I was an AmeriCorps volunteer at Birmingham AIDS Outreach(90's) and took care of patients before the drug cocktail came out. So many clients died. This made me demand safe sex even to this day. Today there are drugs to prevent you from getting HIV infected. Many hospitals did not treat gay patients well with AIDS. Today, black women lead the cases of AIDS from so many black bisexual men on the down low. My patients died horribly, families abandoned them, and the sores , holes and spots on many of my patients haunts me today.
Thank you Anderson Cooper and Andrew Sullivan for this Interview. I was the first person in Portland Oregon tested for AIDS. Despite remaining HIV- since that time it has destroyed my life in such a way I could not have ever imagined. There were just so many deaths and so few resources. I am just now coming to terms with the PTSD I develloped after my last friend died in 1998. Doctors would not even want to approach the issue. They refused to admit there was a problem. There is an emotional component that is lacking when people talk of AIDS today. It would be nice if you explored this more.
We are the walking wounded. The effects of being in that "war" have not been fully studied. I live in San Francisco and lost 90% of my friends to AIDS. I still grieve and likely have PTSD. It's difficult to convey (and the video says the same) the horrors we lived with on a daily basis. It's devastating to me still.
But you are all (even those who we lost) well loved by at least one person you don’t know. Speak for those you/we lost... as people always live on thru the memories of others. Don’t despair. Love is being sent your way!
Even now stills people discriminated you because of HIV status... it was rough time on 80 and 90 ....maybe people not pretended or cares of HIV ... but the time they get it they will know how much strategy and straggling every day with it ? ...
You sir are so brave for speaking about your experience. I cannot imagine going through what you went through. Much love and respect and peace to you sir.
I was diagnosed as positive in 1986 and went through the same experience as Andrew. The Viral Load test was not available to me until 1997 when I was finally put on meds.
AC is right about the lack of awareness in the younger generation. I was a kid but I remember the fear in the community. The awareness of this terrifying disease, the Grim Reaper ads on TV (I’m Australian). Mum explaining not to be scared of HIV positive people, but watch out for needles in park. Talking to a + man on a long bus trip as a teenager and learning all about his experience during the late 80s and early 90s, the worst times. And now, his ongoing health issues despite being on meds. I worry about how casual young people are now. “Oh, AIDS isn’t such a big deal ... you just take meds, right?” I had a young gay housemate a few years ago (before PREP) and found out he thought he couldn’t contract HIV because he was always the top. I spoke to him about the risks but he was totally disinterested. Hetero kids are even worse! Safe sex / condoms are considered old-fashioned and “lame”
Complete amnesia and no memorials ,it’s so true. I’m an Rn who worked through the aids epidemic right at the beginning and well into it. My hospital dealt with aids and was hit the hardest with all the aids patients, we remember the losses and the ignorance of people.no government involvement. The stigma was horrible and the fear was crippling. No one wanted to touch their patients with aids but we did, even though we didn’t know how it was spread in the beginning. So sad that time.
A friend's brother died from AIDS IN '94. When he was diagnosed in '91 he had already developed full blown AIDS. He was most likely infected in the early '80's when there was little known about the disease. In the '80's I remember being in 9th grade and there was a rumor going around that somebody in our school had AIDS. Rumor had it she/he was going into the restrooms and spiting on the toilet seats because they were angry about being infected, and supposedly wanted to infect others. All the horrible gay/AIDS "jokes" kids would make :( It was a sad, sad time. So many lives lost and destroyed by a horrible disease.
Yes, in the beginning we had to band together to help each other because we were ignored by the rest of society and our pleas for help were ignored. After several years HIV began to strike and kill straight hemophiliacs! Now finally our pleas were taken seriously and research started., Straight society, government - were fine with gays dying and wanted that. This has been very hard to forgive.
In the first 3 years of the AIDS epidemic I lost my best friend, one of my roommates and numerous other friends and acquaintances. The ignorance and hate .... smh. I am not at a place where forgiveness is possible. Part of the problem is that MOST of the hateful assholes who were responsible for how LGBTQ people were treated back then are NO DIFFERENT TODAY from what they were back then! They are hateful and vicious. I saw dozens of videos of MINISTERS CELEBRATING the Pulse MASSACRE! How can we forgive people who CONTINUE to push gay hate as the basis of their "religion?"
