The San Francisco Chronicle
Today, the world marks 20 years of AIDS.
It is a ghastly anniversary, especially for San Francisco, where the epidemic touched down early and devastated a generation of gay men.
Like a disaster in slow motion, AIDS has taken 18,600 San Francisco lives, far more than the city lost in wars and earthquakes and fires combined.
"It hurts me the most when I remember the good times,'' said AIDS activist Cleve Jones, 46, a long-term survivor who has beaten the odds. "I would love to reach out and pick up the phone and say, 'Hey, do you remember when we did that?' There is hardly anyone left in my life who knew me when I was young.''
Two decades ago, nobody ever thought it would last this long. No one could have imagined how terrible it would become.
But since June 5, 1981, when doctors described an outbreak of rare pneumonia among five gay men in Los Angeles, AIDS has rewritten the rule book.
It is changing how neighborhoods and nations alike respond to disease. It is changing how medical research is conducted, how drugs are approved and sold. It is changing both sexual behavior and attitudes toward sexuality. It is changing how we live, and even how we die.
Once thought of as a "gay disease'' afflicting only the hip, urban centers of America, AIDS is now unmasked as a global killer whose toll has passed the 20 million dead of the Spanish influenza of 1918. It has cut a swath through impoverished African states and is now threatening the teeming populations of India, China and Southeast Asia.
A medical curiosity in 1981, AIDS was declared a threat to national security one year ago. This month, it will be the focus of an unprecedented special session of the U.N. General Assembly.
"From the start, HIV has always been a political disease,'' said Paul Volberding, who saw his first case of AIDS on his first day on the job at San Francisco General Hospital, 20 years ago.
Belated Global Mobilization Now Afoot
Just as AIDS activism transformed the politics of medicine in America, HIV is stirring the revolutionary embers of postapartheid South Africa and a belated global mobilization is now afoot.
