Respectability Politics and the AIDS Crisis

In 1985, doctors at a methadone clinic in the South Bronx made the harrowing discovery: 50 percent of its patients had HIV. Three years later, in the same neighborhood, a pair of epidemiologists estimated that as many as one in five young men were positive for the disease. Those ...  Show more

In this final episode, we turn to people living with HIV today — longtime survivors of a plague who, despite their pain, frustrations and desires to just be done with it, realize they can’t be done with it. These are people like Kia LaBeija, an artist born HIV-positive, who turne ...  Show more

In the 1980s, the world was gripped by a virus that was killing people in their thousands; savaging communities and creating a climate of fear, blame and ignorance. That virus was HIV, and here to sift the facts from the fiction and explain how the AIDS crisis transformed everyth ...  Show more

In 1992 HIV/AIDS hit a grim milestone in the United States when it became the number one cause of death among men ages 25 to 44.Since there was still so much stigma attached to the illness, people were often dying without even telling their closest friends and family that they we ...  Show more

How do we understand something as huge as a global epidemic?Similarly to Covid, the AIDS epidemic, which was most destructive in the 1980s and 90s, had such universal reach. Yet within that, there were millions of personal experiences.What was it like to work on the frontline wit ...  Show more

When HIV was first identified in the early 1980s, it was a public health crisis mired in urgent scientific questions: How was it transmitted? What were the symptoms? Could it be treated? But alongside that, and equally challenging to public health, was the stigma attached to t ...