None of you have to forgive anything, ever. Don't ever listen to anyone who tells you otherwise. If a therapist tells you that, ditch that therapist and find a better one.
@@chriswolfe7830 I want to be completely honest because I used to be like that but I changed myself alot over the years and now I'm a completely different person, I'm very embarrassed about the person I used to be but I realised it was more me, the hate inside me. Now I see everyone just humans and everyone deserves to love and be loved no matter what.
Is it possible to have memory without its true experience?....Young gay men that did not bury many of their friends, will never have a clue, and the circle of those that lived through it only becomes smaller as time marches on..
young people think they are very smart and all others are dumb. They will learn when it comes to they smart own body. They will.......tic tac tic tac ....
There's something called generational trauma, which is when the literal/cultural descendants of survivors *act* Iike trauma survivors, because the response to trauma becomes part of the culture. A great example of this is the stereotype of Ashkenazi Jews as neurotic penny pinchers- that's because they spent a couple hundred years constantly on the brink of starvation/massacre. There's an argument that american masculinity became stoic because 2 whole generations of men went to war, got PTSD, and then raised kids without ever getting treated. Common symptoms - short temper, poor ability to express or manage emotions, difficulty with trust or building meaningful relationships- became the next generations model of what a normal adult man acts like. So if you inherit a historical trauma, you might "remember" it in the sense that you are shaped by it, and when you learn about it might recognize it as the thing that shaped you. Its like a copy of a fossil. If an imprint of a dead animal in stone is a kind of memory of that animal, then we could say the stone remembers. If you make a copy of that fossil, you might say the copy "remembers" the form of the animal too, although unlike the original it doesn't contain the chemical signatures. Just the form.
We're watching that happen even now... We're at the start of another McCarthy era and the American public is oblivious. We really are doomed to repeat our mistakes over and over and over again. Our species walks towards extinction due to our own stupidity. :(
Professor Logic he sure as hell was .... CONSIDERING THE PROMISCUITY OF GAY MEN AT THE TIME , THIS THING TOOK EVERYONE BY SURPRISE . MY WIFE AND I CARED FOR 3 AIDS PATIENTS UNTIL THEIR DEATHS IN OUR HOME . EVERY DAY A LITTLE WEAKER AND SICKER FOR 6.7.8 years ....I HAD TO DRAG A FRIEND OUT OF FLORIDA BECAUSE HIS MOM WAS A SCHOOL TEACHER AND HER JOB WAS IN DANGER DURING RYAN WHITE . NO ONE WANTED TO BE IN THE SAME ROOM OR HOME WITH THESE PEOPLE . I VOLUNTEERED IN SAFE HOUSES THAT WE HAD TO MOVE EVERY 6 MONTHS . SHUT YOUR PIE HOLE , REGAN WAS HORRIFIED ! FDA INCREASED PASSING OF NEW DRUGS WITHOUT TESTING , THE COCKTAIL CAME , SAVED MILLIONS WHO ARE STILL ALIVE TODAY . .
I was gay and 25, living in Houston in 1985. I never got HIV, most likely because I didn't party, drink or take drugs or poppers. I didn't hit the bookstores and bath houses...BUT if I had been into drugs, I probably would have gone to the sex joints, gotten HIV...and I'd likely be dead now. What I am saying is that I was lucky I didn't want to do what a lot of gay guys were doing in large urban centers.
I remember well. We lost 2 family members, married straight, in 1992 and 94.It was traumatizing watching these horrific deaths and nothing we could do, no meds yet.Took me years to recover. Such hard deaths. RIP 🙏🙏
@@SergioSantos-yv1pz ... It is sad, the person I know who died recently stopped taking his meds, and once he stopped he died quickly, HIV spread like crazy and he got AIDS soon after, died of pneumonia .... Very sad...
