Speaker 1: But We Loved is a production of iHeart Podcasts and
Speaker 1: the Outspoken Podcast Network. Hey, this is Jordan with a
Speaker 1: quick note. After this episode, we just have three more
Speaker 1: before our season officially ends, and I have two things
Speaker 1: to ask you. First, if you haven't already, go follow
Speaker 1: me on Instagram or TikTok at JR Underscoregan Solve this.
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Speaker 1: stay with me on this journey. And two, for our
Speaker 1: finale episode, I want to hear from you. Send me
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Speaker 1: what the show means to you. As always, I couldn't
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Speaker 1: Now let's get into the show.
Speaker 2: And there was one science magazine that had a cover
Speaker 2: story on everything that was known about the disease, and
Speaker 2: I snatched that up and read it on the plane
Speaker 2: about three times. And when we got to our hotel
Speaker 2: outside Disney World, I broke down and just started sobbing.
Speaker 2: And the guy I was dating was also named Peter,
Speaker 2: and he was so scared for me he didn't know
Speaker 2: what was going on or how to come for me,
Speaker 2: and I said, it's part of me. It's genetically integrated.
Speaker 2: I'm fucked.
Speaker 1: As a gay kid. Growing up religious and in the South,
Speaker 1: I thought being gay was the worst thing I could
Speaker 1: ever be. Now, as a journalist, I'm trying to unlearn
Speaker 1: that by seeking out our history, and what I've found
Speaker 1: are people and stories full of courage, perseverance, and love.
Speaker 1: In this episode, we'll recap our season's coverage of the
Speaker 1: AIDS crisis, hearing about the epidemic through the people that
Speaker 1: lived it, the people that grie through it, and the
Speaker 1: people that fought against it. From My Heart Podcast, I'm
Speaker 1: Jordan and Solves, and this is what we loved. We
Speaker 1: are approaching the end of season one and we've done
Speaker 1: a lot of coverage around AIDS, and this episode is
Speaker 1: really a reflection and an oral history of that coverage.
Speaker 1: You know, growing up, I genuinely had no idea how
Speaker 1: profound the loss of the AIDS crisis really was. I
Speaker 1: really didn't realize it until much after I came out,
Speaker 1: when I was in my early twenties. One year around
Speaker 1: that time, when I was living in San Francisco, I
Speaker 1: was volunteering with my company and we were helping to
Speaker 1: clean up the AIDS Memorial Grove, which is the nation's
Speaker 1: official AIDS memorial. It's this ten acre plot in the
Speaker 1: city's Golden Gate Park dedicated to the lives touched by AIDS.
Speaker 1: I had never been there before, and I wanted to
Speaker 1: explore a bit, so I wandered off for a moment,
Speaker 1: and I stumbled upon an area called the Circle of Friends.
Speaker 1: It was cozy with a bench, and in the ground
Speaker 1: there was this long spiral of what seemed like thousands
Speaker 1: of words engraved. I leaned in closer to read the words,
Speaker 1: to see what they said, and I realized they were names.
Speaker 1: They were the names of people who had died from
Speaker 1: the disease. I remember feeling so lightheaded all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: I had to sit down. I didn't really that there
Speaker 1: was a whole generation of queer people that just vanished,
Speaker 1: and here they were, their names, right in front of me.
Speaker 1: When I set out to make this show, I didn't
Speaker 1: know that the AIDS crisis would touch almost every interview
Speaker 1: I conducted. It has become so clear to me that
Speaker 1: the lives lost have profoundly shaped our culture. Whether we
Speaker 1: know the history or not. So these are the stories
Speaker 1: of those people lost and the ones they left behind.
Speaker 1: Our episode actually begins before the AIDS crisis in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies. Stonewall had just happened, and it changed everything.
Speaker 1: Most gay people were no longer being arrested simply for
Speaker 1: being gay. The American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its
Speaker 1: list of mental illnesses. Gay people felt empowered, so in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy they organized the very first Pride March in
Speaker 1: New York and ended up in Central Park. For Martin Boyce,
Speaker 1: who was our very first guest on the show and
Speaker 1: who was actually at the Stonewall riots and who attended
Speaker 1: that very first Pride March, the feeling of seeing gay
Speaker 1: people in the daylight for the very first time was
Speaker 1: exhilarating and true enough.
Speaker 3: In the south part of the park were all getting
Speaker 3: in and the hills were covered with gay people, well
Speaker 3: covered with gay people.
Speaker 2: Now, we never saw each other before in the daytime.
Speaker 3: Really, we're when we knew about each other, We imagined
Speaker 3: each other, we knew all that, but we never really
Speaker 3: looked at each other. And multitudes of gay people covering
Speaker 3: the hills and Bertie looked at me and said, you
Speaker 3: know what, I think, we're people.
