After turning 70, I became focused on “getting ready” to be old. The first action I took was to explore moving out of my third-floor walkup condo where I had lived for 30 years. Eventually those stairs would become an issue. As luck would have it, a unit went up for sale on the first floor, and I was able to stay in the building and the neighborhood I had grown to love.

Tucked in the back of a cabinet behind my slides from trips when slides were the thing, I found a 4-foot-high stack of material on AIDS. Among the documents was this lecture I gave to the psychiatry department when I was a resident in 1983. The last paragraph of this talk, as I read it for the first time in 43 years, sent a shiver through my core. It catapulted me right back to the early 1980’s when strange cases of a normally rare skin cancer known as Kaposi’s sarcoma and a lung infection usually only found in severely immune compromised people, pneumocystis pneumonia, started occurring in gay men in New York City. I latched onto this piece of news very early and became obsessed with learning what was going on and following the developing story. I received monthly reports from the CDC, Center for Disease Control, in Atlanta where the newest data on the number of cases were reported and evolving theories of what was happening were reviewed. I collected every medical article, newspaper clipping or magazine story I could find.

If you can’t wade through this lecture, although it is interesting to see what was going on before the human immunodeficiency virus was found, read the last two paragraphs, especially the last paragraph. That’s the part that really transported me back to this time and all the emotions associated with the storm that awaited us.

University of Wisconsin Department of Psychiatry Grand Rounds

Dr. Vance Baker

1983

AIDS stands for acquired immune deficiency syndrome. I think it would help to start off with a definition more specifically of what AIDS exactly is.

Official current definition of AIDS is a biopsy or culture proven life-threatening neoplasm and/or opportunistic infection in an individual with unexplained cellular immune system dysfunction. Possible AIDS is defined as persons meeting the clinical and laboratory definition of AIDS but falling outside of the idiopathic criteria that I’ve just mentioned for one or more of the following reasons: A) Infection or neoplasm unconfirmed by biopsy or positive culture or serology but is in critical condition. B) Other known cause for immunosuppression such as steroid treatment, chronic active hepatitis, or other chemotherapy but a clinical picture consistent with AIDS. C) Multiple specific risk factors such as hemophilia, IV drug abuse, and/or prostitution in addition to being homosexually active.

Pre-AIDS is the presence of two or more of the following symptom pictures:

1. A) Lymphadenopathy involving two or more separate lymph node chains progressively enlarging over a two month or greater period and not related to a known active localized and self-limiting infectious process.
2. B) Fever of unknown origin greater than 101 degrees F for three weeks or greater.
3. C) Diarrhea and/or anorexia lasting two months or more unassociated with identifiable enteric infection and resulting in a loss of 25 pounds or at least 10% of the ideal body weight loss.
4. D) Severe fatigue and/or malaise without known functional neoplastic or infectious etiology which lasts at least two months, is unrelenting, and does not respond to sufficient rest.

Suggested Pre-AIDS is defined as:

1. A) Only one of the criteria mentioned under the Pre-AIDS syndrome.
2. B) Atypical or disseminated infection such as extensive mucocutaneous herpes, oral thrush, or mycobacteriosis in the presence or absence of cellular immune system abnormality.
3. C) Repeated sexually transmitted diseases or enteric infections with definite remissions between relapses and/ or re-infection.
4. D) Proctitis of unknown etiology persisting for greater than one month and/or resistant to standard treatments if the etiologic agent has been identified.

As can be seen by these definitions, the syndrome of AIDS varies greatly in its severity and presentation. It is not currently known whether the possible Pre-AIDS syndrome is just an earlier stage in a disease process and will eventually evolve into AIDS or whether in some individuals this syndrome is more limited and less severe than in others.

In terms of laboratory studies, if they are available, AIDS presents with a typical type of dysfunction of the immune system. Specifically, it involves the cellular arm of the immune system and a specific type of cellular immunity.

Normally there are various types of lymphocytes responsible for cell mediated immunity. One of these types is called the T cell and within this classification there are both helper T cells and suppressor T cells. The latter seem to perform the function of suppressing the immune system sufficiently to prevent its overactivity.

Some people theorize that in autoimmune diseases; the suppressor T cell function is in some way defective.

Normally the ratio of helper T cells to suppressor T cells is about 2:1. In the syndrome of AIDS, the helper T cell population is reduced and the normal 2:1 ratio of helper to suppressor T cells is reversed so that the ratio is 1:2 helper T cells to suppressor cells. This results in a suppression of the immune system and the resulting complications of opportunistic infections as well as increased neoplasms.

