You're listening to the microversion of the Savage Love cast at Savage.loaf.

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

the human immunodevisions 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 too. 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 test 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. That mandatory counseling was required

to get an HIV test. It was nice to know after everything that happened between July of 1981 and

the fall of 1985, after hearing so many hateful things said by religious conservatives, the moral

majority as they called themselves then, they were the moral majority delighted to see us die.

It was nice to know when the mandatory counseling was imposed that there were some people out there

...