@@briankelly9347 .... “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
Start with Peter Deusberg please , I’m talking to hundreds of people that are HIV positive & have never taken any toxic ARV’s & are completely fine after many years , there is a wonderful interview with Neville Hodgkinson that I beg you to all watch , turn off emotional & subjective thinking & see if it’s possible for any of you to look at it logically from the other side , fear is there tool & it has worked very well indeed, a very sad part of human history
That was Murder,,,Acupuncture needle's tainted with full blown Aids,,killed Him in less than 3 weeks,,,there still finding kids His wife GF's none had. HIV
I thought you could develop immunity to a virus. How come no immunity? So Prep is a prophylactic against getting HIV so does it work every time? How much does it cost? Side effects?
HIV is unique and that you can’t gain immunity to it by the nature of the disease. PREP is a course of medication that kills the virus before it begins. It’s 30 days, there are side effects: headaches, nausea, vomiting, rash and loss appetite. It’s roughly $2000
There is a tiny amount of people that are immune to HIV. Additionally, some people fight it for much longer before it progresses. However, HIV attacks the immune system specifically so it's much more severe than other types of viruses.
Indeed for Gay's and Hetro, 80/90, fear off Dating. At the time single, did not dare date for 7 years!!! As none Gay person. That time Manny Men, keept their life style secret!! Very scary!? It should today reflect the seriousness off non commital random relationships. It both for Gay's but also families. Today, we should consider Covid 19 in a similar fashion, yes also to be self proactive toward personal Health. Also inguire about deceases. In general. And yes not just young people remain uneducated to respect health. Also, how history is Bleached out today. Yes we need memorial off those who died. So true. Good conversation. Thank you for our youth, and grandchildren.🇩🇰🇺🇸🗽💜
Noz Islam To say " required" seems full hearty from my perspective. Was the holocaust required? Seems a saddly ignorent statement from a well meaning person.
I agree that this was a wake up call to the gay community, however it is also a wake up call to the straight community. Surely you have gone to a straight bar in the evening sometime and seen what goes on after hours there, there is tons of unprotected irresponsible sex going on by straight people, it happens all the time. To isolate the gay community about sexual promiscuity is almost as bad as to not acknowledge straight people do it just as much. It’s called responsible sexual behavior to anyone straight or gay.
It upsets me when Andrew Sullivan said that AIDS kill more people than those loss in Vietnam--60.000...interesting how he totally ignores the loss of life in the Vietnam side that according to some estimates was around two million...but well, for him that is the only number that counts.
I really don’t think he was discounting Vietnam at all, he was just comparing the numbers of the two atrocities. If you find Vietnam and his casualties atrocious, which they undeniably work, and you should find these just as horrible if not even worse. They’re both terrible. And a waste of good human lives.
I was born in 2000. I have had to dig to find information on the aids outbreak. There is so little out there that records the hell that queer people had to live through at the time as well as many women. It is disgusting how little straight people who lived through this time know about what happened.
I was an AmeriCorps volunteer at Birmingham AIDS Outreach(90's) and took care of patients before the drug cocktail came out. So many clients died. This made me demand safe sex even to this day. Today there are drugs to prevent you from getting HIV infected. Many hospitals did not treat gay patients well with AIDS. Today, black women lead the cases of AIDS from so many black bisexual men on the down low. My patients died horribly, families abandoned them, and the sores , holes and spots on many of my patients haunts me today.
Thank you Anderson Cooper and Andrew Sullivan for this Interview. I was the first person in Portland Oregon tested for AIDS. Despite remaining HIV- since that time it has destroyed my life in such a way I could not have ever imagined. There were just so many deaths and so few resources. I am just now coming to terms with the PTSD I develloped after my last friend died in 1998. Doctors would not even want to approach the issue. They refused to admit there was a problem. There is an emotional component that is lacking when people talk of AIDS today. It would be nice if you explored this more.
We are the walking wounded. The effects of being in that "war" have not been fully studied. I live in San Francisco and lost 90% of my friends to AIDS. I still grieve and likely have PTSD. It's difficult to convey (and the video says the same) the horrors we lived with on a daily basis. It's devastating to me still.
