We’ve come so far in the struggle against AIDS, but the most marginalized in society are still suffering.
Katrina vanden HeuvelA sex worker demonstrates the use of a female condom during an Indian HIV/AIDS awareness campaign in 2010. (Reuters / Rupak De Chowdhuri)
Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.
On March 24, 1987, the activist group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) gathered in front of Trinity Church on Wall Street in New York City for its first ever demonstration. The flyer advertising the event was crammed with damning facts (“AIDS is the biggest killer in New York City of young men and women”), indictments (“President Reagan, nobody is in charge!”) and the desperate rage of people who were done being ignored (“AIDS is everybody’s business now”).
Of course, ACT UP took to the streets precisely because, in the 1980s, AIDS wasn’t seen as everybody’s business. Before it was a global epidemic, many thought of AIDS as the problem of—and even (capital) punishment for—the already marginalized gay communities living in cities such as New York and San Francisco. As movingly chronicled in last year’s Oscar-nominated documentary How to Survive a Plague, it wasn’t until sick and dying activists, with literally nothing left to lose, raised hell that intransigent government agencies and drug companies were finally forced to act.
Thirty years later, as another World AIDS Day passes, there’s been an enormous amount of progress. According to UNAIDS, the number of new HIV infections has declined by one-third in the last 12 years. Since 2005, there’s been an almost 30 percent drop in AIDS-related deaths, and since 2001, new infections in children have fallen 52 percent, thanks to treatments that prevent mother-to-child transmission. Access to antiretroviral treatment around the world has increased exponentially.
Yet, sadly, as musician and activist Elton John reminds us in his book Love Is the Cure: On Life, Loss and the End of AIDS, the AIDS epidemic is far from over. As John persuasively argues, the same inequalities and stigmas that spread the disease in the 1980s prevent its eradication today.
Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.
Katrina vanden HeuvelTwitterKatrina vanden Heuvel is editorial director and publisher of The Nation, America’s leading source of progressive politics and culture. She served as editor of the magazine from 1995 to 2019.