Speaker 1: At this point, the gay rights movement began to organize
Speaker 1: nationally for the first time ever. In the late seventies,
Speaker 1: the first ever national March for Gay rights happened in DC.
Speaker 1: The momentum was building. Young queer people from across the
Speaker 1: nation heard stories about gay life in the big cities
Speaker 1: of America New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Atlanta. Moving
Speaker 1: there seemed like a fantasy, a life where they could
Speaker 1: finally be unashamed, now that being gay was no longer
Speaker 1: a mental illness or a crime. The seventies after Stonewall
Speaker 1: in these cities seemed like a giant party, and the
Speaker 1: gays were ready to party. Danny Ingram, a gay soldier
Speaker 1: in the army, remembers what it was like.
Speaker 4: Being gay was a party. It was a party. Our
Speaker 4: whole social life centered around the bar and the disco.
Speaker 4: My favorite group was.
Speaker 5: Abba and With Dancing Queen Dancing Queen. When one of
Speaker 5: their songs came on, we would take a hit of
Speaker 5: poppers and just go wild on the dance floor.
Speaker 4: It was hot and sweaty, you know, lots of guys
Speaker 4: dance with their shirts off. It was all joy and happiness,
Speaker 4: just a big party.
Speaker 1: It might seem superficial, but partying was a big deal.
Speaker 1: Gay people could finally form community with each other without
Speaker 1: the fear of being arrested. These bonds would quite literally
Speaker 1: carry them through the AIDS crisis just a few years later.
Speaker 1: But this time of pleasure and indulgence in the seventies
Speaker 1: had one other element, sex. With wider access to oral
Speaker 1: contraception or the pill, and a Supreme Court decision called
Speaker 1: Roe v. Wade which legalized abortion, there was a new
Speaker 1: attitude towards sex for straits and gays alike.
Speaker 6: It was sex without consequence.
Speaker 1: That was how Rubinstein, the famous stylist and Studio fifty
Speaker 1: four regular, talking about sexual freedom. Before AIDS, it.
Speaker 6: Was all about flirting. It was all about attraction. You
Speaker 6: went out to dance and you went out to get
Speaker 6: laid just because of the sexual revolution. It wasn't like
Speaker 6: you had the option to go home with all these people.
Speaker 6: You actually had the responsibility.
Speaker 2: I'm not joking. You had the.
Speaker 6: Responsibility to go home with as many people as you
Speaker 6: could because you were just spreading the love. Literally, the
Speaker 6: whole idea of Going to these clubs was to celebrate.
Speaker 6: It was to celebrate your liberation, was to celebrate your sexuality.
Speaker 6: Was to celebrate your desire to sort of express yourself
Speaker 6: and dance and to listen to them to music that
Speaker 6: made you really happy.
Speaker 1: Bath Houses were grinder back then.
Speaker 7: They were you know, it was just a sex place, right,
Speaker 7: I mean, that's what it was for.
Speaker 1: That's Larry Colton, a man whose life was deeply impacted
Speaker 1: by the AIDS crisis in San Francisco. Here he is
Speaker 1: talking about the role of the bath houses in the seventies.
Speaker 7: They would be given a towe when they came in.
Speaker 7: They had a locker, they would just rope put their
Speaker 7: taels on and they'd start walking around. And they had
Speaker 7: private rooms, and they had public spaces, and they had sanas,
Speaker 7: and they had steam rooms. And in San Francisco, the
Speaker 7: original bath house I first went to, which was in
Speaker 7: an alleyway, was really fancy. They had like a like
Speaker 7: a mini restaurant. They had a wall, aquarium wall, huge waterfalls.
Speaker 7: I mean, it was very fancy and people would stay
Speaker 7: all night. I mean would just stay for like a
Speaker 7: day or two. But it was very popular and just
Speaker 7: packed and especially after the bars at two, I mean
Speaker 7: you'd have a line out the door, start between two
Speaker 7: and three, you know, in the morning.
Speaker 1: But at the peak of all this fun, a mysterious
Speaker 1: illness began affecting gay men, at first a severe flu,
Speaker 1: but then rashes and fungal infections in the mouth, painful
Speaker 1: purple lesions all over the body, and severe weight loss
Speaker 1: called wasting. Here's Geen Carlo Musto, a filmmaker who was
Speaker 1: part of the small but mighty group of lesbian activists
Speaker 1: during the AIDS crisis, describing what she saw in New.
Speaker 8: York and in the East village where I lived at
Speaker 8: the time. You would see these guys, these walking skeletons,
Speaker 8: who had, you know, these markings that they showed ks
Speaker 8: or who just looked like they were old men, and
Speaker 8: they were these young guys.
