AIDS Back Then

A series called "The Age of AIDS" is the newest thing that Scott the Bill in Exile blogger is doing. He’s inserting sad memories in between the hardcore porn that he so expertly curates and the political rants that I never read. Here’s an excerpt from the first installment, remembering eating out in the West Village in the late ’80s.

Back then you’d be out to dinner at a popular gay restaurant like Claire’s on 7th Avenue South or Trilogy on Christopher street and all the patrons meds beepers and alarms would start going off around the restaurant at about the same time.

And tables full of gay men would pull out their pill containers and start rooting through them for the dozen or more pills that they had to take with their dinner.

It wasn’t unusual to see an entire table of four, each with their pill containers in front of them, trying to figure out which of the meds they had to take.

Here’s the second installment in full:

I remember going to a dinner party around 1983 it must have been — I didn’t know the two hosts but had been invited by a guy I was seeing at the time and he was friends with one of them from work.

It was a dinner for about eight guests and the hosts and when we arrived it became immediately apparent that the host whom my date did not know was suffering from “The Gay Cancer” or what had been known as GRID until earlier that same year.

Now it’s called AIDS of course.

All of the guests were gay men and you could feel the palpable sense of fear that emanated from the entire group of guests when it became obvious what it was that our host was suffering from.

One couple actually said they wouldn’t be able to eat there and left the dinner party and another person, an insanely sexy blond dancer from the Paul Taylor Dance Company {whom I ended up fucking about a year later}, asked that his food be served on paper plates with plastic cutlery.

I stayed and ate on the good china that I was offered and used the good silverware, but I will admit that I was wondering the entire time if doing so would end up being the death of me.

Both dinner party hosts were dead within 18 months and I learned a couple of years later that the dancer from Paul Taylor whom I dated for a while, and who asked that his food be served on paper plates, died from a nasty CMV infection in the charity ward of St. Vincent’s Hospital — after first going blind and then completely insane.

Of course, we all learned later that you couldn’t get AIDS by eating from the dinner plate of someone who was HIV positive.

In the third installment, Scott, then a 24-year-old with sudden and bizarre case of shingles, asked the doctor to explain the new gay disease. Here’s what the doctor told him:

“Some people are getting really weird, rare cancers. Some people are getting covered from head to toe with KS lesions which is yet another weird form of cancer that we never really saw a lot of before this. Some people are getting PCP. Some people are going blind. Some people are going insane from CMV, which most adults have been exposed to and which is generally harmless — unless you have AIDS and then it can shred your mind like tissue paper. Some people are having their internal organs simply fail on them.  Some people have no immediate symptoms and yet are dead within a month of the onset of their first symptom which may seem like nothing more than a low grade flu. Some people get all of the symptoms that I just described all at the same time and die very quickly and still other people recover, relapse, recover and relapse for months and months first with one symptom and then with another.

But everyone who comes down with it right now and who dies is dying in absolute agony.

And pretty much everyone is dying.”

 

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Bill in Exile

 

 

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