But you are all (even those who we lost) well loved by at least one person you don’t know. Speak for those you/we lost... as people always live on thru the memories of others. Don’t despair. Love is being sent your way!
God bless you
Even now stills people discriminated you because of HIV status... it was rough time on 80 and 90 ....maybe people not pretended or cares of HIV ... but the time they get it they will know how much strategy and straggling every day with it ? ...
You sir are so brave for speaking about your experience. I cannot imagine going through what you went through. Much love and respect and peace to you sir.
I was diagnosed as positive in 1986 and went through the same experience as Andrew. The Viral Load test was not available to me until 1997 when I was finally put on meds.
Lawrence Forsyth stay strong, and hang in there my friend! You are supported, whether you know who supports you or not. Much love!
AC is right about the lack of awareness in the younger generation.
I was a kid but I remember the fear in the community. The awareness of this terrifying disease, the Grim Reaper ads on TV (I’m Australian). Mum explaining not to be scared of HIV positive people, but watch out for needles in park. Talking to a + man on a long bus trip as a teenager and learning all about his experience during the late 80s and early 90s, the worst times. And now, his ongoing health issues despite being on meds.
I worry about how casual young people are now. “Oh, AIDS isn’t such a big deal ... you just take meds, right?” I had a young gay housemate a few years ago (before PREP) and found out he thought he couldn’t contract HIV because he was always the top. I spoke to him about the risks but he was totally disinterested. Hetero kids are even worse! Safe sex / condoms are considered old-fashioned and “lame”
Instablaster.
Complete amnesia and no memorials ,it’s so true.
I’m an Rn who worked through the aids epidemic right at the beginning and well into it. My hospital dealt with aids and was hit the hardest with all the aids patients, we remember the losses and the ignorance of people.no government involvement. The stigma was horrible and the fear was crippling. No one wanted to touch their patients with aids but we did, even though we didn’t know how it was spread in the beginning. So sad that time.
A friend's brother died from AIDS IN '94. When he was diagnosed in '91 he had already developed full blown AIDS. He was most likely infected in the early '80's when there was little known about the disease. In the '80's I remember being in 9th grade and there was a rumor going around that somebody in our school had AIDS. Rumor had it she/he was going into the restrooms and spiting on the toilet seats because they were angry about being infected, and supposedly wanted to infect others. All the horrible gay/AIDS "jokes" kids would make :( It was a sad, sad time. So many lives lost and destroyed by a horrible disease.
Yes, in the beginning we had to band together to help each other because we were ignored by the rest of society and our pleas for help were ignored. After several years HIV began to strike and kill straight hemophiliacs! Now finally our pleas were taken seriously and research started., Straight society, government - were fine with gays dying and wanted that. This has been very hard to forgive.
In the first 3 years of the AIDS epidemic I lost my best friend, one of my roommates and numerous other friends and acquaintances.
The ignorance and hate .... smh.
I am not at a place where forgiveness is possible.
Part of the problem is that MOST of the hateful assholes who were responsible for how LGBTQ people were treated back then are NO DIFFERENT TODAY from what they were back then!
They are hateful and vicious.
I saw dozens of videos of MINISTERS CELEBRATING the Pulse MASSACRE!
How can we forgive people who CONTINUE to push gay hate as the basis of their "religion?"
People were horrified ! Gay friends were in ... It was to hard for most to watch
@@GEORGIE12211 Reagan was not horrified.
None of you have to forgive anything, ever. Don't ever listen to anyone who tells you otherwise. If a therapist tells you that, ditch that therapist and find a better one.
@@chriswolfe7830
I want to be completely honest because I used to be like that but I changed myself alot over the years and now I'm a completely different person, I'm very embarrassed about the person I used to be but I realised it was more me, the hate inside me. Now I see everyone just humans and everyone deserves to love and be loved no matter what.
The band played on 1993 HBO's tv movie.
Is it possible to have memory without its true experience?....Young gay men that did not bury many of their friends, will never have a clue, and the circle of those that lived through it only becomes smaller as time marches on..
young people think they are very smart and all others are dumb. They will learn when it comes to they smart own body. They will.......tic tac tic tac ....