Speaker 1: Here's Larry again.
Speaker 7: It unfolded first and foremost at the bars. People started
Speaker 7: losing weight. Somebody would come in with a blotch on
Speaker 7: their face or on their arm. You know that that's
Speaker 7: carposi sarcoma thrush. People would get rashes in their mouth,
Speaker 7: and you just saw people. You'd say, well, where's I
Speaker 7: remember the first one? I'm like, where's Larry? Where is he?
Speaker 7: I haven't seen it for a while. Oh he's sick.
Speaker 7: It was like out of a classic movie. Simultaneously, you're
Speaker 7: starting to see obituaries in the San Francisco Chronicle. Then
Speaker 7: you're saying that the real obituaries in the bar magazine,
Speaker 7: and you realize this is really picking up steam and
Speaker 7: it is very serious.
Speaker 1: On July third, nineteen eighty one, The New York Times
Speaker 1: ran a small article on page twenty of the paper
Speaker 1: titled rare cancer seen in forty one homosexuals. The cases
Speaker 1: were mostly in New York in San Francisco, but eight
Speaker 1: people had already died. That article created a caricature of
Speaker 1: who was being a fan gay men who had up
Speaker 1: to quote ten sexual encounters each night, up to four
Speaker 1: times a week. At one point, the disease was called
Speaker 1: GRID gay related immune deficiency. It would eventually become known
Speaker 1: as AIDS. In a moment, it felt like this long
Speaker 1: chapter freedom and hedonism had ended. The party was over.
Speaker 1: Here's how again. What did it feel like for you
Speaker 1: that this decade of liberation had sort of come to
Speaker 1: an end?
Speaker 6: Oh god, it came crashing down. My friends started getting sick.
Speaker 6: You banded together, but now you were abandoned together. Not
Speaker 6: in celebration, you abandoned together in fear. And that changed everything.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back in the mid eighties. Although most
Speaker 1: people in the gay community knew about AIDS by this point,
Speaker 1: it still felt far away, or at least it did
Speaker 1: for Peter Staley, who would go on to become a
Speaker 1: legendary AIDS activist.
Speaker 2: The first kind of conversation about AIDS I remember was
Speaker 2: that summer in eighty three at a gay bar with
Speaker 2: a guy about my age and I'm twenty two, who
Speaker 2: was also pretty closeted, and he says, are you hearing
Speaker 2: about age? And I said yeah. He said kind of scary.
Speaker 2: What are you hearing? And he said, I hear it's
Speaker 2: only really happening to the older gays who have s
Speaker 2: up with like a thousand guys.
Speaker 1: In the early days of the epidemic, there wasn't much
Speaker 1: information about the virus, and that led to a lot
Speaker 1: of conspiracy theories. Richard Burns, the current board chair of
Speaker 1: the American LGBTQ Museum, says it made everyone scared to
Speaker 1: go about life the way they once did.
Speaker 9: I remember sitting at dinner with some friends in San Francisco,
Speaker 9: and there were all these theories about how you got
Speaker 9: AIDS because this is before the discovery of the HIV virus. Okay,
Speaker 9: like no one knew anything. And there was one theory
Speaker 9: that like, well, if you have more than a thousand
Speaker 9: sex partners, your immune system could collapse. Where that came from,
Speaker 9: or an excessive use of poppers that could cause ace.
Speaker 9: I mean no, people, you know, we all believed that
Speaker 9: I stopped using poppers.
Speaker 1: It felt far away until suddenly it wasn't. Here's Larry
Speaker 1: again talking about going on vacation with this partner Joe.
Speaker 7: Joe and I used to go to Mikono's. We went
Speaker 7: each year because we just loved it, and our best
Speaker 7: friends Gene and Dave would go with us. And they said,
Speaker 7: come over to our pool and we'll sit around the pool.
Speaker 7: And so we went, and Joe and David, our friend
Speaker 7: my best friend actually were and his partner of eight years.
Speaker 7: You know, it was not a new relationship, although I'd
Speaker 7: been an open relationship. Was sitting next to Be in
Speaker 7: a chaise lounge and said turned his arm over and
Speaker 7: looked and said, Larry, look at this mark I have
Speaker 7: on my arm. I knew what it was right away.
Speaker 7: I mean I'd done my research enough to know what
Speaker 7: it was. And he said, what do you think that is?
Speaker 7: And of course I said, Gene, I have no idea,
Speaker 7: but you need to get a check when we get back,
Speaker 7: no question. And he was the first, the closest person
Speaker 7: that we'd known that was then at that point infected
Speaker 7: with AIDS. And he got back and very rapidly he
Speaker 7: developed tax tax taxio plasmos i camember when it was
Speaker 7: a brain disease where you know, he went crazy. I
Speaker 7: mean they had institutionalized him and he just he he
Speaker 7: died very quickly.
