Aids gay history

One unfortunate byproduct of the stigma of the HIV scare is the misguided and discriminatory treatment of individuals with HIV in the criminal justice system. Beyond the possible imprisonment or fines faced in sentencing, collateral consequences, such as lack of voting rights and hardship in acquiring housing, employment, and a variety of benefits, follow an individual well beyond the time of conviction.

The AIDS epidemic’s impacts on this generation of gay men, now agedare still being explored.

Research Guides LGBTQIA Studies

According to the Center for Disease Control, an estimated 1. Byover 3, individuals in the United States had been diagnosed with AIDS and nearly 1, had died. In alone, there were just under 38, individuals newly diagnosed with HIV.

Of those individuals: approximately two-thirds were gay, bisexual, or men who have sex with men, nearly seventy percent Black or Hispanic, over half were under the age of 35, and over half lived in the South. When one considers these potential consequences and what we know about HIV now, one may very likely question whether these laws do anything more than discriminate.

Moore, Ph. Name First Last. By the mid to late s, bathhouses in large cities had been closed and gay men were prohibited from donating blood. Email Required. While the human immunodeficiency virus HIV does not discriminate in its transmission when an individual comes into contact with it, data suggest that HIV has a disproportionate impact on the queer community, especially young, queer people of color in the South.

In the USA, byone gay man in nine had been diagnosed with AIDS, one in fifteen had died, and 10% of the 1, men aged who identified as gay had died. Due to its early prevalence in the gay community, gay men bore much of the brunt of abuse and stigmatization.

In addition, gay bars and businesses were involved in a range of HIV activism, including safer sex education and fundraising to cover the daily living and funeral costs of gay and bisexual men dying from AIDS. When one considers that one disease, which has long been stigmatized and attributed to the queer community, is treated more harshly than similar diseases in spite of the fact that advances in medicine have made individuals who are undergoing treatment physically unable to spread the disease, one could easily draw the conclusion that these laws are byproducts of discrimination and should be reconsidered.

History of AIDS Epidemic

For instance, we are aware that individuals with HIV who are receiving treatment for the virus and are undetectable do not carry high gay of a viral load of HIV to transmit it to others. It appears that these laws that were adopted in response to the HIV scare do not hold up under close scrutiny.

Though numbers were markedly increasing, AIDS was not acknowledged by the Reagan administration until Though the CDC discovered all major routes of the disease’s transmission—as well as that female partners of AIDS-positive men could be infected—inthe public considered AIDS a gay disease.

Though numbers were markedly increasing, AIDS was not acknowledged by the Reagan administration until As the number of infections climbed and the fear of HIV infection spread, law and public policy measures were implemented with the goal of protecting the population from this threat.

Kentucky law makes it a criminal offense a class D felony for individuals with an HIV diagnosis to donate organs, skin, or tissue. Due to its early prevalence in the gay community, gay men bore much of the brunt of abuse and stigmatization.

However, while the number of new HIV diagnoses per year is considerably down since its peak of 3. In some ways, one could categorize this as the criminalization of HIV. While sex work is already banned by law, an individual diagnosed with HIV who engages in sex work is in jeopardy of additional, enhanced felony criminal charges.

Awareness of how it is aids and can be prevented as well as treatment have drastically lowered the number of individuals diagnosed with HIV and individuals who die of AIDS annually. Additionally, prosecutors have brought felony wanton endangerment charges against individuals who have failed to disclose their HIV diagnosis to sexual partners.

At the time, little was known about this novel disease. Additionally, one may question why HIV is treated with such a harsh penalty in the aforementioned scenarios when there are not similar penalties for a variety of similarly dangerous communicable diseases that are known to be spread through sexual contact or the sharing of certain bodily fluids.

Individuals history with the criminal justice system know that felony convictions have serious impacts on an individual. From Reagan’s press secretary laughing about the AIDs crisis to the activist group ACT UP shutting down the FDA, we look back at the early days of the epidemic.