There's something called generational trauma, which is when the literal/cultural descendants of survivors *act* Iike trauma survivors, because the response to trauma becomes part of the culture. A great example of this is the stereotype of Ashkenazi Jews as neurotic penny pinchers- that's because they spent a couple hundred years constantly on the brink of starvation/massacre. There's an argument that american masculinity became stoic because 2 whole generations of men went to war, got PTSD, and then raised kids without ever getting treated. Common symptoms - short temper, poor ability to express or manage emotions, difficulty with trust or building meaningful relationships- became the next generations model of what a normal adult man acts like.
So if you inherit a historical trauma, you might "remember" it in the sense that you are shaped by it, and when you learn about it might recognize it as the thing that shaped you.
Its like a copy of a fossil. If an imprint of a dead animal in stone is a kind of memory of that animal, then we could say the stone remembers. If you make a copy of that fossil, you might say the copy "remembers" the form of the animal too, although unlike the original it doesn't contain the chemical signatures. Just the form.
@Calvin Lynn....I've forgotten about this video...thank you for your explanation....
I agree with every word. Let us never forget our fallen
People will forget, people will repeat.
We're watching that happen even now... We're at the start of another McCarthy era and the American public is oblivious.
We really are doomed to repeat our mistakes over and over and over again.
Our species walks towards extinction due to our own stupidity. :(
Professor Logic he sure as hell was .... CONSIDERING THE PROMISCUITY OF GAY MEN AT THE TIME , THIS THING TOOK EVERYONE BY SURPRISE . MY WIFE AND I CARED FOR 3 AIDS PATIENTS UNTIL THEIR DEATHS IN OUR HOME . EVERY DAY A LITTLE WEAKER AND SICKER FOR 6.7.8 years ....I HAD TO DRAG A FRIEND OUT OF FLORIDA BECAUSE HIS MOM WAS A SCHOOL TEACHER AND HER JOB WAS IN DANGER DURING RYAN WHITE . NO ONE WANTED TO BE IN THE SAME ROOM OR HOME WITH THESE PEOPLE . I VOLUNTEERED IN SAFE HOUSES THAT WE HAD TO MOVE EVERY 6 MONTHS . SHUT YOUR PIE HOLE , REGAN WAS HORRIFIED ! FDA INCREASED PASSING OF NEW DRUGS WITHOUT TESTING , THE COCKTAIL CAME , SAVED MILLIONS WHO ARE STILL ALIVE TODAY . .
It's all ready started.
I was gay and 25, living in Houston in 1985. I never got HIV, most likely because I didn't party, drink or take drugs or poppers. I didn't hit the bookstores and bath houses...BUT if I had been into drugs, I probably would have gone to the sex joints, gotten HIV...and I'd likely be dead now. What I am saying is that I was lucky I didn't want to do what a lot of gay guys were doing in large urban centers.
Gotta say it when it's true. Great clip and good insight on the AIDS epidemic
What will we do about the bug-chasing culture and mentality? They are everywhere, and have not allowed for the prevention to work as I see it should.
It was a big tragedy!!
This video should be pushed more by CNN PR or on Anderson's social media presence.
I remember well. We lost 2 family members, married straight, in 1992 and 94.It was traumatizing watching these horrific deaths and nothing we could do, no meds yet.Took me years to recover. Such hard deaths. RIP 🙏🙏
I know several people personally that have died from AIDS, one recently, people are still dying even in the USA with the advancement of meds...
I know few that have died from aids in the last 10 years... that's sad
@@SergioSantos-yv1pz ... It is sad, the person I know who died recently stopped taking his meds, and once he stopped he died quickly, HIV spread like crazy and he got AIDS soon after, died of pneumonia .... Very sad...
@@funkyflights No he in hell!!
@@briankelly9347 .... “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
@brian Kelly: soooooo you profess to be God?
