Hello, hello and welcome back to a bit fruity. I'm Matt Bernstein and I'm so

happy that you're here.

So by the time this episode is published,

Pride Month will be over, but gay people still exist,

or at least that's what I've been told.

I talk a lot online about the AIDS crisis and specifically the years between 1981, which was when the first mainstream article on what they called then,

Gay Cancer was published in the New York Times,

by the way, it was called Rare Cancer

Seen in 41 homosexuals and was published

in a little column on page 20 and 1996 which is when

antiretroviral therapies which are the drugs that keep people with HIV living

long and healthy lives became widely available.

During these years the people most commonly associated with AIDS, gay men,

intravenous drug users, were turned into pariahs by society and by the state. You've heard

the stories, you know, the government, the media, and the general public

moralized the behavior of people who contracted the disease so that they could feel no responsibility at all for their callous attitudes towards what quickly became mass death and the collapse of entire communities.

Famously, it took Ronald Reagan, President Ronald Reagan,

rolling around in hell as we speak,

four years to acknowledge AIDS in a press conference, and that was only because

his friend, Closited Movie Star Rock Hudson, had just been diagnosed.

As a gay man born in 1998, tell me I'm young. Just two years after antiretrovirals became available, I feel like I live in the shadow of this crisis, which I think is why I fixate on it so much. It's also because I will

never not be jarred by the way that I learned about the AIDS crisis, like, I don't know

...