Speaker 1: But things really began to hit home when people partners
Speaker 1: received diagnoses. Here's Larry again.
Speaker 7: So that night we went to bed and when I
Speaker 7: woke up the next morning, the sheets were soaked and
Speaker 7: I knew, I knew as that was it. And when
Speaker 7: that was one of the major symptoms when heard about
Speaker 7: you know, it's night sweats. And I woke up and
Speaker 7: Joe wasn't awake yet and I was lying in sweat.
Speaker 7: I'm like, oh my god, he's got AIDS.
Speaker 1: Of course, people who were diagnosed with the virus themselves
Speaker 1: felt their own lives changed forever. Here's Olympic gold medalist
Speaker 1: Greg luganis often considered the greatest diver of all time.
Speaker 1: On the moment he was diagnosed.
Speaker 10: I was having some problems with my ear ear infection
Speaker 10: or something, and then I went into the doctor and
Speaker 10: I said, oh, by the way, I'd like to do
Speaker 10: an HIV tests. And it was my thought that if
Speaker 10: I was HIV positive, then I would pack my bags,
Speaker 10: go back to California, lock myself in my house, and
Speaker 10: wait to die, because that's how we thought of HIV AIDS.
Speaker 10: And so when he came by and gave me the
Speaker 10: results that I was HIV positive, I mean, it was
Speaker 10: like ringing in my ears. I couldn't really hear anything,
Speaker 10: I wasn't really absorbing anything, and I was thinking, oh
Speaker 10: my god.
Speaker 1: Peter again on his diagnosis.
Speaker 2: On November fifteenth, nineteen eighty five, I got called at
Speaker 2: my trading desk by the nurse in my doctor's office
Speaker 2: at work at work, and he's like, we need you
Speaker 2: back from more blood work. And I said what is it?
Speaker 2: And he said A low white budsuck out and I said, well,
Speaker 2: what could that be? What might that mean? He said, ah,
Speaker 2: he'll talk to you about that, and I'm up, really,
Speaker 2: you know, I'm on my trading desk. I'm pushy as
Speaker 2: all hell. I'm an aggressive bond trader, right, and I'm like, na,
Speaker 2: you can tell me what might mean. I really pushed him,
Speaker 2: and he said, well, we do see that a lot
Speaker 2: in our patients with HIV. And in a flash, all
Speaker 2: the denial and ignorance and youth and innocence just emptied
Speaker 2: out of me. I was actually I had a guy
Speaker 2: i'd met in Amsterdam was staying with me and I
Speaker 2: was taking him to Disney World that weekend. He even
Speaker 2: knew less than I did, and were heading down. We
Speaker 2: had to LaGuardia. I scoured the news stand for anything
Speaker 2: about HIV, and there was one science magazine that had
Speaker 2: a cover story on everything that was known about the
Speaker 2: disease from a scientific standpoint, written in layman terms, and
Speaker 2: I snatched that up and read it on the plane
Speaker 2: about three times. And when we got to our hotel
Speaker 2: outside Disney World, I broke down and just started sobbing.
Speaker 2: And the guy who was dating was also named Peter,
Speaker 2: and he was so scared for me. He didn't know
Speaker 2: what was going on or how to come for me,
Speaker 2: and I said, it's part of me, it's genetically integrated.
Speaker 2: I'm fucked.
Speaker 1: To be diagnosed was terrifying. By the late eighties, tens
Speaker 1: of thousands of Americans were already dead. The CDC said,
Speaker 1: if you had AIDS, you'd likely only have five years
Speaker 1: to live. One particular moment that illustrated just how much
Speaker 1: death had occurred was in nineteen eighty seven, when the
Speaker 1: AIDS Quilt was laid out at the National Mall in Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. For the first time, people across America were
Speaker 1: asked to send in a quilt for the loved ones
Speaker 1: they lost to AIDS. Each quilt or panel would be
Speaker 1: three by sax feet, the approximate size of a coffin.
Speaker 1: All together, laid out, the AIDS Quilt, essentially a patchwork
Speaker 1: of all those lost to AIDS, was bigger than a
Speaker 1: football field. Here's Derek Codle, the leader of the New
Speaker 1: York Buyers Club, on the moment he saw it for
Speaker 1: the first time.
Speaker 11: Here was this quilt that you could walk across and
Speaker 11: look at panels that were intensely personal memorials. Really, and
Speaker 11: people who were walking across that quilt were just uniformly weeping.
Speaker 11: It was the most emotional experience I had ever had before,
Speaker 11: and it really connected with me that this is about death.
