From our past: NY TIMES: RARE CANCER SEEN IN 41 HOMOSEXUALS

[Behind the Aegis]

Doctors in New York and California have diagnosed among homosexual men 41 cases of a rare and often rapidly fatal form of cancer. Eight of the victims died less than 24 months after the diagnosis was made.

The cause of the outbreak is unknown, and there is as yet no evidence of contagion. But the doctors who have made the diagnoses, mostly in New York City and the San Francisco Bay area, are alerting other physicians who treat large numbers of homosexual men to the problem in an effort to help identify more cases and to reduce the delay in offering chemotherapy treatment.

The sudden appearance of the cancer, called Kaposi's Sarcoma, has prompted a medical investigation that experts say could have as much scientific as public health importance because of what it may teach about determining the causes of more common types of cancer. First Appears in Spots

Doctors have been taught in the past that the cancer usually appeared first in spots on the legs and that the disease took a slow course of up to 10 years. But these recent cases have shown that it appears in one or more violet-colored spots anywhere on the body. The spots generally do not itch or cause other symptoms, often can be mistaken for bruises, sometimes appear as lumps and can turn brown after a period of time. The cancer often causes swollen lymph glands, and then kills by spreading throughout the body.

more: http://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/03/us/rare-cancer-seen-in-41-homosexuals.html

The above is one of the first, if not the first, article written on what would be come known as AIDS. Today is World AIDS Day.

Also see: "Getting to Zero": World AIDS Day 2012 -- Silent Thread/In Memoriam in General Discussion.

[Warpy]

1. The first I heard about it was a Newsweek article calling it GRID

or Gay Related Immunodeficiency Disease since those were the only patients that first presented any real cluster.

We knew about the diseases caused by severe immunosuppression because transplant medicine was in its infancy and only when an immune system was basically dead did early patients get to keep their organs, a terrible bargain between a rapid death from organ failure and a slower one from cancer and opportunistic infection.

It spread like wildfire and I don't think it was more than a year later that I started to see it on the street and at work, now called Acquired Immuno-Deficiency syndrome, the name the full blown disease still carries.

I don't think it's possible to overstate the horror show of those first years while Reagan napped and funding failed to materialize where it could do the most good.

It's largely due to Reagan's failure to act in those very early years that it became such a widespread disease.

[graham4anything]

2. F--k Ronald Reagan.One million plus died before he even woke up. May he continue to rot.

and you gave me quite a scare with this. I am reading it top to bottom without seeing the first three words in the title,or the paragraph at the end
and I am thinking, OMG deja vu here we all go again.

and I never forget friends from the past among others Freddy, Jack, Vinnie plus many others I shall not name.
I had started to place Freddy's obit here, but don't know if that is proper or if his remaining family would want it here, so I won't.
They were not my lovers, but my very good friends, and I don't think a week goes by when I don't think of them and some others. AIDS affects everyone. And back in the early 80s, being from NYC, and my hanging out with a number of people (musicians,broadway agents,Broadway photographers) at NYC rock clubs and Broadway shows, I remember the horror, panic, terror, etc. before it was known as AIDS, when people in NYC knew there was something going round, but not yet knowing what it was all people needed to be afraid of and attempt to get around it.
Had Freddy not caught the died for another decade and would have been able to keep going professionally, today he most likely would have had a theatre named after him, he died way too young.(of course so does everyone).

Am also thinking of another very close friend, he was much older, and for some reason of all people
Jack just died a few months ago of natural causes. He was indeed one of the very lucky, because there was no rhyme or reason and he always wondered what made him different when everyone around him was dying and by all thoughts, he would have died very early on.

