Beginning of the AIDS Epidemic

So, June 5th actually marks an important moment in LGBT+ history — and for today we’re not delving into the ancient past.

This day in 1981, the CDC published its first documentation on the disease that would be known as AIDS. The document was about a cluster of five gay men in Los Angeles infected with Pheumocystis Pneumonia — a fungal infection in the lungs that occurs almost exclusively in people with weakened immune systems. Within days of this report being published, doctors from across the United States would flood the CDC with reports of similar infections.

Although in many ways this marks the “official” start of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, the LGBT+ community was already aware of the epidemic. On May 18, Lawrence Mass had become the first journalist to write about the epidemic, publishing a piece entitled “Disease Rumors Largely Unfounded” in a gay newspaper call The New York Native. Mass’s sources, NYC public health officials, had claimed to him that his assertion that a fungal infection was sweeping through New York’s gay community was totally unfounded — even though the CDC had been investigating the same claim for a month.

By the end of 1981, 270 cases of severe immune deficiency were reported in gay men and 121 of those reported had died. At this point, the disease still did not have a name and was not clearly understood. The CDC would not dub the disease Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) until September 24 of the following year.

By 1985 — the same year that President Ronald Reagan first publicly mentioned AIDS — at least one HIV infection had been reported in every region of the world.

(Adapted from this Facebook post.)