Speaker 11: These are all dead people, and they're all thirty or forty,
Speaker 11: and the tragedy just overwhelmed me.
Speaker 1: Even though so many were dying and many were already dead.
Speaker 1: The reaction of the United States government was slow and negligent.
Speaker 1: The president at the time, Ronald Reagan, was a staunch
Speaker 1: Conservative who had been elected in a landslide largely due
Speaker 1: to evangelical Christians, and AIDS was a disease centered around
Speaker 1: drugs and gay sex. It would be several years into
Speaker 1: the crisis before the President even said the word AIDS publicly.
Speaker 1: In the early eighties, his Press Secretary Larry Speaks was
Speaker 1: asked about the AIDS crisis in a White House press
Speaker 1: briefing and responded, laughing, saying, quote, I don't have it,
Speaker 1: do you. Queer people across America were furious. Here's Richard
Speaker 1: Burns again.
Speaker 9: You also have to remember, in the minds of the
Speaker 9: government and the media, like mainstream media and in corporate America,
Speaker 9: gay people were completely disposable. And the fact that as
Speaker 9: it emerged that AIDS affected intravenious drug users and gay men.
Speaker 9: There was a perception that, like, well, maybe we're better
Speaker 9: off without those people. William Buckley in the New York Times.
Speaker 9: He was the editor of the National Review, and you know,
Speaker 9: one of the leaders of the right in America, the
Speaker 9: intellectual right. He in an essay and the Times said
Speaker 9: that people with age should be tattooed.
Speaker 1: You remember how you felt when you read that.
Speaker 9: We were so enraging, you know, And the fact that
Speaker 9: the Times would publish that shows you what they thought
Speaker 9: of us.
Speaker 1: But all of the sadness and grief was being transformed
Speaker 1: into rage. And out of that rage a group was
Speaker 1: born that would change everything. Act UP. It stood for
Speaker 1: the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, the premier AIDS activism organization,
Speaker 1: and on March twenty fourth, nineteen eighty seven, Act UP
Speaker 1: held its first protests on Wall Street during the morning
Speaker 1: rush hour to capture and direct the attention of Americans
Speaker 1: towards AIDS. Jean Carla Musta, a filmmaker and lesbian AIDS activist,
Speaker 1: heard about the protests from her friends, so she grabbed
Speaker 1: her camcorder and headed downtown.
Speaker 8: I knew people were angry and I knew people were
Speaker 8: starting to feel like it wasn't enough. I went down
Speaker 8: to Wall Street. It was kind of a cold March day,
Speaker 8: and people are chanting and a leaflitting, and all of
Speaker 8: a sudden, a bunch of them got in the middle
Speaker 8: of the road, sat there with their signs and holding
Speaker 8: hands with each other and just started chanting.
Speaker 1: The middle of Wall Street.
Speaker 8: In the middle of Wall Street, they stopped traffic. They
Speaker 8: were protesting. They were doing a dye in. Basically, they
Speaker 8: were laying in the street, in the middle of Wall Street,
Speaker 8: and they weren't moving. The police were there, they were
Speaker 8: trying to get them out.
Speaker 2: Of the way.
Speaker 8: They basically were hauling them out on stretchers, and people
Speaker 8: weren't moving. Everybody was determined that they were going to
Speaker 8: get arrested. I remember this energy just made me go
Speaker 8: into a different frame of mind. So I was just
Speaker 8: dodging around them with the camera and I was shooting
Speaker 8: between the policemen's legs and what not, trying to get
Speaker 8: trying to document this because it was just so important.
Speaker 1: At this point. The top priority for most activists was
Speaker 1: to keep people alive, since the likelihood of death was
Speaker 1: so high. People diagnosed were desperate for any experimental drugs,
Speaker 1: but there were two groups standing in the way. The
Speaker 1: first was the FDA, who's slow approval process wasted time
Speaker 1: that AIDS patients didn't have. So activists like Derek Hodle,
Speaker 1: the leader of the New York Buyers Club, took matters
Speaker 1: into his own hands. He would smuggle the drugs from
Speaker 1: other countries to get them into the bodies of AIDS patients.
Speaker 11: This system is insane where people who are dying of
Speaker 11: infections can't get access to an experimental drug because it's
Speaker 11: experimental and it might harm them. But in the meantime,
Speaker 11: we're going to smuggle this drug in through the mail,
Speaker 11: and you know, please do stop us if you're so inclined.
Speaker 11: And so we set up a system where at first
Speaker 11: it's just insane, but with the fluconaisol, we set up
Speaker 11: a system to mail individual packages back through the mail,
Speaker 11: addressed to people in the health group. And so the
Speaker 11: mail man would come with hundreds of boxes of drugs
Speaker 11: and and it never got like, it never got seized
Speaker 11: at customs.