It is this cellular arm of the immune system which is believed responsible for surveillance of tumor cells which spontaneously arise thus preventing development of neoplasms.

Now that this syndrome has been identified, I think it would be helpful to give some epidemiological and statistical information.

As of March 1983, the Center for Disease Control task force reported a total of 1,128 cases of AIDS in the United States and 70 foreign cases from 15 countries. Seventy-two percent of the cases identify as homosexual, this includes bisexual men; 16.6 percent are IV drug abusers, 4.4 percent are Haitians and 1.0 percent are hemophiliacs, 6 percent are in no apparent risk group or a risk group that is currently unknown. The above data reflects US cases only. Twenty one percent are from individuals age 20-29, 48% from 30-39, and 21% from age 40-49. The remainder in all other age groups. Thirty-five states have reported cases with New York having 49.7%, California 20.7%, New Jersey 6.7 %. Since the syndrome has been officially recognized and case reports have been kept since 1981 the incidents of new cases has doubled every six months.

The question of etiology of this syndrome has been slowly becoming more defined since it was originally identified almost two years ago.

Since it originally was noted in very sexually active homosexual men who used large amounts of recreational drugs such as amyl nitrate and butyl nitrate or “poppers”, marijuana, cocaine and amphetamines, it was believed that these various lifestyle activities resulted in a depression of the immune system. This then caused the characteristic opportunistic infections and neoplasms.

It was also believed that repeated exposure to various sexually transmitted diseases in some way adversely affected the immune system and this also then was a risk factor.

Over the last few years, it has become increasingly clear that some sort of infectious agent is involved with the transmission of AIDS. There are various pieces of evidence which led to this conclusion.

In doing epidemiological studies there was a group of men in the Los Angeles area diagnosed with AIDS who all were documented to have had sexual contact with a man visiting from New York who had a diagnosis of AIDS. Aside from other documented cases of similar exposure to AIDS, there have also been more convincing pieces of evidence that have come to life.

There was a case of an infant under one year of age who had, because of a Rh incompatibility with the mother, received multiple blood transfusions in the first few months of life. This infant came down with an AIDS syndrome with the typical immune dysfunction previously described and it was later discovered that one of the donors of the blood products the infant was receiving was a homosexual male who, although at the time of the blood donation was asymptomatic, eight months later developed AIDS.

There have also been reported cases of AIDS in hemophiliacs. It is believed that factor 8 concentrate which is a blood product used by hemophiliacs who are having an acute bleed, is the responsible substance in these cases.

Factor 8 is a blood clotting factor and to make up a unit of factor 8 concentrate requires up to a thousand units of blood, so the risk of a hemophiliac who uses multiple units of factor 8 for any acute bleed and who has multiple acute bleeds over time, has an extremely high risk of acquiring an agent transmitted in the blood. The old form of treatment which was a cryoprecipitate has a much lower risk involved because it only requires 4 to 8 units of blood for one unit of cryoprecipitate.

Hemophiliacs who have come down with AIDS syndrome often have no other risk factors associated with acquiring AIDS.

The other bit of information which is supportive of the infectious theory is that there have been 20 some cases of children of high-risk populations or persons with an actual AIDS diagnosis developing AIDS. These are mostly women who were pregnant and were either IV drug users or prostitutes and have then birthed children who develop an AIDS syndrome.

There are immune system defects which are present in children, but the specific T-helper, T-suppressor cell ratio which occurs in AIDS syndrome is not the type of abnormalities noted in any of the currently known hereditary immune disorders of childhood. Also, the cases of AIDS in mothers of prostitutes or IV drug users would require a dominant mode of transmission if indeed they were genetic immune dysfunction disorders and none of the known disorders of childhood have this mode of inheritance.

There is also a body of evidence suggesting an autoimmune mechanism involved in developing AIDS.

It has been noted by some investigators that there is an increased occurrence of the HLA antigen locus DR-5 in patients with Kaposi’s sarcoma. Naturally, this sarcoma has a high incidence in Mediterranean, and Jewish males who also have a high incidence of this HLA locus. Investigators have reported a high incidence of anti-HLA antibodies and/or anti-sperm antibodies in AIDS cases, and several auto-immune syndromes have been observed in homosexually active males during the current AIDS epidemic such as lupus, idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, hemolytic anemias and multifocal leukoencephalopathy.

