WI AIDs in the 1960's

OTL, AIDS really emerged as a matter of discourse in the 1980s, despite having jumped to humans decades before. It led to drastic changes in behavior, with an increased focus on "safe sex" and condom use (especially among the gay community), as well as increased condemnations of homosexuality by religious conservatives (including talk about a "gay plague").

What if it had spread earlier, reaching a visible peak in the West during the 1960s? How would the sexual revolution and drug culture of the 1960s react to the earlier spread of HIV? How would social conservatives react? Would the association of the disease with African origin play into the racial tensions of the time? What would be the effect on the infant LGBT movement (the Stonewall riots happened in 1969)?

From a medical perspective, we have developed increasingly effective antiviral drugs that can at least mitigate the disease, such that people living with HIV can survive for extremely long times. How would this research have changed if it was taking place 20 years ahead of OTL (would it be possible? would medical knowledge be more advanced?)?

Furthermore, if the AIDS crisis spread through a newly decolonized Africa that was still at the height of the Cold War-era of proxy wars, how would that effect efforts to control the disease?

Just a Rube said:

OTL, AIDS really emerged as a matter of discourse in the 1980s, despite having jumped to humans decades before. It led to drastic changes in behavior, with an increased focus on "safe sex" and condom use (especially among the gay community), as well as increased condemnations of homosexuality by religious conservatives (including talk about a "gay plague").

What if it had spread earlier, reaching a visible peak in the West during the 1960s? How would the sexual revolution and drug culture of the 1960s react to the earlier spread of HIV? How would social conservatives react? Would the association of the disease with African origin play into the racial tensions of the time? What would be the effect on the infant LGBT movement (the Stonewall riots happened in 1969)?

From a medical perspective, we have developed increasingly effective antiviral drugs that can at least mitigate the disease, such that people living with HIV can survive for extremely long times. How would this research have changed if it was taking place 20 years ahead of OTL (would it be possible? would medical knowledge be more advanced?)?

Furthermore, if the AIDS crisis spread through a newly decolonized Africa that was still at the height of the Cold War-era of proxy wars, how would that effect efforts to control the disease?

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It would be a disaster.

The Establishment would close ranks and insist on 'virginity at marriage' and totally condemn homosexuality. This would, of course, simply drive extra-marital and homosexual sex underground, where it would be unregulated and invisible. Spread could be even more rapid than OTL, and more of it would be hetero, I suspect.

Intravenous drugs would take a big hit - but it's not going to make marijuana smokers or cocaine sniffers sick.

Anti virals aren't going come much sooner. There are LOTS of viral diseases out there. If anti-virals were developable earlier iOTL, they probably would have. We were very, very lucky iOTL that the first anti-virals were being worked on when HIV hit. AND, if it's gay men and prostitutes being hit first, and the backlash is against 'sinners', it might take LONGER for the research to get prioritized.

Condoms ought to be more used, but the neoVictorian hypocritical false morality that is the most likely result of an earlier AIDS epidemic is likely to want to ban condoms, rather than promote them.

Ultimately, there's probably going to be a huge scandal about 20 years after the epidemic hits, when a critical mass of cases of abuse/rape/child molestation, etc., finally build to the point where it can no longer be ignored. When some major 'upright' politician or priest or 'he-man movie star' is proven to have infected several innocent victims, THEN we might get some sanity to prevail.

I can see HIV painted in bigger divine colors given the way hippies act. A good portion of the country might even believe it's God's judgement, wrath, etc. It would probably spread real fast through those communes too, of course with the disease known to the public, hippies will have a harder time trying to find places to reside.

How would it affect race relations? OTL it was associated with Haitian immigrants in the US; assuming it first becomes prominent in some immigrant community ITTL, how does that interact with desegregation and the resistance to it going on at that point (to say nothing of the later racial tensions that developed nationwide over things like busing)?

How does it affect things on a more international scale? With a somewhat less globalized world, is the spread slower? Would some areas be more or less vulnerable? Are there conspiracy theories about AIDS as a Communist/white supremacist/black nationalist/neocolonialist/whoever plot (I know at least some of those are OTL conspiracy theories, but do they get more traction)?

I think the international work to eradicate smallpox began in the '60 even though it was declared a success in '79. So, this is a hopeful sign and one thing going in our favor.

I like the book Viral Storm by Nathan Wolfe who's a PhD biology guy and who has both a company and a nonprofit. His big thing is early warning on newly emerging diseases. And I think he does a pretty good job talking about the early history of AIDS with a fair amount of references. One sad downbeat is that smallpox vaccination may have been one factor in the spread, although not as big a factor as roads into remote areas.

As far as risk factors, anal intercourse is one risk factor and should be acknowledged and talked about in candid and realistic educational material, and this certainly is not specifically gay. Even the most cursory and random review of pornography will most probably show that a lot of heterosexuals like anal sex, too, at least on the fantasy level.

Having sex when another STD is present is another big risk factor, because a certain type of white blood cell is closer to the surface of the skin or mucosal membrane. From the following source, HIV needs the CD4 receptor site which is present on some immune cells, plus certain other things have to happen biologically in order for transmission to occur. It's complex. And to me, kind of the more that's known about the specifics of HIV, the harder it is to view it as some kind of moral issue.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1539443/

' . . HIV-1 needs two receptors to gain entry into human cells: the CD4 receptor found on some cells of the immune system and the chemokine binding co-receptor. . '

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Actually, a case of AIDS was confirmed to exist in 1969:

http://partners.nytimes.com/library/national/science/aids/102887sci-aids.html

New evidence that a St. Louis teen-ager died of AIDS in 1969 suggests that the AIDS virus may have been introduced into the United States several times before touching off the current epidemic, according to experts in disease transmission.

Until now, many experts have assumed that the virus that causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome first appeared in the country sometime in the mid-1970's. Evidence indicates to many experts that the disease originated before then in Africa, although this has not been proved.
The patient, identified only as Robert R., died in 1969 of an illness that baffled his doctors at Washington University in St. Louis. They published a paper in 1984 suggesting that, with hindsight, his symptoms resembled those of AIDS. About two months ago, molecular biologists at Tulane University in New Orleans examined stored specimens of Robert R.'s tissues for signs of the AIDS virus and found that the 15-year-old was apparently infected with it.

"Our diagnostic tests confirmed the presence of the AIDS virus," said Dr. Robert Garry of Tulane. "We're pretty confident about this case now."

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AIDS kills via secondary infection. It was around in the sixties, but not identified until 1979-80 when professional gay men did not respond to state-of-the-art medical treatment.