Speaker 1: The other enemy was the pharmaceutical companies. Activists felt that
Speaker 1: they made experimental drugs expensive and unaffordable. They could do
Speaker 1: that because in America, people dying of AIDS was a
Speaker 1: market and their desperation for life saving drugs was a demand.
Speaker 1: So act UP targeted them too. Here's Peter Staley again
Speaker 1: talking about a protest in nineteen eighty nine against Burrow's Welcome,
Speaker 1: the pharmaceutical company that developed AZT, which at the time
Speaker 1: was the only drug thought of that could treat AIDS.
Speaker 1: But the company Burrows Welcome the pharmaceutical company. The pharmaceutical company.
Speaker 2: They slapped this obscene price, was it. It seems low today,
Speaker 2: seems cheap, but at that time it was the highest
Speaker 2: price of any drug in history, ten thousand dollars a year.
Speaker 2: Country was shocked at the price. Even some government officials
Speaker 2: were like, this is that's shocking, and.
Speaker 1: For contexts, this is the only viable drug right that's
Speaker 1: treating AIDS.
Speaker 2: So in September of eighty nine, we decided to do
Speaker 2: a huge demonstration on Wall Street in front of the
Speaker 2: Stock Exchange. But I'm like, hmm, nobody's actually gotten onto
Speaker 2: the floor of the Stock Exchange. So I made that
Speaker 2: my mission impossible, and within a few weeks we figured
Speaker 2: it out how to get in, how to bypass security.
Speaker 1: Yeah, How did you figure that out?
Speaker 2: You know, the great thing about age activism is that
Speaker 2: it was a queer movement, queer based, and that gives
Speaker 2: you the largest by network in the world.
Speaker 1: You mean to say, there's a gay person.
Speaker 2: We are everywhere. Wow, we are everywhere. There are tons
Speaker 2: of us in the White House, and there are endless
Speaker 2: numbers of us on Capitol Hill, in the military, on
Speaker 2: the stock exchange. I was a bond trader, you know,
Speaker 2: we are everywhere. And there was an act up member
Speaker 2: that worked not the stock floor trading floor, but there
Speaker 2: were commodities floors next to it. He worked on one
Speaker 2: of the commodity's floors, and he was my spy. We
Speaker 2: discovered an old antique balcony and nobody was up there,
Speaker 2: but it was over the trading floor. It was perfect
Speaker 2: and nine to twenty five we walk up the balcony.
Speaker 2: We kneeled down so that we're below the banister and
Speaker 2: can't be seen. When we're up there, we pull out handcuffs.
Speaker 2: We handcuffs ourselves through the chain to make it a
Speaker 2: little harder to get us out of there. I have
Speaker 2: had a huge banner strapped to my belly, a big
Speaker 2: black banner that we unfurled that said sell welcome, Burrows Welcome.
Speaker 2: And I look at my watch, which is timed perfectly
Speaker 2: to the real time. And we had a runner outside
Speaker 2: who are already had notified Associated Press that we were
Speaker 2: up to something. And at nine twenty nine and fifty
Speaker 2: five seconds, I say go and we stand up. We
Speaker 2: unfurl the banner and we pull each have a a
Speaker 2: pocket sized marine foghorn which says on the side of it,
Speaker 2: do not hold close to your ears because in danger
Speaker 2: you'll break an ear drum. These things are fucking loud,
Speaker 2: and we all raised our hands and boom. Nobody heard
Speaker 2: the opening bell was this piercing scream. It felt like
Speaker 2: time was standing still. Everything stopped. Every the trader's like,
Speaker 2: what what the fuck is this? They're like confused, and
Speaker 2: they look up, they see us, they see the banner
Speaker 2: sell welcome. Those fuckers got inside. They're in our sanctum.
Speaker 2: The faggots got in and they went ballistic. They were frothing.
Speaker 2: You know, I'd worked with these guys. I was smiling
Speaker 2: from ear to ear. What was the result of the demonstration.
Speaker 2: The company lowered the price again.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: Three days later, Wow, boom, and it never gets better
Speaker 2: than that, It never feels better than that. It were
Speaker 2: activism rarely works that fast.
Speaker 1: Act up In other AIDS organizations were making good progress
Speaker 1: and racking up victories, but even though they were winning battles,
Speaker 1: they were still losing the war. The death toll was
Speaker 1: growing year after year. By this point, most people in
Speaker 1: the community knew someone who had died of AIDS, and
Speaker 1: for many it was their partner. Here's Chris talking about
Speaker 1: his partner Rogers difficult final days.
