[hist, lgbt] "Wow. The past really is a foreign country"

[siderea]

I'm am catching up on some reading, and finally got around to reading a Metafilter post and associated links, which included a bunch of Reddit discussion, all concerning the history of the AIDS crisis in the US

Comments

[heron61]

Wow, I had no idea that anyone who wasn't part of an insular and willfully ignorant subculture didn't know this.

[siderea]

Well, at least one IIRC mentioned being from the Midwest. :/

[nancylebov]

I may have reached the point where the present is a foreign county.

Knowing the truth is valuable, but I think it's kind of cool that younger people reflexively reject something that is plausibly a homophobic slur.

[siderea]

Hah! Yes on both counts.

I'm reminded of a Black professor of mine commenting that he's really freaked out by how casually his three kids use the N-word. He observed that despite his trying to explain to them, they really don't get what it means to someone of his generation, because, mercifully, they don't have the perspective.

[gement]

Knowing the truth is valuable, but I think it's kind of cool that younger people reflexively reject something that is plausibly a homophobic slur.

That part is, in fact, a relief. I was raised with "You can't get AIDS from toilet seats or sharing a drink" in grade school (mid-late 80s), and only learned about the horrifying negligence as an adult who pays attention to queer history.

If people are missing the travesty and the loss, at least they're also missing the libel?

[squirrelitude]

I had not known about the will-full ignoring part, no. :-(

[ron_newman]

I certainly remember AIDS starting out as a disease affecting primarily gay men ... but I also recall Reagan's surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, actually doing a lot of good on this subject?

[ckd]

Hell, I remember the joke about "if you get AIDS, just convince your parents that you're Haitian". But I lived through the 1980s. Unlike all too many.

[desireearmfeldt]

I remember some publicity effort going into teaching us (the generation coming of age sexually at the same time that AIDS was The Big News in the US) that it wasn't *only* transmissable male-to-male and therefore women & heterosexuals should take precautions, too. (Which is to say, I also remember the main narrative at the time being "gay men and intravenous drug users.") I guess that message was successfully, er, transmitted?

[siderea]

Yeah, that's sort of what one of these whippersnappers said. They'd grown up surrounded by relentless PSAs that the whole only-gays-get-AIDS thing was a myth. "Everybody knows that."