Start with Peter Deusberg please , I’m talking to hundreds of people that are HIV positive & have never taken any toxic ARV’s & are completely fine after many years , there is a wonderful interview with Neville Hodgkinson that I beg you to all watch , turn off emotional & subjective thinking & see if it’s possible for any of you to look at it logically from the other side , fear is there tool & it has worked very well indeed, a very sad part of human history
I’m sorry but been on prep encourages unsafe sex and it doesn’t stop other dangerous virus that can’t be cured either, so not the answer
Brilliant interview
We understand now how you felt then
Rip easy e
That was Murder,,,Acupuncture needle's tainted with full blown Aids,,killed Him in less than 3 weeks,,,there still finding kids His wife GF's none had. HIV
AC should remember that the black civil rights movement helped every one.........
God,I just love seeing a Anderson cooper doing the news.....
Accord to Allah which he states in AL Qur'an that the people of Sodom and Gomorrah suffered the same fate
Is AC positive?
Bravo! Now it's COVID-19. I hope those who shamed us then, are stepping up to serve others now.
What documentary is Andrew referring to at 10:14?
I think he's talking about How To Survive A Plague: www.imdb.com/title/tt2124803/
I thought you could develop immunity to a virus. How come no immunity? So Prep is a prophylactic against getting HIV so does it work every time? How much does it cost? Side effects?
HIV is unique and that you can’t gain immunity to it by the nature of the disease. PREP is a course of medication that kills the virus before it begins. It’s 30 days, there are side effects: headaches, nausea, vomiting, rash and loss appetite. It’s roughly $2000
There is a tiny amount of people that are immune to HIV. Additionally, some people fight it for much longer before it progresses. However, HIV attacks the immune system specifically so it's much more severe than other types of viruses.
@@katiekuchen9694 you're thinking of PEP, not PrEP.
Indeed for Gay's and Hetro, 80/90, fear off Dating. At the time single, did not dare date for 7 years!!! As none Gay person. That time Manny Men, keept their life style secret!! Very scary!? It should today reflect the seriousness off non commital random relationships. It both for Gay's but also families. Today, we should consider Covid 19 in a similar fashion, yes also to be self proactive toward personal Health. Also inguire about deceases. In general. And yes not just young people remain uneducated to respect health. Also, how history is Bleached out today. Yes we need memorial off those who died. So true. Good conversation. Thank you for our youth, and grandchildren.🇩🇰🇺🇸🗽💜
Aids was a required wake up call for the gay community in terms of attitude. This is not a criticism or a prejudice but a truth of the time.
Noz Islam To say " required" seems full hearty from my perspective. Was the holocaust required? Seems a saddly ignorent statement from a well meaning person.
I agree that this was a wake up call to the gay community, however it is also a wake up call to the straight community. Surely you have gone to a straight bar in the evening sometime and seen what goes on after hours there, there is tons of unprotected irresponsible sex going on by straight people, it happens all the time. To isolate the gay community about sexual promiscuity is almost as bad as to not acknowledge straight people do it just as much. It’s called responsible sexual behavior to anyone straight or gay.
It upsets me when Andrew Sullivan said that AIDS kill more people than those loss in Vietnam--60.000...interesting how he totally ignores the loss of life in the Vietnam side that according to some estimates was around two million...but well, for him that is the only number that counts.
Jesus, you're stupid.
Mauricio, he is c
I really don’t think he was discounting Vietnam at all, he was just comparing the numbers of the two atrocities. If you find Vietnam and his casualties atrocious, which they undeniably work, and you should find these just as horrible if not even worse. They’re both terrible. And a waste of good human lives.
YEA , HE WAS !!!!
I was born in 2000. I have had to dig to find information on the aids outbreak. There is so little out there that records the hell that queer people had to live through at the time as well as many women. It is disgusting how little straight people who lived through this time know about what happened.
Make your RUclips posts the same audio level. Jeanne moos is always quiet, this clip is very loud. Get it together for web content!
a cure should have been provided a lot sooner
I’m not the biggest Fan of Anderson Cooper he turned his back on his “friend” Katy Griffin. Also what has he done for the gay community.
Many of those who are gay men looks very pale. Why? Does it have something to do with some kind of illness?
Just don't take it up the "Hootin Annie."