I’ve been thinking about AIDS a lot lately. I hope we never see an epidemic this devastating again. One million people died from AIDS-related causes in 2017, and 36 million have succumbed to the disease since the beginning of the epidemic. In sum, the HIV virus has killed the equivalent of the population of Canada.
Just as we’ve outsourced war to young people who feel indebted to our country—unlike an increasingly large cohort who believe the country owes them—we outsourced and compartmentalized much of the suffering and the fight against AIDS. It was a “gay disease,” and we thought of a group who were victims as irresponsible instead. I believe our initial response to the crisis, as a nation, will go down as a stain on the American story.
In 1985, I remember sitting in the dining room of my fraternity and reading an L.A. Times article about scientists making progress toward an HIV vaccine. That meant this abstract thing called AIDS, that none of us had any contact with, was over. Only it wasn’t, and all of us would know several people who’d contract HIV and ultimately die from an AIDS-related illness.
It was the perfect virus: it spread through sexual contact. Something all of us eighteen-year-old males were always thinking about and plotting. We were, theoretically, the agents and warriors for the virus. We took cold comfort believing AIDS was a disease only gay men got. And none of us knew anybody who was gay.
But we did. A bunch of us were gay. Only most, if not all, of the heterosexuals in our circle had no idea. Anybody you liked who seemed “normal” couldn’t be gay, as that was a strange perversion. Definitely not anybody we knew. You couldn’t be openly gay at UCLA in the eighties. It didn’t matter how brave or comfortable with yourself you were. Being gay was unnatural. We were young men and women at UCLA, which was a postcard for natural and wholesome, and there was no tolerance for fucking with the postcard.
Yet this was slowly becoming the era when being gay was tolerated. Not accepted, but tolerated. Several friends let it be known, post-graduation, that they were gay. AIDS haunted all of them, always around, waiting, striking. AIDS haunted everyone, as years earlier the blood supply had been tainted, and there was evidence this wasn’t just a “gay disease.” Approximately half of the nation’s fifteen thousand hemophiliacs were infected. Straight people could also contract HIV. Unprotected sex meant several days of anxiety leading to 100 percent certainty you had the virus.
I’ve been introduced to Daniel Kahneman’s notion of fast and slow thinking.10 Our fast, shorthand thinking offers utility but a lack of nuance. Slow thinking is where we grow and learn; it informs the fast … I think. College was for fast thinking. Homosexuals were “fags,” and “gay” was a slur to describe something weak and unnatural. The decade after college was for slow thinking, as we discovered people we loved were gay. They had similar hopes and problems as us, only they were stalked by a plague, and their friends were dying.
After I sold my first e-commerce firm, Aardvark, my then wife and I moved from a two-bedroom in Potrero Hill to a five-bedroom in Noe Valley. That house is next to where Mark Zuckerberg now lives. I hate myself for selling it, as (1) it’s likely worth $10 million or more, and (2) I would register enormous joy sitting on my porch in a Fila tracksuit and yelling at Zuck, “How does it feel to be Putin’s bitch?” But I digress. We would go to the Castro to shop for furniture to fill the five bedrooms and would see ghosts everywhere. Men in their thirties and forties who were painfully thin and had sores littering their bodies. Thirty-five-year-old men who looked eighty, barreling toward death. Ghosts, everywhere.
We like to think the time leading up to death is a period when you can reflect on a long life of blessings. It’s a time to register the love you’ve invested and harvested. These young men were being taken early by a virus ravaging their bodies. Their backdrop: a society that had decided they weren’t really victims. Not long before, we’d had a president, Reagan, who never uttered the word “AIDS” in his eight years in the White House.
Some of our friends from UCLA who contracted HIV:
Bill Aarons was the first to die. Bill contracted the virus from clotting factors made from donated blood—the treatment that had liberated him from the tyranny of a blood disorder.
Ron became a talent agent for CAA and rose to be director of current TV at Disney by the age of thirty. I saw Ron at a friend’s wedding a decade after we’d graduated, and it was apparent his HIV had become full-blown AIDS. A few months later, Ron called several people he felt he needed to make amends with, mixed the contents of two dozen Valium capsules into a glass of vodka, and ingested the cocktail. Ron was dead at thirty-three.
Pat struggled with his sexuality and attended reeducation camps hosted by religious groups who felt homosexuality was learned and could be deprogrammed. Pat, someone we should have all continued to be good friends with, as we had been in college, just faded away. One of our group, a successful dentist, filled a cavity for Pat, who was in rough shape. Pat claimed he was suffering from a bad case of Lyme disease. Suffering, but still not trusting or wanting our friendship and love, as he’d seen the fast thinking at UCLA. I heard Pat died about a decade ago, but none of us are sure exactly when or where. I’m embarrassed and ashamed I didn’t have the decency to track him down and tell him how impressive I thought he was (remarkably creative with boundless energy), and that I was thinking about him. I am so sorry, Pat.
Tom Bailey was caught by the warm grasp of the hand of science and has been on antiretroviral treatment for twenty years. In addition to a successful career in advertising, Tom opened a spin studio, where he was an instructor. He is the godfather to my oldest son. He’s a lousy godparent. But he’s healthy and married to my best friend. And that’s enough.