PC: Earlier AIDS epidemic

While it had existed decades before, AIDS only became a serious issue in the 1980s.

The question is, could it have peaked like that earlier? Like in the 1960s and the early 1970s?

What would be the effects of an earlier epidemic? How would AIDS research fare?
 
Before it got into the U.S, AIDs had been around in Africa for awhile. This was apparently caused by African farmers forced off their land by colonialism resorting to bushmeat and getting infected with the disease. There's also a theory it could have originated in South America. So, some colonialists have relationships with infected local women, and head back to Belgium or France, and it spreads from there. It then goes epidemic. AIDS having a reputation as a European rather than Gay disease could have interesting cultural effects.
 
If it happens after blood transfusion is common but before it can be detected it will be a major problem. For example if it surfaces before WW2 (perhaps due to a different development pattern in the Congo in the 1920s/30s) it will spread quickly worldwide, especially given the long incubation period. Huge social changes when it emerges in the 1950s.
Oh well there's always the 15% of us with CCR5-D32...
 
If it gains media attention in the 1960s I'd see it being stereotyped as a hippy/free love disease rather then a gay disease, and it's a legitimate question whether there'd be much public sympathy at all. Perhaps even active opposition to attempts to find a cure or prevent it's spread.
 
If it gains media attention in the 1960s I'd see it being stereotyped as a hippy/free love disease rather then a gay disease, and it's a legitimate question whether there'd be much public sympathy at all. Perhaps even active opposition to attempts to find a cure or prevent it's spread.
Once it's in the blood banks it becomes a public health issue.
 
If it gains media attention in the 1960s I'd see it being stereotyped as a hippy/free love disease rather then a gay disease, and it's a legitimate question whether there'd be much public sympathy at all. Perhaps even active opposition to attempts to find a cure or prevent it's spread.

Isn't gay rights linked to the free love counterculture and the liberalisation at the time?
 

Wallet

Banned
Before 1960, it's unlikely to get attention. About the same as syphillis. The social culture was just to conservative at the time. Especially if it's still mostly effecting gays. It will get even less attention then in the 80s, so more gay men will die with less media attention. It will also be harder to get treatment, as there were still anti homosexuality laws.

By 1980, a significant portion of the gay community could be dead.
 
I think the posters here have the right idea. Depending on when it appears, it could change the perception of the so-called free-love movement of the 60s - prompting more sexual conservatism, and stunting the whole Hippie movement. After all - a looooot of young people were enticed into those kinds of social circles through the "carefree love" in a violent and awful decade.

Also, homosexual decriminalisation took place throughout the 50s and 60s. If AIDS were epidemic at the time, then the resulting paranoia and political backlash would quite possibly delay or cripple this progress. Remember - the whole "gays spread disease and God hates 'em," argument would probably hold up a lot better in a society witnessing this underground community be decimated by a horrible epidemic. I think we'd see anti-homosexual mainstream politics well into the 70s.
 
The problem with HIV/AIDS is that it has such a long latency time before any symptoms, the symptoms are not entirely obvious and linked (Kaposi's Sarcoma and immune deficieny, who knew), viral identification is a pretty sophisticated thing, and anti-HIV drugs piggybacked on prior research into anti-virus drugs. Depending on when the disease spreads the consequences vary a lot. Syphilis was new to Europe and yet became widespread pretty quickly so especially once HIV gets established it can spread quickly. Imagine if it is before latex condoms...
 
HIV would be an incurable illness. The science to understand it just wasn't present in the mid-20th century. Even OTL, the understanding that retroviruses existed and could cause disease among humans predated the recognition of the pandemic by only a couple of years. The only way the disease could be dealt with would be through the isolation of carriers and trying to prevent further infections.

Without tests for HIV infection--you can only test for something that you know exists--blood banks and organ transplants could become impossible. This would have serious medical implications, more later than earlier.

I'm not necessarily sure that homosexuals would appear as a distinct group at risk. Quite apart from pervasive societal homophobia, it's not clear to me that gay sexual networks in the mid-20th century would be as conducive to the spread of HIV as the networks of later. These networks were more fragmented, and it also seems as if anal sex may have been less common.
 
