OutCasting Overtime; HIV at 40 and how youth lose by not learning about its context

This is Outcasting Over Time, from media for the public good, creator of public radio's LGBTQ youth programs. Hi, I'm Lil and Outcasting Youth Participant. On Friday, July 3rd, 1981, 40 years ago this month, the New York Times published an article deep inside the paper headlined Rare Cancer, seen in 41 homosexuals. It was the first article in the mainstream press about what we now know as HIV AIDS. There had been some progress in public acceptance for gay people in the 1970s, roughly the dozen years following the Stonewall uprising. The American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental illness in 1973. Activist groups took hold, working hard to destigmatize gay people, and addressed our community's lack of civil rights protections. But then, young gay men started dying of these weird diseases. It took time for the cause to be found, a virus we now know as HIV, and for people to understand how it was spread. In those

early years, most cases in the United States were in gay men, but that wasn't the case in other places in the world, where the disease was often transmitted heterosexually. For a time, the syndrome was actually called grid, gay-related immunodeficiency disease. It was terrible. For many, a diagnosis was nearly a death sentence. Often, people who worked in hospitals wouldn't even enter the room of an AIDS patient, leaving meals outside in the hall to get cold. Funeral homes would refuse to accept the bodies of those who died. In the United States, AIDS was first noticed in gay men, and this led people to vilify them for bringing this deadly new disease into the US. AIDS gave people a whole new reason to hate gay people, and a huge new wave of homophobia blasted the country. But the government largely ignored AIDS as it grew from a few dozen cases to hundreds to thousands, because it was mainly infecting gay men, and why should the government care about them? President Ronald Reagan, who was

notoriously homophobic, didn't publicly even say the word AIDS during those critical early years when the epidemic might have been checked. If only the government had cared about the people who were getting sick. Today, in high school, we learn about HIV AIDS as just another sexually transmitted infection. We're taught how to avoid it, just as we're taught to avoid other STIs. But schools don't teach us about the devastating effects of AIDS on the LGBTQ community, because for the most part, schools teach little if anything about our community. Our education is filtered through lens of whiteness and straightness, so we don't learn about the terrible context in which HIV AIDS occurred, especially in the most deadly years of the 1980s and 90s, or about how HIV had and continues to have even worse impacts on communities of color. This lack of education about such a critical event in LGBTQ history leaves many young people, LGBTQ and straight, unaware that it happened at all. For those of us who are LGBTQ, it makes it seem that teachers and other adults in

our lives don't care that it happened. This brings up a larger issue. In most of the country, LGBTQ history is intentionally erased from public school curricula. LGBTQ Nation reports that last month Nevada became only the sixth state to require that school curricula include history lessons on LGBTQ people and historic events. California was the first to end the exclusion, and several years ago we talked with the California State Senator Mark Leno, who sponsored the bill to include LGBTQ history in public schools. You can listen to that program on our website, outcastingmedia.org. Why is it important for all of us, not just LGBTQ students, but all of us, to learn this history? Think about the black civil rights movement. It's filled with names we've all heard of. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and too many others to name. When schools teach students about these people and the

movement, it makes students all students understand that it wasn't just some agitators who thought they had been discriminated against, who are trying to get more rights, even though that's how it was often seen. It was an organized movement of strong people who had historically and brutally been denied their civil rights, working to claim their share of the American promise of equality. Black students gain self-respect as they learn about this, but of course the benefits aren't limited to them. Everyone learns that the black civil rights movement was something to be respected and valued, a movement full of heroes. And although that certainly has an eliminated prejudice against black people, there's no question that it's created a very different and much better reality, not only for black people, but for everyone. But when LGBTQ history is erased, that public acceptance just doesn't happen for us. Lots of people believe lots of falsehoods about LGBTQ people, that we are predators and sinners and perverts, that we say we're LGBTQ just to be trendy, that we choose to be

LGBTQ, and that we can easily choose not to be. We experience the same rejections and inequalities that are experienced by all people who are considered others, people outside the straight white mainstream, and yet our minority is different because our differences involve sexuality and gender, which some people in so-called polite society don't like to talk about, especially when those discussions include young people like me. There are lots of heroes in AIDS activism, but we don't learn about them. We don't learn about the terrible stigma around AIDS and how that affected so many people so horribly. We don't learn about the LGBTQ women who became AIDS activists, even though lesbians were at the lowest risk of actually catching the disease. We don't learn how heroically all sorts of people in our community pull together and work not only to take care of each other, but also to push the government and medical authorities to work for treatments. This lack of acknowledgement and education about such a critical point in LGBTQ history is dehumanizing for LGBTQ youth. Few

young people know about the epidemic and the affected had on our community. The lack of time, consideration, education, care, and acknowledgement of such a devastating event in our history makes us feel isolated and unrecognized. This lack of context and lack of teaching about LGBTQ history in general hides the fact that just like other discriminated against minorities, LGBTQ people have been fighting for equal rights for decades. Erasing that from our education makes it harder to see our own lives in context, and we need to see ourselves and our community to see that context. And a lot of non-LGBTQ kids, straight, cisgender kids, also don't know about it because it's not taught. They don't see the larger context in which LGBTQ people exist, so there's nothing to lift up their perceptions of the LGBTQ people they actually know, and make them aware of the inequalities we still face. Schools have a responsibility here. Students learn best when we feel safe and supported, and making education more

inclusive would improve the learning experience of LGBTQ students. But even more importantly, we all need to learn about civil rights struggles, and this includes learning about the history of LGBTQ people. Come on schools, we need you to do better. Thanks for listening to Outcasting Over Time, from Outcasting Media, creator of Public Radio's LGBTQ youth programs. Outcasting media is created by media for the public good based in New York. This piece was created by the outcasting team, including Rose, Jada, Isha, Justin, Charlotte, Naja, Sasha, Timothy, and me, Will. Our executive producer is Mark Sofis. Visit us at outcastingmedia.org to get information about outcasting, watch outcasting videos, access our social media links, and listen to outcasting and related content. You can also find outcasting on Radio Public, Apple Podcast, Stitcher, Audible, and other major podcast sites. Thanks, and thanks for listening.