From free love to safe sex
In hindsight, the news reported on June 5, 1981, was the first cold slap of a new reality. The Centers for Disease Control announced that five homosexual men in Los Angeles had been stricken with Pneumocystis carinii, a rare form of pneumonia. Within a month, 26 cases of Kaposi's sarcoma, another rare disease that was soon to be known as "gay men's cancer," were reported in New York and California.
No one yet had put the name AIDS to these puzzling cases, no one knew the diseases were caused by HIV, and no one could stop the quick progression from disease to death that made the next 15 years look, in some communities, like a massacre.
What followed those early reports was a roller coaster of fear and apathy, as the epidemic first ravaged gay men, IV drug users and -- until testing made the blood supply safe -- hemophiliacs and transfusion recipients. The epidemic made its way increasingly to heterosexuals, particularly in poor and rural communities. It now afflicts 1 million Americans, and 40,000 new cases of HIV infection are expected this year, according to the CDC.
For a quarter of a century, Americans have had to face the uncomfortable knowledge that, with one false sexual move, AIDS could happen to anyone.
Lovers now know that they are sleeping not only with their partners, but with the entire cast of characters making up their partners' sexual histories. That reality is perhaps most ingrained in the generations that have come to sexual maturity during the age of AIDS.
The epidemic, by infusing careless sexual encounters with the penalty of death, has added a heavy dose of fear to the joy of sex.
Those CDC reports were the first step in bringing to a close an era that some would recall as a sexual playground of free love and others would condemn as a moral free-fall. AIDS emerged a scant 21 years after approval of the birth control pill sexually liberated a generation. Less than a decade after the Pill, the Summer of Love and then Woodstock tested the limits of the sexual revolution, and the Stonewall riots of June 27, 1969, in Greenwich Village launched the gay rights movement.
Sex, so recently seen as natural and liberating, began to get a bad rap.
Today, adolescents have known about AIDS from the first conversation about the birds and the bees. "If you can find me a 15-year-old who doesn't know that AIDS is a deadly disease, I'd be shocked," says Julie Downs, director of the Center for Risk Perception and Communication at Carnegie Mellon University. "They know this."
- First AIDS Cases for Saudis Mar 18, 1988
- 1st Navy Court-Martial of Kind - He Never Told of AIDS Virus, Woman Testifies May 10, 1988
- Non-Gays See, Ignore AIDS Peril, Study Says Jan 25, 1989