It has also been noted that the wasting syndrome associated with AIDS is similar to that of graft vs host syndromes and it has been hypothesized that allogenic leukocytes injected into the body with semen could be problematic in an already immunocompromised host.

These findings, however, are not uniform and suggest that there may be many different idiopathological mechanisms involved in AIDS cases which progress to Kaposi’s sarcoma and people who die of opportunistic infections.

So, the picture at present is complicated but seems to be one of an infectious agent, which is necessary but possibly not sufficient for the acquisition of AIDS. There may also be various risk factors involved such as the number of sexual contacts, use of various drugs which have a depressant effect on the immune system and possibly even a specific HLA locus.

There has been a recent outbreak in South America of a particularly virulent hepatitis which seems to have a greater morbidity than the hepatitis B which we are used to in this country. It is believed that a possible explanation for this is that there is a viral sub particle which in and of itself is unable to infect cells and produce hepatitis, but which attaches onto the hepatitis B virus and then enters the cell with the virus and is incorporated into the cells genome and produces a particularly virulent form of hepatitis.

The transmission and epidemiology of AIDS is very similar to hepatitis B and one theory is that the AIDS agent is similar to this viral sub-particle which seems to currently be present in South America. It might also be that various other virus infections are necessary prerequisites to. The acquisition of AIDS or if not necessary, at least in some way increased the risk of the AIDS agent causing disease. Two viruses which would fulfill the necessary factors would be either hepatitis B or cytomegalovirus.

Cytomegalovirus is almost ubiquitous in the homosexual male population with as many as 98% having elevated antibody levels to cytomegalovirus. Cytomegalovirus has also been isolated from Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions in AIDS cases. Its presence in these lesions could, of course, be due to the virus’s infection after the onset of the sarcoma and not be causatively related.

Nevertheless, one possible model for AIDS could be that it’s an agent which in the presence of other viral infections, other host factors such as a specific HLA locus, or lifestyle practices which decrease the function of the immune system, is then capable of establishing an infection which specifically attacks the helper T cell population of the immune system just as the hepatitis virus specifically attacks hepatocytes.

Some people believe that this could be an agent which was imported from Africa. There is a belt in equatorial western Africa where the incidence of Kaposi’s sarcoma and various other types of lymphomas are extremely high.

One theory is that there is an agent involved in this and that it was brought back to the Caribbean area possibly from Cuban military men fighting in Angola. In this way it may have been introduced into the Caribbean and Haitian population and picked up from this group by homosexual men from New York who frequent the area as a vacation spot.

At this point, the future course of the AIDS epidemic is unknown. The most optimistic picture would be that it is caused by a not-too-virulent organism which unless a fair number of other risk factors such as heavy drug use, very high promiscuity, and possibly other sexually transmitted viral infections, does not cause a full-blown AIDS syndrome. It could be that the various possible AIDS and Pre-AIDS syndromes are infections in individuals with less risk factors and possibly a more competent immune system. If this were the case, the epidemic would eventually level out at a fairly low incidence only becoming manifest in a high-risk population.

Another scenario not as optimistic is that of a more virulent organism which is only shown up in the population that it has so far because this is the most sexually active population and therefore the most likely to initially have acquired the agent. It could be that the various people with the Pre-AIDS syndrome are merely victims of AIDS in an earlier stage and will eventually progress to a full-blown AIDS syndrome.

If this is true it would also mean that as the agent becomes more widespread it will eventually spread to other groups namely homosexual men who are not promiscuous and who do not have as many of the other risk factors as well as the heterosexual population. This would be more like what happened with the herpes Epstein-Barr epidemic.

There are people who believe the latter and who fear that the current number of clinical AIDS cases is the tip of a very large iceberg possibly involving hundreds of thousands of people who are harboring the agent and merely in various stages of its incubation.

This lecture so accurately captures this moment in time. The emerging crisis caused terror in me and the gay community. Nothing was known about what was going on and every month when the CDC put out a new report, I gobbled up the information as the latest statistics came out, and the latest theories were presented and explained.

It was a Wack-A-Mole situation, a moving target. It felt like they were throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what would stick. The evolving and multiple theories did nothing to quell my anxiety. If anything, it made things worse because no real explanation was being provided that made sense. The fact that our modern-day medical research machine, the most advanced in the world, was stumped, of course, added fuel to the anxiety fire.

