WI: no HIV

I know evolution is ASB, but HIV evolved recently, in the 1920s, in specific circumstances, namely Leopoldville's brothels with rapid turnover of sex workers; without such turnover, SIV would not spread enough to evolve into the nastier HIV.

If that did not happen, what would the effects be? Butterflies would of course eliminate anyone born after, say, 1920 in OTL, but they would not change major social and political trends until at earliest the 1980s. WW2, the Cold War, decolonization, and the social protests of the 1960s would happen on schedule. But what then?
 

Polemarchos

Banned
More raunchy free love popularized by none other than Freddie Mercury. Magic Johnson also competes with Michael Jordan for a few extra years.
 
How would it affect urban African-American communities? They were also hard-hit by AIDS, and I recently read that there is evidence of it cropping up there even earlier than in gay communities. At the very least it is one fewer thing going wrong for them and one fewer drain on healthy young men and women.

As for a POD: Possibly no Congo Free State? That would probably produce enough butterflies.
 
How would it affect urban African-American communities? They were also hard-hit by AIDS, and I recently read that there is evidence of it cropping up there even earlier than in gay communities. At the very least it is one fewer thing going wrong for them and one fewer drain on healthy young men and women.

As for a POD: Possibly no Congo Free State? That would probably produce enough butterflies.

But HIV evolved in the Belgian Congo, not the Congo Free State...

[Incidentally, while we're discussing effects on communities, let's not forget what AIDS did to Africa, esp. Southern Africa. Middle-income countries suddenly had their life expectancy cut to the 50s.]
 
But HIV evolved in the Belgian Congo, not the Congo Free State...

[Incidentally, while we're discussing effects on communities, let's not forget what AIDS did to Africa, esp. Southern Africa. Middle-income countries suddenly had their life expectancy cut to the 50s.]

But the Congo Free State was later taken over by the Belgian Congo. If we avoid the Congo Free State, it makes sense that Belgium wouldn't take over the Congo later, either.
 
I think (in the US, at least) you are looking at a several decade setback for political LGBT rights. The HIV/AIDS crisis brought a lot of people out of the closet, and a lot of people (not always the same ones) out into the streets. Without the visibility and desperation putting LGBT people and issues on the map in the 1980's, when the political influence of the US social/religious rightwing was still limited (though growing), there would be little or none of the political and social advances that exist today.
 

guinazacity

Banned
Either gay rights happening a decade further or a decade earlier.

On the plus side, no real worrying about stds until the antibiotics stop working in some 80 years.
 
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