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New AIDS cases in NYC: 52.
Deaths so far: 15. -
French-Canadian flight attendant Gaetan Dugas pays his first known visit to New York City bathhouses. All of the city’s early infections would be traced to Dugas, since dubbed “Patient Zero.”
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A young gay man named Nick suffers a seizure and loses consciousness. His boyfriend, Enno Poersch, rushes him to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt, where he’s diagnosed with toxoplasmosis, a disease usually found in cats. “I had no idea it was the beginning of an epidemic,” recalls his doctor, Michael Lange.
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New AIDS cases in NYC: 162.
Deaths so far: 74. -
January 15
Nick dies. Doctors are puzzled by an outbreak of the rare skin cancer Kaposi’s sarcoma. “We had twenty cases in the city,” recalls Dr. Alvin Friedman-Kien. “All used poppers, amyl nitrate. We suspected it could be that.” (Later theories would blame contaminated polio vaccines, other recreational drugs, and even biowarfare.) -
Lawrence Mass, a gay doctor, publishes the first story on the illness in the gay weekly New York Native: disease rumors largely unfounded.
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The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports on a cluster of Pneumocystis pneumonia, a deadly pulmonary infection, among gay men in Los Angeles.
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Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals
The C.D.C.'s MMWR publishes its first description of a outbreak of 41 cases of Karposi's Sarcoma, a rare skin cancer. -
Larry Kramer, whose 1978 novel Faggots took gay men to task for loveless promiscuity in pre-AIDS New York, calls a meeting of concerned men in his Village apartment.
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2 Fatal DiseasesTwo rare diseases have struck more than 100 homosexual men in the United States in recent months, killing almost half of them, and a medical study group has been formed to find out why.
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Kramer and two friends put up a banner at the Fire Island dock that says give to gay cancer. They make only $124.
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ABC’s Good Morning America is the first network show to cover the disease, in a nine-minute segment cut down to 150 seconds owing to a report on unrest in Lebanon. Frank Gifford begins by saying, “This is a terrible problem. How come nobody’s paying any attention to it?”
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“Gay-related immune deficiency” (GRID) gains currency, though the name becomes obsolete when straight Haitians show up with symptoms in Brooklyn hospitals. (Hemophiliacs would soon join them in the public’s mind as the third H group seen to be at any real risk.)
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New AIDS cases in NYC: 543.
AIDS deaths so far: 276. -
Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) is founded by six men, including Kramer—but he walks out eight months later, telling the Times, “Everything, everything, is too little, too late. By our silence we have helped murder each other.”
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GMHC’s fund-raiser at the fun-sleazy dance club Paradise Garage raises $50,000.
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The disease is renamed AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome).
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Dr. Arye Rubinstein submits a study to the American Academy of Pediatrics finding evidence of AIDS among five infants in the Bronx. It’s rejected—based on the belief that the disease is confined to gay men.
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Panic over the nation’s blood supply sets in after a baby in California becomes sick following blood transfusions. (A donor is later discovered to have AIDS.)
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New AIDS cases in NYC: 1,096.
Deaths so far: 864. -
Kramer publishes “1,112 and Counting” in the Native. He begins, “If this article doesn’t rouse you to anger, fury, rage and action, gay men may have no future on this earth.”
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Mayor Ed Koch holds his first meeting with gay-community reps, t agreeing to proclaim the last week of April “Aid AIDS Week”—and little else. “Gays did not have a seat at the political table in those days,” recalls longtime activist Bill Dobbs. “And so the anger over the way Koch and others treated us sparked a stunning activist movement.”
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GMHC fund-raiser at Madison Square Garden fills the 17,000-seat arena.
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Safe sex is born: Activist and writer Michael Callen’s pamphlet, How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach, urges condom use. He dies in December 1993.
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Patrick Buchanan calls on Mayor Koch to cancel the Gay Pride Parade as a health threat. Koch orders extra cops to protect marchers.
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Dr. Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris tells colleagues he has isolated the retrovirus that causes AIDS. He calls it LAV (lymphadenopathy-associated virus).