The early data was descriptive with causative theories either scant or just bizarre, such as the theory that sperm in the rectum was the cause as the focus was on gay men and their lifestyle. As information became available, the theory changed. Although the science was moving fast, specifics were lacking. When the data started to support the idea that a virus may be involved, rather than providing relief, it increased my alarm exponentially.

Viruses are not really living things; it’s why antibiotics which target living organisms don’t work on them. At the time, there was no treatment for any viral infection. Computer viruses are called that because viruses are just packets of information. They are pieces of genetic material, either RNA or DNA, protected by an outer shell. When in contact with a cell, the virus attaches, and a spring-loaded type of mechanism shoots the genetic material into the cell. That genetic material is then incorporated into the cell’s DNA and instead of performing the functions it needs to stay alive, the cell just turns into a virus factory and eventually explodes and dies as it releases countless new Viral particles to infect more cells.

The idea that AIDS was caused by a transmissible virus which would not be treatable was the worst possible outcome. The worst possible outcome.

The sense of panic and foreboding I had then is hard to explain. In the two years before this lecture, the news just kept getting worse. Cases kept going up and they were doubling every 6 months. The projections of the possible number of cases moving forward were staggering. The gay plague, as it became known, was sending shock waves through the gay community.

I wrote this essay on a beach—Cinnamon Bay on St. John Island. The campground I stayed at had been rebuilt after it was destroyed by Hurricane Irma. With the winds on September 6, 2017, reaching over 200 mph, this direct hit was the most powerful storm to hit the island in recorded history. Ninety percent of structures were destroyed, and leaves were all stripped from the few trees that were left standing. Then in an unimaginable stroke of bad luck, Hurricane Marie hit 13 days later destroying much of what was left and causing untold suffering.

Being a weather nut, I imagined that had I lived here, I would have been watching the weather channel when Irma was Invest 93-L off the Cabo Verde Islands on the west coast of Africa. I would have become concerned when on August 30^th it became a tropical depression. I would have been watching the spaghetti models regarding potential storm tracks as it became a hurricane and rapidly strengthened. A sense of panic would have slowly set in as the magnitude of the unfolding disaster became clear.

AIDS was just such a storm. When in June and July of 1981 doctors in New York reported treating cases of pneumocystis pneumonia, the CDC was already tracking cases reported in Los Angeles. The New York gay press (New York Native) had started reporting the cases on May 18^th, 1981.

The storm clouds were not yet visible on the horizon, but it slowly dawned on me that something was happening. Over the ensuing year, alarm set in as it became clearer that a storm was indeed brewing.  By the time this lecture was written, the chilling last paragraph of this lecture was becoming the likely scenario. It’s not possible for me to verbalize and communicate the experience of watching this scenario unfold. The best I can do is to draw the hurricane analogy. The spaghetti models were converging on a worst-case scenario.

The reality of a category 5 direct hit became clearer when in May 1983 the virus responsible for AIDS was identified.

In 1985 there were 8,406 new cases of AIDS reported, and by the end of January there were 16,458 cumulative cases of AIDS in the United States. By 1990 there were 161,073 cumulative cases of AIDS with 43,339 new cases reported that year. By 1995 the cumulative number of cases was 501,310 with 311,381, or 62% resulting in death. To date, worldwide, there have been 44.1 million deaths from AIDS. To put this in perspective, to date there have been 7,107,212 deaths from COVID-19. It is estimated that today there are 40.8 million people living with the AIDS virus with an additional 130,000 to 180,000 new infections estimated in 2024.

Equally horrifying was the general public’s reaction, or lack thereof, to this unfolding disaster. It became a dumping ground for every prejudice, every judgmental pronouncement, every hateful opinion towards gay men this society had harbored for time immemorial. The lack of concern and action being taken was appalling and it was made very clear that this unfolding disaster was not a priority.

Once an infectious agent was identified the vitriol only got worse. There was talk of internment camps for housing infected gay men. Some health care workers refused to treat AIDS patients resulting in food trays being left outside hospital rooms. Friends and allies in the gay community started going into AIDS wards and providing care.

I started working in the area around Viroqua, Wisconsin, in 1984 and became less engaged with the gay community in Madison.  Deaths started occurring around this time in Madison and Milwaukee. My personal sphere was spared the horrific death toll of some people I know, but I lost two very dear friends.

