Avescope Memento Mori

Did you know? Let’s face it! In our ten-minute news cycle, we
need ‘sexy gore’ non-stop for it to even penetrate. To use the
vernacular, Ebola blew its wad and for the average Northern
European/North American it’s not interesting anymore. Those
clicks are spent. Ebola? Been there. Done that. Next. Oh! Maybe
if there is a case in the US again, THAT would be newsworthy,
but really? Trump Tweets get way more rage clicks than brown
children dying in someplace we all assume to be, to quote
Trump, a bit of a shithole.
We’ve forgotten about the Horseman.
I was born in the 1970s. I grew up in the 1980s when this new
monster rose from the murk. Originally, it was called GRID. I
actually remember hearing about GRID. It wasn’t something I
would probably have to worry about. Gay-Related Immune
Deficiency. Ringing any bells? Now we call it by the far less
discriminatory, HIV, or Human Immunodeficiency Virus. You
know, when it was proven that far more than just the LGBT+
community could get it. For many years, however, there was a
stigma to HIV that it was a gay disease or a drug addict disease
and ‘good’ people didn’t get it. The religious right called it
God’s punishment for bad behaviour. The only people who
were getting HIV who didn’t ‘deserve’ it were those poor
hemophiliacs, but maybe the hateful humans thought that
God couldn’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.
This prejudice allowed HIV to spread and go unresearched for a
shockingly long time. If one is interested in the early years of
HIV, HBO did a fantastic movie about it in 1993 called ‘And the
Band Played On’ based on a book of the same name.
HIV was a scourge. It had the potential to kill us all. One
moment of unprotected sex and it could be game over, and
game over in a horrible, melting end. It took beautiful people,
like Rock Hudson, Gia Marie Carangi, and Freddie Mercury.
People who got HIV, or, as we said in the day ‘full-blown AIDS’
(Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) were often
abandoned by their parents. In the earliest days, medical staff
wouldn’t treat them. Undertakers wouldn’t bury them. They
died horrendously in the modern-day equivalent of plague
wards. Even into the early 90s, it was thought by some that you
could get AIDS just by being near someone who had it.
In fact, a somewhat distant relative through marriage of mine
died of it in the 1980s. Someone my parents described to the
young me as ‘living an alternative lifestyle’ that we stayed with
in San Francisco on a family trip in 1983. When I look back, I
remember a powerful man with a moustache in a plaid shirt
and incredible tight jeans, even for the 1980s. I thought he was
really fun. Then two years later we heard he was sick and he
sent a letter to my mother. In it, he enclosed two pictures of
himself in a sports jacket that seemed sizes too big for him.
This powerful, flamboyant man who I thought was so cool was
a shrunken husk of his former self. And then he was gone. It
was 1985.
Watch any Queen video from the 1970s or early 1980s and you
will see a robust, vital Freddie Mercury. Watch 1991’s These Are
the Days of Our Lives video, the last music video that Freddie
Mercury ever made, and you will see a very different man.
It cannot be impressed upon young people now how terrifying
HIV was in those days. We heard about it in school. Safe sex
became a religion. “No glove, no love!” Movies were made
about HIV to destigmatize it; the most famous of which was
1993’s Oscar-winning ‘Philadelphia’, a movie I still can’t watch
without breaking into tears. I think that movie should be
required viewing in schools.
But then came AZT or azidothymidine as a treatment for HIV. I
remember when Magic Johnson announced in 1991 that he
had HIV and we sat around in school morbidly joking about
how long he would live. None of us would have thought that
Magic would still be around in 2019. In 1991, it would have been
incomprehensible to think someone could live five years after
an HIV diagnosis, let alone eighteen. With antiviral therapy, HIV
has been controlled. There is even talk of downgrading it to a
‘chronic condition’ instead of a fatal illness. Now there are also
protocols like PrEP, Pre Exposure Prophylaxis, that people in
high-risk communities can take to prevent them from getting
HIV.
Despite PrEP, HIV rates are rising again in demographics
where it hasn’t risen in years. Young LGBT men, the very group
who once fought desperately in their community to stop the
spread of the disease. It’s been described as, ‘really, no big deal
if you get it.’
We have forgotten the horsemen.
Measles. The United States was declared free of ‘circulating’
measles in 2000. The only measles in the country was measles
brought in by travellers. In 2016, measles was declared as
eradicated from the Americas. This disease, which can be fatal,
was conquered. Until it wasn’t. Because of a now thoroughly
debunked paper in the Lancet in the 1990s which suggested
that vaccines cause autism, parents began to stop vaccinating
their children.
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