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The New York Post’s front page reads L.I. GRANDMA DIED OF AIDS. The next day’s story inspires more fear still: JUNKIE AIDS VICTIM WAS HOUSEKEEPER AT BELLEVUE.
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The state Funeral Directors Association urges members not to embalm AIDS fatalities.
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New York Magazine’s cover story on “AIDS Anxiety” reads, “AIDS victims have been fired from their jobs, driven from their homes, and deserted by their loved ones. Any homosexual or Haitian has become an object of dread . . . ”
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Club fixture Klaus Nomi is among the first downtown celebrities to die.
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New York State sues a West 12th Street co-op for trying to evict Dr. Joseph Sonnabend for treating AIDS patients. He later receives $10,000 and a new lease.
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New AIDS cases in NYC: 1,841.
Deaths so far: 1,960. -
The State Health Department urges dentists to wear gowns, masks, rubber gloves, and eye goggles.
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Tests for the virus are newly available, and novelist Edmund White gets one with his lover. “I’ll be positive, you’ll be negative, and within six months you will have broken up with me,” he recalls telling his partner. “That’s what happened.” In 1997, White will publish The Farewell Symphony, about outliving friends.
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New AIDS cases in NYC: 2,871.
Deaths so far: 3,766. -
The first big season for plays about AIDS: William M. Hoffman’s As Is premieres, followed on April 21 by Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart.
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Amid a flurry of rumors, Rock Hudson’s spokesman reveals that the actor has AIDS.
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Queens parents launch a school boycott after the city allows a second-grader with AIDS to attend classes.
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AIDS fund-raising becomes a cause celeb: Dr. Mathilde Krim, grande (and very influential) dame of the American Foundation for AIDS Research, co-hosts the first Hollywood benefit with Elizabeth Taylor. Rod Stewart and Bette Midler attend.
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To ease paranoia over AIDS in schools, the chancellor says all classrooms will stock alcohol-dipped cotton swabs.
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Against Koch’s recommendation, New York State urges local health officials to padlock gay baths and sex clubs. A month later the Mine Shaft is shuttered, followed by Plato’s Retreat, a straight swingers’ club.
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The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation holds its first protest, targeting the Post for its AIDS coverage.
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Rock Hudson dies, after his rapid decline becomes a nationally televised spectacle.
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In a poll, 37 percent of Americans have a “less favorable” attitude toward gays since AIDS. Only 2 percent were more sympathetic.
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New AIDS cases in NYC: 4,217.
Deaths so far: 6,458. -
The birth of a legendary logo: silence = death stickers begin popping up. “We were very conscious of making it ‘yuppie graphics,’ ” recalls Avram Finkelstein, a member of the anonymous collective that created it. “We were using Gill Sans Serif. At the time, that was the typeface.”
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The International Committee on the Taxonomy of Viruses rules that the AIDS-causing virus should be called human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
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At GMHC’s first AIDS Walk in New York, 4,500-plus participants raise $710,000.
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Roy Cohn dies of AIDS, asserting to the last that he has liver cancer.
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Early results show that the drug AZT can slow down progress of HIV. Jubilation breaks out—prematurely. “After six years of having nothing to do for people but hold their hands and watch them die, I got my patients on it ASAP,” recalls Dr. Howard Grossman. “We didn’t know that AZT on its own is only good for six months before resistance sets in.”
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New AIDS cases in NYC: 5,216.
Deaths so far: 9,756. -
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The FDA approves AZT as the first antiretroviral drug for AIDS. But at $12,000 a year, it’s one of the costliest drugs in history.
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A new phase of activism: The first ACT UP demonstration protests the FDA’s slow speed in approving AIDS drugs, which could take nine years. Traffic is stopped, demonstrators are arrested, and an effigy of the FDA head—provided by the Public Theater’s Joe Papp—is burned. Soon after, the FDA says it will cut two years off the process.
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President Reagan first mentions AIDS, six and a half years into his presidency.
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Mayor Koch calls for mandatory HIV testing for visitors and immigrants to the U.S. Those with HIV should be denied entry, he says.
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Michael Bennett, creator of A Chorus Line, dies. “AIDS set the theater back 40 years in terms of wiping out a whole layer of creativity,” says Charles Kaiser, author of The Gay Metropolis, a history of gay life in the city.