So the consensus here is that the gay rights movement would be gutted in such a scenario, as well as everything related to the free love counterculture.

Is constitutional amendment banning gay marriage by the mid-1970s possible here?

Though probably, I think by the time it becomes a full-blown crisis by 1980, even a Republican government by that time would have been forced to take measures, although the free love counterculture movement takes a hit. Am I right?
I think that in the US a SSM prohibition would actually be unlikely simply because the gay rights movement would be so far behind OTL that agitation for same sex marriage would be looked in as ludicrous. Sooner or later there's be a backlash, possibly even pro-gay rights terrorism to draw attention to their plight.

That said HIV would not remain a disease of mainly homosexuals (anyone remember GRID?) for long; it will spread. In fact IIRR the US heroin epidemic started in the seventies, just right for HIV to go endemic. This might actually help stop drug abuse becoming a legal rather than medical matter, though I wouldn't be optimistic on that, at least in the USA.
 
While HIV/AIDS was initially basically a disease of gay/bisexual men, it crossed over to the heterosexual community pretty quickly. Recognition was delayed due to not looking for it and also the latency between infection and obvious symptoms. While initially there be more of a anti-gay backlash, once HIV is seen in the heterosexual community the backlash against prostitution for example will be equally harsh. It is still not clear the POD date for this, but lets assume its the late 1940's brought back to the USA and Europe by servicemen who served in the Allied bases in tropical Africa.

Sexual revolution, forget about it. You'll see a return to strict morality that is now backed not just by religious rules, but the reality that one encounter can give you a fatal incurable disease - unlike syphilis and gonorrhea which by the late 1940's are curable with antibiotics. Dating, in the sense of young men and women going anywhere without strict chaperonage will cease. Female virginity, possibly confirmed by premarital examination (which occurs in some places now) will rapidly become the norm. Extramarital affairs, when exposed, will result in the scarlet "A" for the offender male or female, and I expect automatic divorce with the guilty party losing all parental rights, and taking a huge financial hit - the breadwinner hit with huge payments to the other spouse, or the non-breadwinner denied payments. Homosexuals and bisexuals (male) will face huge issues, and of course any person with HIV may be quarantined - although this won't be until they have symptoms, and folks with the disease may be denied medical treatment (waste of resources etc.). It is not unrealistic that lesbianism, especially among teenage girls and young women before marriage, may be winked at since this is the one form of sexuality that is safe.

Of course, the reaction to HIV/AIDS will be a huge increase in effort and funding for medical research that will make the search for new antibiotics and the polio vaccine look like nothing. Understanding of viral diseases, treatment for viral disease (as opposed to bacterial disease). The changes in society such as I outlined will last quite some time, although eventually the pendulum will swing.
 
Nice explanations, all of you. Just asking, will a POD of 1960 work, with an outbreak by the end of the decade (1967-68?)

In any scenario, I think the gay rights movement would only get attention by 2050. Am I right?
 
Nice explanations, all of you. Just asking, will a POD of 1960 work, with an outbreak by the end of the decade (1967-68?)
The latency for HIV has a median of ~10 years, so you'll see a sprinkling of cases by '67/8 and little attention. I'd expect people to start being worried around 1972-3 when it's noticeable that people are suffering from something new.

In any scenario, I think the gay rights movement would only get attention by 2050. Am I right?
No. Once the virus is prevalent amongst non-homosexuals, which will happen rapidly through sexual transmission, blood transfusions and pregnancy, I'd expect gay rights to proceed pretty much as historically with a lag of perhaps a decade.
 
Before 1960, it's unlikely to get attention. About the same as syphillis. The social culture was just to conservative at the time.

The Public Health Service of the 50s and earlier had teeth. As in you had an incurable deadly disease they would make sure you wouldn't infect others in ways that would be considered illegal by the 80s. Syphillis was curable by the 50s. The real problem would be more be detection as the instrumentation was much more crude.

The generation that lived through the 1918 infuenza outbreak was in power in the 40s and 50s and took potential pandemics really seriously, by the 60s and 70s though a new generation was in power that didn't take worries about a pandemic all that seriously.
 
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