Speaker 12: So Roger had been home for a few weeks from work,
Speaker 12: just bedridden, and I was taking care of him, and
Speaker 12: he was starting to would I want to say babbel
Speaker 12: kind of talking things that didn't make sense to me,
Speaker 12: or it was not part of any conversation. I could
Speaker 12: hear exactly what he was saying, but to me it
Speaker 12: didn't make sense, and I knew I think. I called
Speaker 12: the hospital and they said, just get him here to
Speaker 12: the hospital. I had to carry him. He was not
Speaker 12: even strong enough to walk. I had to carry him
Speaker 12: down three flights of stairs to the car. He was
Speaker 12: very like weak and like ready to pass out. So
Speaker 12: we get Roger into the emergency room, into a wheelchair
Speaker 12: and someone went to go look at Roger and his
Speaker 12: lips were blue, and so they were like, okay. They
Speaker 12: immediately put him in the back and they intubated him
Speaker 12: and they had to strap him down, and it was
Speaker 12: kind of a horrible moment to seeing him, you know,
Speaker 12: in such a weak state and barely breathing and getting
Speaker 12: you know, not getting enough oxygen, and he pulled the
Speaker 12: tube out, so they that's why they tied him down,
Speaker 12: and they induced coma at that point. And so that
Speaker 12: was basically the last time that we could look at
Speaker 12: each other. And so when we were aware of each other,
Speaker 12: it hope face to face.
Speaker 1: And here's Danny talking about the moment he said goodbye
Speaker 1: to his partner Darryl.
Speaker 4: And on Christmas Eve of nineteen ninety three, he said,
Speaker 4: we have to go to the hospital and I started
Speaker 4: crying and he just he put his hand on my
Speaker 4: shoulder and he said, not from you, not from you.
Speaker 4: I'll take tears from everyone else, but not from you.
Speaker 4: We had to carry him to the car and then
Speaker 4: take him to the emergency room and we knew what
Speaker 4: that meant. He was going to die. And we sat
Speaker 4: there watching that little machine on the wall that beeps,
Speaker 4: and it got lower and lower and lower until it
Speaker 4: flat lined, and then he was gone. I was holding
Speaker 4: him in my arms as he died, and that time
Speaker 4: that we had together, we'll always touch my heart.
Speaker 1: Others, like ballroom Legendarcine Pendarvis, lost their chosen families. She
Speaker 1: remembered the moment she said goodbye to her legendary house mother,
Speaker 1: Avis Pandavis.
Speaker 13: But losing Avis took so much out of me. The
Speaker 13: wind was knocked out of me. But I remember her
Speaker 13: telling me that she was tired and she wanted to
Speaker 13: be with her mother and her sisters. And in that moment,
Speaker 13: I knew that she was going to leave me. And
Speaker 13: she said to me, it's alright, Racing, it's all right.
Speaker 13: And I said, Avis, if you're tired, let go, Let
Speaker 13: go you and got to hold or no more. Your
Speaker 13: job has been done. You served us as an excellent mother. Well,
Speaker 13: and I will tell your story. I will speak your name,
Speaker 13: and I will let people know that you will never
Speaker 13: be forgotten.
Speaker 1: Aids had shaped an entire generation of queer people. Grieving
Speaker 1: the loss of your partner at twenty thirty or even
Speaker 1: forty years old was not normal. Not to mention the
Speaker 1: grief of losing friends, the chosen family you finally made
Speaker 1: after escaping your old life after years of loss, the
Speaker 1: AIDS crisis began to take its toll on everyone. Here's
Speaker 1: Bill Glenn, a spiritual leader during the AIDS crisis. He
Speaker 1: managed the aid support group Continuum in San Francisco during
Speaker 1: the crisis and recounted the moment that the tragedy of
Speaker 1: AIDS hit him all at once.
Speaker 14: We lost one a week, so in the seven years
Speaker 14: I was there that he lost about three hundred and
Speaker 14: fifty clients. We created a chapel and we took I
Speaker 14: eight by eleven photographs of everybody who we called a member,
Speaker 14: anyone who came into the group, and men and women
Speaker 14: who IT died. We put their pictures up, began the ceiling,
Speaker 14: and when I left, every instant space in that chapel
Speaker 14: was covered with pictures of men and women.
Speaker 1: Who IT died.
Speaker 14: I had to stop. That was forty and exhausted, and
Speaker 14: I was at a retreat, Trappist religious retreat center in Oregon,
Speaker 14: and I found myself on the floor of my little
Speaker 14: room in the fetal position, crying, and I knew I
Speaker 14: had to stop. I didn't want to I felt some
Speaker 14: way I was betrayed, but I'd given fifteen years to it.
