
for many it was their partner. Here's Chris talking about
his partner Rogers difficult final days.
Speaker 12 (30:54):
So Roger had been home for a few weeks from work,
just bedridden, and I was taking care of him, and
he was starting to would I want to say babbel
kind of talking things that didn't make sense to me,
or it was not part of any conversation. I could
hear exactly what he was saying, but to me it
(31:15):
didn't make sense, and I knew I think. I called
the hospital and they said, just get him here to
the hospital. I had to carry him. He was not
even strong enough to walk. I had to carry him
down three flights of stairs to the car. He was
very like weak and like ready to pass out. So
we get Roger into the emergency room, into a wheelchair
(31:37):
and someone went to go look at Roger and his
lips were blue, and so they were like, okay. They
immediately put him in the back and they intubated him
and they had to strap him down, and it was
kind of a horrible moment to seeing him, you know,
in such a weak state and barely breathing and getting
(32:00):
you know, not getting enough oxygen, and he pulled the
tube out, so they that's why they tied him down,
and they induced coma at that point. And so that
was basically the last time that we could look at
each other. And so when we were aware of each other,
(32:21):
it hope face to face.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
And here's Danny talking about the moment he said goodbye
to his partner Darryl.
Speaker 4 (32:28):
And on Christmas Eve of nineteen ninety three, he said,
we have to go to the hospital and I started
crying and he just he put his hand on my
shoulder and he said, not from you, not from you.
(32:52):
I'll take tears from everyone else, but not from you.
We had to carry him to the car and then
take him to the emergency room and we knew what
that meant. He was going to die. And we sat
there watching that little machine on the wall that beeps,
(33:16):
and it got lower and lower and lower until it
flat lined, and then he was gone. I was holding
him in my arms as he died, and that time
that we had together, we'll always touch my heart.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
Others, like ballroom Legendarcine Pendarvis, lost their chosen families. She
remembered the moment she said goodbye to her legendary house mother,
Avis Pandavis.
Speaker 13 (33:48):
But losing Avis took so much out of me. The
wind was knocked out of me. But I remember her
telling me that she was tired and she wanted to
be with her mother and her sisters. And in that moment,
I knew that she was going to leave me. And
she said to me, it's alright, Racing, it's all right.
(34:09):
And I said, Avis, if you're tired, let go, Let
go you and got to hold or no more. Your
job has been done. You served us as an excellent mother. Well,
and I will tell your story. I will speak your name,
and I will let people know that you will never
be forgotten.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
Aids had shaped an entire generation of queer people. Grieving
the loss of your partner at twenty thirty or even
forty years old was not normal. Not to mention the
grief of losing friends, the chosen family you finally made
after escaping your old life after years of loss, the
(35:00):
AIDS crisis began to take its toll on everyone. Here's
Bill Glenn, a spiritual leader during the AIDS crisis. He
managed the aid support group Continuum in San Francisco during
the crisis and recounted the moment that the tragedy of
AIDS hit him all at once.
Speaker 14 (35:20):
We lost one a week, so in the seven years
I was there that he lost about three hundred and
fifty clients. We created a chapel and we took I
eight by eleven photographs of everybody who we called a member,
anyone who came into the group, and men and women
who IT died. We put their pictures up, began the ceiling,
(35:43):
and when I left, every instant space in that chapel
was covered with pictures of men and women.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
Who IT died.
Speaker 14 (35:53):
I had to stop. That was forty and exhausted, and
I was at a retreat, Trappist religious retreat center in Oregon,
and I found myself on the floor of my little
room in the fetal position, crying, and I knew I
(36:15):
had to stop. I didn't want to I felt some
way I was betrayed, but I'd given fifteen years to it.
I was psychically exhausted by the death, and because the
death came at our agency and my my friends so often,
you can't fully grieve.
Speaker 1 (36:33):
That some had to face the harsh reality of planning
for their own death. Here's Olympic diver Greg luganis again.
Speaker 10 (36:43):
I'm not much for surprises. I'm not crazy about surprises.
But my thirty third birthday, I was wasting, you know,
I was losing weight. We couldn't figure out what was
going on. We didn't know, and so I gave my
address book to my then partner and my mom and said, naked,
(37:03):
throw me a surprise birthday party. The surprise was going
to be I didn't know who was going to show up,
but I thought I was saying goodbye to everybody.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
I was prepared to die.
Speaker 10 (37:15):
I wasn't prepared to live.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
By the mid nineties, the community was exhausted. Nineteen ninety
four was the worst year of death yet. But even
through their fatigue, activists kept fighting for treatment, fundraising for research,
and persevering for all the loved ones who were lost.
(37:38):
Peter Staley, who was an act UP was now a
member of TAG, short for Treatment Action Group. They were
working very closely with scientists and the Clinton administration when
a breakthrough happened in nineteen ninety six at the annual
AIDS conference, which was in Vancouver that year. Here's Peter
on that moment.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
We were getting over a billion dollars a year. We
had money to burn, and we just had to spend
it wisely and do the right research. And the TAG
was intimately involved with the development of this new class
of antivirals called protease inhibitors. And then many of us
were in the room when the results got released. We
(38:21):
had been through so many moments of dashed hope, so
many moments that it was it was very hard to believe.
But we also at that point were very adept at
the science and this was rock solid. So it was surreal.
(38:45):
And whenever we went to an AIDS conference overseas, we
would add a vacation at the end of it, you know,
to blow off steam, smoking weed with David on the
beach on Vancouver Island. After the Vancouver IGHTHS conference, I'm like,
so we're gonna live and he's like, I guess. So
(39:13):
it just didn't. It was so hard to wrap our
heads around. But within weeks we all went on the
regimen that had been on the slides, and a month
after that, all of us saw our viral loads go
from the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands to undetectable.
Speaker 1 (39:35):
Today, the landscape around HIV and AIDS is completely different.
It's no longer a death sentence, and it's largely preventable
with breakthrough drugs like prep All. This means that the
fear of HIV is slowly fading away. Amazingly. Experts say
(39:57):
a cure isn't as far away as we think. In fact,
it might be here in the next ten years. One
of my favorite moments of this entire series was when
I asked Peter Staley what he thinks that day is
going to be like for him when they find a cure.
This is his answer, what do you think that day
(40:21):
will be like for you?
Speaker 11 (40:22):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (40:22):
My god, amazing. There's a scene at the end of
Longtime Companion, a beautiful tear jerker AIDS film, where they
ending in like a dreamlike sequence when AIDS is cured
and it's all on fire Island's beach and all the
characters who have died during the film. They're all back
(40:45):
and everybody's hugging each other, so I think there'll be
a lot of remembering of those we lost.
Speaker 1 (41:06):
But We Loved is hosted by me Jordan Gonsolves. New
episodes drop every Wednesday. If you want to write in
to tell your story, email us at Butweloved at gmail
dot com, or you can send me a message on
Instagram or TikTok at your underscore goosolves. We are a
production of The Outspoken Podcast Network and iHeart Podcasts. But
(41:29):
We Loved was originally developed with Pushkin Industries. Our producers
are Joey pat Emily Meronoff, and Christina Loranger. Our executive
producers are me Maya Howard and Katrina Norville. Original music
by Steve Boone. Special thanks to Jay Brunson and Roquel Willis.
If you loved this episode, leave us a rating and
(41:50):
follow us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and thank you
for listening. I'll see you next week.
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