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Equity Fights AIDS is founded and merges with Broadway Cares five years later. The group has since raised more than $100 million.
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DC Comics introduces Extraño, a gay superhero who contracts HIV after he’s bitten by the villain Hemo-Goblin.
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Cosmo says women can have unprotected sex with an HIV-positive man without fear. “Most heterosexuals are not at risk,” the magazine says, adding that it’s impossible to transmit HIV in the “missionary position.”
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New AIDS cases in NYC: 6,445.
Deaths so far: 13,990. -
At Surgeon General C. Everett Koop’s insistence, the CDC mails out 107 million copies of the brochure “Understanding AIDS.”
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To stem the epidemic among IV drug users—who will dominate new AIDS cases over the next decade— the city approves a hypodermic needle exchange in the downtown headquarters of the Health Department. Users are admitted only upon agreeing to seek treatment. (The program would close in 1990.)
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New AIDS cases in NYC: 6,871.
Deaths so far: 19,241. -
Robert Mapplethorpe dies.
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AIDS on Park Avenue: The Times runs a story about Alison Gertz, 23, an Upper East Sider. “They tested her for everything,” says her mother. “But they never tested her for AIDS because nobody thought a heterosexual woman who’s not a drug user would get it. We subsequently learned that she’d gotten it from a good friend, who she’d only slept with once.” She dies in 1992.
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The fashion world gets involved: Susanne Bartsch hosts the Love Ball at Roseland, which raises more than $300,000 for Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS (DIFFA).
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Keith Haring reveals he has HIV. Prices for his art soar as collectors anticipate his death (in 1990).
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More promising AZT news causes stock in manufacturer Burroughs Wellcome to jump 32 percent.
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Seven ACT UP members infiltrate the Stock Exchange and chain themselves to the VIP balcony. Above the trading floor a banner unfurls: SELL WELLCOME. Four days later, the company lowers the price of AZT, to $6,400 per year.
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New AIDS cases in NYC: 7,752.
Deaths so far: 24,835. -
New Yorkers meet Marisol and Julio, two Latino lovers grappling with sex in the age of AIDS—in an ongoing comic strip plastered in subways.
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Longtime Companion, the first feature film about AIDS, is released. During shooting, a key actor, Peter Evans, dies of AIDS, and director Norman Rene tests positive. The lover of writer Craig Lucas helps Rene fudge insurance forms so he won’t get fired.
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Congress passes the Ryan White CARE Act, a five-year emergency-relief fund named for the hemophiliac teenager with AIDS, from Indiana, who died in April.
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New AIDS cases in NYC: 9,072.
Deaths so far: 31,202. -
The New York City Board of Education votes to make condoms available in high schools, sparking an outcry among religious conservatives. Three years later, the tide turns and condoms are no longer offered.
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Tom Duane, an openly gay candidate in a close race for a West Side City Council seat, reveals he has HIV after opponent Liz Abzug comes out as a lesbian. Duane says he’s not on medication, has no symptoms, rises at 6:30 a.m., and rarely goes to bed before midnight, living on “stress and coffee—the candidate’s best friend.” In November, he becomes the first openly HIV-positive candidate in the country to win public office.
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Magic Johnson announces he’s HIV-positive and decides to retire from basketball.
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ACT UP’s brain trust abandons street tactics to form Treatment Action Group, aimed at overhauling federal AIDS research. With backing from major donors and researchers, the group will become a force in national AIDS policy.
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New AIDS cases in NYC: 10,871.
AIDS deaths so far: 38,044. -
Mayor David Dinkins names Ronald Johnson of the Minority Task Force on AIDS as the first citywide coordinator of AIDS policy. Johnson’s now at GMHC.
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Billboards by artist Felix Gonzales-Torres go up around the city. His photos, taken shortly after his lover died, depict an empty bed.
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Election of Bill Clinton, who’d promised a cabinet-level AIDS czar and a Manhattan Project to find a cure. Neither happened, though once out of office, Clinton would join Nelson Mandela in the global fight against AIDS.