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The New-York Historical Society will
run a retrospective exhibition, “AIDS in New York: The First Five Years,” from
June 7 through September 15 at the society’s Upper West Side museum. It
documents the early years of the epidemic and its devastating course across the
city. Many of the first cases were detected in 1981. The exhibition will
display cultural artifacts, including posters, photographs, clinicians’ notes,
pamphlets, letters, and diary entries, plus audio, visual, and print media. The
New York Public Library, New York University, and the National Archive of LGBT
History supplied the materials from their archives for this exhibit.
The exhibit depicts the 1969
Stonewall revolution, which resulted in a sense of gay men’s sexual liberation,
and the ensuing 1970s decade, which became an era of sexual freedom that
stopped in the 1980s when AIDS first was identified. It includes the socially
marginalized “four Hs”—homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin users, and
Haitians—through images of their Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions, in images of public
protests calling for medical research and fighting against the crippling stigma
toward people with AIDS, and in a thank you note to friends and family who
cared for a dying man.
The presentation portrays the scientific
community’s response to the growing epidemic, which also was eventually deemed
a threat to those in the “general population,” through a Kaposi’s sarcoma
conference transcript from July 1982. The transcript identified when scientists
officially suggested that the term AIDS codified what had heretofore been
referred to as a “gay-related immunodeficiency disease,” or GRID. The
exhibition includes a video of the April 1984 press conference during which
President Reagan’s Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler
announced the discovery of HIV, the approaching release of an HIV test, and the
expectation that a vaccine would enter human trials within two years.
A photography show titled “Children
with AIDS: 1990–2000,” accompanies the exhibition, and features 30
black-and-white photographs by Claire Yaffa, illuminating the stories of the
youngest affected by the disease. For more information on the exhibition, visit
http://www.nyhistory.org/exhibitions/aids-new-york-first-five-years.
The Friends of AIDS Foundation is
dedicated to enhancing the quality of life for HIV positive individuals and
empowering people to make healthy choices to prevent the spread of the HIV
virus. To learn more about The Friends of AIDS Foundation, please visit: http://www.friendsofaids.org.
TOGETHER WE REMAIN STRONG!