And am thinking of Vinnie. Vinnie who had it under control for more than a decade.
Vinnie, who was a very proud person from a family that was very hard on him but came around to understand.
Vinnie, who had a great job to pay for the very, very expensive then-cocktail.
Vinnie, who lost that job not due to illness but just did.
Vinnie, who was so proud, he never told anyone that he lost the job, thereby losing his insurance, and as the next couple of years went by, lost his savings and in the end,
lost his life, not being able to afford the drugs that kept him alive and would have to this day.
If only he had let us know, we would have done all to help him get it. We would have signed him up for some group or other.
We would have told his very, very famous friends he had (not friends in my group of friends, his own, major celeb names who had they known, would have paid his doctor bills forever.
But he was too proud and he died.
I still cry for the injustice of someone not having insurance because they lost their job and dying directly because of that. (Vinnie would have loved President Obama and his health care bill for this purpose).

One should never be too proud to stay alive another day. Now a half decade or so later,
Vinnie would still be here and live to an old age having it "under control".

again Fuck Ronald Reagan for doing nothing for so many years.and then it taking so many years after to find drugs to make it controllable(long as one is on the drug treatment) and that it is so damn expensive here in the US, when it is so cheap elsewhere.


and fuck those who are homophobic and who shunned in the early days before those low lifes realized it can happen to anybody and did.(and who still are).

And I am old enough to remember the Stonewall riot -
(and say Fuck the cops)
NYC back in the early to 50s to 60s,with the police routinely busting any/all facilities that were Gay
and what finally happened on Christopher Street at the Stonewall in what was the last straw, and the customers finally would not take it anymore and the riot ensued

that night directly led to National orgnaizations and the annual Gay Rights marches in 1970 on its one year anniverary that continue to this day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots
(If that wiki is indeed correct, it is a very interesting back story too)

and I hope I am not intruding here in this group & thread.

[closeupready]

4. Not intruding, IMO - thank you for that touching tribute

to your friends. Three of my closest friends died, and as you, I think of them probably every week. Two of them I didn't know were ill. The other was a very out gay man in the 80's, well-known in the community and a huge heart. Silence equaled death then, and it still equals death.

[RKP5637]

6. I had the same reaction! "OMG deja vu here we all go again." And the asshole then

we called a president.

[xchrom]

3. Du rec. Nt

[cbayer]

5. Holy crap. I had the most astounding visceral reaction to this just by reading the headline.

I was in training at New York Hospital in Manhattan and we were seeing the very first cases.

And things just got worse and worse and worse. Our early speculations on cause and transmission were mostly wrong, but our terror was greatly justified.

Thanks for posting this. We should never forget.

[irisblue]

7. yeah, I had a WTF!?!

I had to read the story, twice before I saw the date. I started Xray School in 1982. I had my TB clinic proctor, very sincerely and in total belief, tell me that TB would be gone by the time my career ended. I can still recall the first brown eyed man, maybe 25, in our hospital critical care, doing his chest film after his admission....and Turk, very senior technologist and Dr VanDerKoch both with decades of experience saying, near simultaneously," What the hell does this kid have?" (ground glass prsentation). Over the next 2 weeks, he got sicker and sicker. One of the radiologists refused, refused! to inject the contrast for our then brand new CT machine. The first physician who I knew was a total dick.
Reagan had much to answer for when he stood before the Divine

[mitchtv]

8. that is when I lost my best friend

they were calling it Gay cancer, then too.He was only the beginning,

[TrogL]

9. I saw a sufferer standing outside a nightclub

This was likely summer 1984. The local gay nightclub had long lines every night. The line went down the sidewalk. On the front lawn there was a guy standing there, who couldn't have been older than 19. He was wearing an A-shirt and you could see the open sores all over his arms, chest and legs. He was leaning heavily against a tree otherwise he would have collapsed. Clearly he was in rough shape.

He had a hat on the ground looking for donations and a sign "I have AIDS - please help".

He wasn't getting many takers and I was scared to get close to him because I knew nothing about the disease except scare-stuff I'd heard on US television.

I hate myself some days.

[Neoma]

10. Don't guilt yourself.

I think everyone has those moments of, "if only I knew." You didn't.