Speaker 14: I was psychically exhausted by the death, and because the
Speaker 14: death came at our agency and my my friends so often,
Speaker 14: you can't fully grieve.
Speaker 1: That some had to face the harsh reality of planning
Speaker 1: for their own death. Here's Olympic diver Greg luganis again.
Speaker 10: I'm not much for surprises. I'm not crazy about surprises.
Speaker 10: But my thirty third birthday, I was wasting, you know,
Speaker 10: I was losing weight. We couldn't figure out what was
Speaker 10: going on. We didn't know, and so I gave my
Speaker 10: address book to my then partner and my mom and said, naked,
Speaker 10: throw me a surprise birthday party. The surprise was going
Speaker 10: to be I didn't know who was going to show up,
Speaker 10: but I thought I was saying goodbye to everybody.
Speaker 2: I was prepared to die.
Speaker 10: I wasn't prepared to live.
Speaker 1: By the mid nineties, the community was exhausted. Nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: four was the worst year of death yet. But even
Speaker 1: through their fatigue, activists kept fighting for treatment, fundraising for research,
Speaker 1: and persevering for all the loved ones who were lost.
Speaker 1: Peter Staley, who was an act UP was now a
Speaker 1: member of TAG, short for Treatment Action Group. They were
Speaker 1: working very closely with scientists and the Clinton administration when
Speaker 1: a breakthrough happened in nineteen ninety six at the annual
Speaker 1: AIDS conference, which was in Vancouver that year. Here's Peter
Speaker 1: on that moment.
Speaker 2: We were getting over a billion dollars a year. We
Speaker 2: had money to burn, and we just had to spend
Speaker 2: it wisely and do the right research. And the TAG
Speaker 2: was intimately involved with the development of this new class
Speaker 2: of antivirals called protease inhibitors. And then many of us
Speaker 2: were in the room when the results got released. We
Speaker 2: had been through so many moments of dashed hope, so
Speaker 2: many moments that it was it was very hard to believe.
Speaker 2: But we also at that point were very adept at
Speaker 2: the science and this was rock solid. So it was surreal.
Speaker 2: And whenever we went to an AIDS conference overseas, we
Speaker 2: would add a vacation at the end of it, you know,
Speaker 2: to blow off steam, smoking weed with David on the
Speaker 2: beach on Vancouver Island. After the Vancouver IGHTHS conference, I'm like,
Speaker 2: so we're gonna live and he's like, I guess. So
Speaker 2: it just didn't. It was so hard to wrap our
Speaker 2: heads around. But within weeks we all went on the
Speaker 2: regimen that had been on the slides, and a month
Speaker 2: after that, all of us saw our viral loads go
Speaker 2: from the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands to undetectable.
Speaker 1: Today, the landscape around HIV and AIDS is completely different.
Speaker 1: It's no longer a death sentence, and it's largely preventable
Speaker 1: with breakthrough drugs like prep All. This means that the
Speaker 1: fear of HIV is slowly fading away. Amazingly. Experts say
Speaker 1: a cure isn't as far away as we think. In fact,
Speaker 1: it might be here in the next ten years. One
Speaker 1: of my favorite moments of this entire series was when
Speaker 1: I asked Peter Staley what he thinks that day is
Speaker 1: going to be like for him when they find a cure.
Speaker 1: This is his answer, what do you think that day
Speaker 1: will be like for you?
Speaker 11: Oh?
Speaker 2: My god, amazing. There's a scene at the end of
Speaker 2: Longtime Companion, a beautiful tear jerker AIDS film, where they
Speaker 2: ending in like a dreamlike sequence when AIDS is cured
Speaker 2: and it's all on fire Island's beach and all the
Speaker 2: characters who have died during the film. They're all back
Speaker 2: and everybody's hugging each other, so I think there'll be
Speaker 2: a lot of remembering of those we lost.
Speaker 1: But We Loved is hosted by me Jordan Gonsolves. New
Speaker 1: episodes drop every Wednesday. If you want to write in
Speaker 1: to tell your story, email us at Butweloved at gmail
Speaker 1: dot com, or you can send me a message on
Speaker 1: Instagram or TikTok at your underscore goosolves. We are a
Speaker 1: production of The Outspoken Podcast Network and iHeart Podcasts. But
Speaker 1: We Loved was originally developed with Pushkin Industries. Our producers
Speaker 1: are Joey pat Emily Meronoff, and Christina Loranger. Our executive
Speaker 1: producers are me Maya Howard and Katrina Norville. Original music
Speaker 1: by Steve Boone. Special thanks to Jay Brunson and Roquel Willis.
Speaker 1: If you loved this episode, leave us a rating and
Speaker 1: follow us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and thank you
Speaker 1: for listening. I'll see you next week.