I met Jeff Poaster just as I was divorcing my wife and had just come out. We were never lovers, but I’m sure he wanted that from me. Not having me reciprocate that must have been very hard, but he was my rock and main support over the next few years. He moved into my place when my wife Helen moved out and helped me raise my three-year-old son Jason. We moved a couple of times over the ensuing years, and after three years when Jason started living with his mother again, we continued to live together. Jeff remained a part of Jason’s life when I parented on weekends.

Jeff had moved to Chicago when he and his partner both became infected with HIV. It was in the late 1980’s, and the only treatment was AZT. It was toxic, had lots of side effects, and wasn’t very effective. He developed painful peripheral neuropathy that caused numbness and pain in his feet as well as difficulty walking due to the loss of sensation that accompanied this.

Up to 50% of people developed HIV infection and ensuing lesions in their brains before there was adequate treatment. Their deaths presented as a slowly developing dementia and entailed physical and motor deterioration as well.

When visiting Jeff during the last year of his life, he was having increasingly difficult time walking and ambulating. He also was slowly “disappearing” and interacted less with each visit. My last visit with him entailed him staring at the TV and not speaking to me for the hour or two I sat with him.

I gave a eulogy at his funeral and Jason, who accompanied me, was introduced to the realities of the AIDS epidemic with the death of his gay Uncle in our gay family.

Jim Roosa was the man I bought my 80 acres from in Western Wisconsin. When I met him, he had just lost a partner to AIDS and was himself infected. Over the next two years, as he became increasingly weak, he became unable to run his dairy farm and had to get rid of his herd. I bought some of his land so he could pay off his mortgage and stay in his home as he died. He was an alcoholic and was sober when we met, but he relapsed the last two years of his life. He was emotionally dysregulated and distraught and had several drunken public displays. Once he ran naked down his driveway, as neighbors were pulling in, screaming, “I have AIDS!” He had a similar display at a gay bar in La Crosse one night when he proclaimed his condition standing on a pool table.

One weekend when I was visiting, he woke up with double vision. This usually indicated a lesion such as a tumor. He went to the hospital in La Crosse and came home 6 hours later with an eye patch! That was the extent of the intervention and treatment. I was furious and thought it indicated an appalling lack of appropriate care based on homophobia.

He took it in stride. He also had developed an HIV brain infection with lesions causing progressive deterioration. Within two months, he was on home hospice and lying in a hospital bed that had been put in his bedroom. The last week of his life he was nonverbal, not eating or drinking. The hospice allowed me to control and administer a shot of morphine when he wanted. I sat by his bedside that week swabbing his crusty dry mouth with a sponge soaked in apple juice. Our only communication was when he squeezed my finger, which I had placed in his palm. That was our agreed upon signal that he wanted another morphine shot.

I had another friend in Milwaukee, Kerry, who was a pharmacist, and as he was dying, I became involved on his care team. Care teams spontaneously were organized in those days by friend groups with sign-up sheets for chores and tasks necessary to help care for people and maintain their homes as they succumbed to this disease.

Nobody of my generation was spared losing loved ones, NOBODY.

In sharing this essay with friends, they all told me it took a while, days or weeks, before they were ready to read this because of the trauma and memories they knew it would bring back. One friend used the term “repressed memories.” His recollections haunted me in the same way finding my lecture did with me.

He goes on to say, “1982 was the first time that I had sex with a stranger, and as a subscriber to Rolling Stone magazine, I first read of the gay cancer in an article they published. I was terrified that I was already exposed. I am one of the lucky gay guys that never got infected, I don’t know why, but I am aware of how fortunate I am. Watching friends disappear was sometimes a mystery. I’d go to bars and say to someone, where is so and so? I haven’t seen them in a few weeks. Only to hear that they had succumbed to AIDS. I didn’t even know before then that they were infected. One of my worst experiences was talking with my friend Gary who had another friend Mark with him. I said hi to Gary and then introduced Vance to him and we both introduced ourselves to Mark. A few days later I called Gary to tell him how good it was to see him. He said that he took Mark out because he hadn’t been out in quite a while. I told him that I hadn’t met Mark before and Gary told me sure I had, that Mark was Hollywood, the name everybody called him because he was such a stunning blond bombshell. Of course, I knew Hollywood and as it turns out so did Vance. The guilt still lives in me that we nodded at my friend’s acquaintance when he knew all along that we both knew him, and he didn’t call us on it.”

