Quotes & Sayings About Aids In The 1980s

Those of us who lived through the worst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic from the early 1980s through the mid-1990s have a very special spot in our heart for home-based health care. — David Mixner

In the 1980s, when people were just beginning to talk about AIDS, there were just a few categories of those who were at high risk: homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin addicts, and Haitians. We were the only ones identified by nationality. — Edwidge Danticat

[T]he myth that there was somehow a magic wand in the early 1980s to cure AIDS - a wand that Reagan deliberately refused to wave - is now almost conventional wisdom. — Andrew Sullivan

Right-wing influence on sex education has played an equal, if not greater role. Federally mandated abstinence-only programs, which began in the early 1980s, not only reinforced that intercourse was the line in the sand of chastity, but also, using the threat of AIDS as justification, hammered home the idea that it might well kill you. Oral sex, then, was the obvious work-around. I doubt, though, that social conservatives would consider it a victory that, across a range of studies, college students who identify as religious are even more likely than others to say oral sex is not "sex," or that over a third of teenagers included it in their definition of "abstinence" (nearly a quarter included anal sex), or that roughly 70 percent agreed that someone who engages in oral sex is still a virgin. — Peggy Orenstein

The reality of AIDS in America is that gay men of color-finding no home in either their birth communities or the highly commercialized, white gay world-represent the majority of HIV infection in America. The time
has come for the gay community to take responsibility for reaching these gay men as gay men, insisting that their lives are as important as the first group of gay men lost to AIDS in the 1980s. — Patrick Moore

Perhaps more than any other disease before or since, syphilis in early modern Europe provoked the kind of widespread moral panic that AIDS revived when it struck America in the 1980s. — Peter Lewis Allen

I can remember in the late 1980s and early 1990s how many men with AIDS I saw everywhere in Key West. There were hospices and medical supply stores geared to people with AIDS. It seemed that every sick man who could afford it had headed for the warmth and the tranquillity and the gay-friendliness of the island. — Edmund White