You're listening to the micro version of the Savage Lovecast at savage.love.

If you're stuck in a relationship quandary, or if you're looking for sexual harmony,

well, there's nothing you can't ask on the Savage Lovecast. In the mid-1980s, on the Savage Lovecast,

in the mid-1980s, when it became possible to get tested for the newly discovered virus,

the human immunodeficiency virus that had already killed thousands of gay men

and would go on to kill millions of people all over the world, gay, straight, and by,

I got my first HIV test. My boyfriend at the

time insisted. I didn't want to do it. I was a little older than he was, and I'd been sexually

active for a little bit longer. And my timing was terrible. The New York Times ran its first story

about what would become the AIDS crisis in July of 1981.

That story had the famous headline, Rare Cancer, seen in 41 homosexuals.

I'd come out a month earlier that same summer.

A few years later, as more guys were getting sick and dying, my boyfriend grew increasingly afraid.

And he had every right to be

afraid. I was afraid to. We were all afraid. I was afraid I was already infected, and I was afraid

what it would mean to know that I was. The first HIV tests became available in 1985.

Back then, you had to wait months for your test results, and there was no cure.

Finding out you had HIV was like being told there was a ticking time bomb inside you that would

go off sometime in the next two years. But unlike a time bomb, which would kill you swiftly and

relatively mercifully, this viral time bomb when it went off was going to kill you slowly and painfully and there was

nothing anyone could do to help you there was no cure no treatment no vaccine so many guys were

testing positive back then in the mid 1980s and killing themselves after getting their results

...