These are our story’s, of people just disappearing, dying when we didn’t even know they were sick. Stories of seeing someone after a long absence and AIDS having ravaged them unrecognizable. Imagine being a 28-year-old in the prime of his life and within months being invisible in a new body, ravaged beyond recognition.

Pressure from the activist gay community such as ACT UP, and the growing realization that the AIDS crisis was a global crisis for all of mankind, has resulted in scientific research and advances in treatment unimaginable in 1985. Today, being infected with HIV is a chronic illness. Treatments suppress the virus to the point where blood levels are undetectable and people harboring the virus no longer pass it on to uninfected individuals, and when living a healthy lifestyle have a lifespan approaching normal. Although there is still concern regarding HIV in the gay community, with the advent of PREP (pre-exposure prophylaxis), that concern has dwindled exponentially.

I don’t remember talking a lot with my son about the epidemic as it unfolded. He was born in 1974, so he was 10 when the repercussions of the pandemic started to unfold in Madison where we lived. He was 12 when I took him to the funeral of one of my dearest friends and he was 15 when my friend from whom I bought my beloved land in western Wisconsin died. To what extent these experiences affected his career path is unclear, but him having become an infectious disease physician specializing in treatment of and doing clinical research in treatment of HIV is truly the only bright spot, the only association with this disease that causes me joy, and of course, pride.

I’m digressing a bit here for I didn’t intend for this essay to be a review of the status of HIV treatment, nor the history of treatment advances that led to this point in time.

My goal is just to bear witness to the horrors of the early days of the epidemic and the sense of disbelief and fear that the ever-worsening information engendered in myself and all other gay men. It felt like an apocalyptic event.

It caused me to experience death up close far too early in life, it caused me to hold the friends left from that era closer, and it exposed homophobia’s true colors in a way that forever changed me. Grief never goes away, one just lives with it. For me the same is true with the anger I have from this era.

This became evident to me during and since the COVID-19 epidemic. COVID -19 was a nightmare that could have been even worse than it was. The fact that this was an airborne illness contributed not only to its indiscriminate spread, but also to the terror it engendered. Our society’s response was also anything but stellar, and that response revealed deep divisions in how we care for and protect one another. Nonetheless, for gay men who lived through the AIDS crisis, the disparity in society’s response between COVID-19 and AIDS was a slap in the face that caused major bruising.

In many ways one of the saddest parts of this whole story is the resurgence of homophobia at a national level and the federal government’s decision to cut back on HIV research and HIV treatment worldwide.

My son Jason, who has become an HIV researcher of some renown summarily had a research project he was doing in collaboration with a team in Cape Town, South Africa, defunded almost overnight. He received a huge RO1 Grant from the NIH, National Institute of Health, as a follow-up to a smaller study he had done with the same group. All in all, he and his team had invested 6 years of effort and money into this study of the cardiac effects of being HIV-positive and undetectable. Funding for his grant was stopped because the Trump administration was pulling funding for studies with the buzzwords, gay, Black and HIV.

Usually if grants are defunded, they just aren’t renewed. Stopping funds in the middle of a study is almost unheard of. This results in a lot of the data and all the previous work being unusable. It’s driven by one thing and one thing only: prejudice. In this case, homophobia and racism.

Trump also halted funding for HIV treatment in Africa, stopping a program started by President George Bush that has saved more lives than any public health intervention in the history of US funding. It is estimated that the cessation of this funding will result in 6 to 10.8 million new HIV infections and 2.9 to 4 million new deaths.

The Trump administration has even stopped funding research on an HIV vaccine!  Let that sink in, IT HAS EVEN STOPPED RESEARCH ON AN HIV VACCINE.

To add insult to injury, since I started writing this essay, the ICE invasion of Minneapolis has resulted in staff at the Hennepin Health Care facility where Jason works to suffer severe staff shortages as staff is afraid to come to work, clients are afraid to come in to receive care and the Hospital itself is entering bankruptcy. This facility of course serves indigent and T-19 patients for all of Hennepin County and has a huge HIV clinic numbering over 2,000 clients.

Once again, homophobia reigns and the true ugliness of our society’s attitude towards minorities is in plain view.

In his 1987 book And The Band Played On, Randy Shilts chronicles the first five years of the AIDS epidemic and the abysmal societal response. “And the band played on” is a phrase that has come to represent complacency in the face of impending catastrophe and refers to reports of the musicians who went down with the Titanic as they continued to play.

The ongoing tragedy of this story is how apt that metaphor remains.