What it said
Many voices tried to say what AIDS was before anyone could say much about it. The CDC's first report, on 5 June 1981, described Pneumocystis pneumonia in five previously healthy young gay men in Los Angeles. On 11 May 1982 the New York Times headlined "New Homosexual Disorder Worries Health Officials" and reported the working name GRID, gay-related immune deficiency
. That August the Philadelphia Daily News ran "Gay Plague" Baffling Medical Detectives
. By 24 September 1982 the CDC was using the neutral name, acquired immune deficiency syndrome, and reported 593 cases and 243 deaths.
Commentators turned the disease into a judgment. Pat Buchanan wrote in the New York Post on 24 May 1983:
The poor homosexuals, they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.
Jerry Falwell was widely quoted that year as saying AIDS was God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals
. On 18 March 1986, William F. Buckley Jr. proposed in the New York Times that everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.
The government's own messages came later and said something else. The 1988 brochure Understanding AIDS, mailed to all 107 million U.S. households, put it this way:
Who you are has nothing to do with whether you are in danger of being infected with the AIDS virus. What matters is what you do.
The CDC's America Responds to AIDS posters said You Won't Get AIDS From A Bug Bite
and You Won't Get AIDS From Hide 'N' Seek
. Activists answered with posters of their own: the pink-triangle Silence = Death in early 1987, and Gran Fury's Kissing Doesn't Kill: Greed and Indifference Do
on city buses in 1989.
Who made it and why
The speakers were openly identified. Federal health agencies (the CDC, the FDA, NIH, and the Surgeon General) issued reports, guidelines, posters, and the mailer. Newspapers and columnists coined and repeated labels. Religious and political figures supplied the moral frame. A committee tied to Lyndon LaRouche, the "Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee," or PANIC, put Proposition 64 on California's 1986 ballot. ACT UP, which formed in March 1987, and allied artist collectives answered with posters and protests. The archive also covers British and Australian government campaigns from 1987, the tombstone and the Grim Reaper, as comparisons.
The White House came late. At a briefing on 15 October 1982, a reporter asked about the "gay plague." Press secretary Larry Speakes answered I don't have it. Do you?
to laughter, and conceded that nobody there, including the President, had any knowledge of the epidemic. President Reagan first spoke of the disease at a news conference on 17 September 1985, calling AIDS research one of the top priorities.
His first major speech on AIDS came on 31 May 1987, at the American Foundation for AIDS Research dinner, where parts of the audience booed his call for wider testing. His own Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop, released a report on 22 October 1986 that explained how the virus spread and did not spread, recommended condoms, and called for sex education starting in the third grade.
What it got right or wrong
"Gay plague" was wrong as public-health language. It tied a disease to an identity instead of to a route of transmission, and the word "plague" carried its own terror. It came from the press, not the CDC, which dropped GRID within months. The "4H" shorthand that followed the March 1983 federal recommendation did the same to four groups: gay men, injecting drug users, Haitians, and people with hemophilia. One of the four was a nationality.
"Retribution" and "punishment" were moral claims dressed up as an explanation of an epidemic. The CDC's March 1983 recommendations already named people with hemophilia and exposure to blood or blood products, and described an infectious agent. Buchanan was free to write his column. It was still wrong as a description of how a virus moves.
The federal campaigns used fear too, and say so plainly. One America Responds to AIDS poster put a stop sign over the line With AIDS around, gonorrhea, syphilis & herpes are fair warning
. The difference is that the content was accurate: transmission by sex and blood, no known cure, condoms reduce risk, no casual transmission. Those claims still hold. Accuracy does not make a fear appeal stop being one. It does decide what the fear is pointed at.
The Haitian blood-donor rule is the record the government should be least proud of. The March 1983 recommendation, offered as a temporary measure
, asked Haitian entrants to the United States
not to give blood. In April 1985 the CDC stopped counting Haitian birth as a separate risk category, citing heterosexual contact and contaminated needles, yet its 10 May report said the donor guidelines continue to apply
; the same report put antibody prevalence among Haitian-American controls at 5 percent, several times higher than that seen in random blood donors.
In February 1990 the FDA widened the exclusion to everyone born in Haiti or sub-Saharan Africa. An FDA spokesman said the rule was not meant to single out any ethnic group. On 20 April 1990 about 50,000 people, most of them Haitian Americans, marched across the Brooklyn Bridge. On 5 December the government announced it would lift the national-origin exclusion. The stated basis throughout was blood safety. The rule still sorted people by where they were born for more than five years after the CDC had stopped doing so in its counts.
The activists are held to the same test. Silence = Death borrowed the pink triangle that Nazi camps forced on men held as homosexuals, deliberately and openly, to accuse the government of silence. It made a political equation, not a data claim. On 10 December 1989 ACT UP and WHAM! staged "Stop the Church" at St. Patrick's Cathedral against Cardinal O'Connor's opposition to condom and sex education. 111 people were arrested, 53 inside the church, and one protester crumbled a consecrated communion wafer. The disruption of a Mass was widely criticized at the time. It deserved that criticism.
The coercive proposals lost at the ballot box
The coercive proposals failed, and they failed by the method a republic should prefer. Proposition 64 would have made AIDS a communicable disease subject to quarantine and barred people with HIV from attending or teaching in schools. California voters rejected it 71 percent to 29 on 4 November 1986. The Surgeon General's report the same year said the virus did not spread through casual contact. Buckley's tattoo plan asked for a power no free government should have: marking citizens' bodies by diagnosis.
Koop's report and the 1988 mailing are the model of what government health speech can be: signed, factual, sent to everyone, and asking adults to decide for themselves. The brochure opened with his signed letter, and it set its testimonials beside the transmission facts. A libertarian can grant that this was government persuasion and still say it was the right kind. It informed choices instead of making them for people.
The donor rule raises the question equal protection is built to ask: why this group, and on what evidence. The FDA gave a safety answer. The CDC's own surveillance had dropped the national category. A government that classifies people by birthplace owes a reason that keeps pace with its own data. This site's record of the 1942 exclusion order shows the same feature at a vastly larger scale: a rule applied by origin rather than by individual assessment. The two are not the same in coercion. The 1942 order removed people from their homes. The 1990 rule barred people from giving blood. The shared feature is the one worth remembering.
Its legacy
By the end of 1990 the main fights had ended in favor of information over coercion. The quarantine initiative lost. The national mailing went out. The national-origin donor rule was announced for repeal. The record does not show that any one campaign caused or prevented a measurable number of infections, and it does not show that any official campaign was designed to stigmatize a group. Critics later argued the reverse risk: in 1996 the Wall Street Journal said the "everyone is at risk" message, while technically true, overstated the danger to most heterosexuals.
The same years carried a foreign operation as well. Thomas Boghardt, writing in the CIA's Studies in Intelligence, traces a Soviet-bloc story that the virus was made in a U.S. military laboratory to KGB and Stasi active measures. That claim was false, and it came from a hidden author. The American speakers on this page, right or wrong, signed their names.
Sources
- FRAME case study "Gay plague, tombstones and Silence = Death: messaging in the AIDS crisis, 1981-1990," for the chronology, quotations, poster texts, the donor-rule history, and the positions on the record.
- CDC, MMWR, 5 June 1981, 24 September 1982, 4 March 1983, and 10 May 1985; CDC, "AIDS: the Early Years and CDC's Response" (2011), as cited there.
- Lawrence K. Altman, New York Times, 11 May 1982; Patrick J. Buchanan, New York Post, 24 May 1983 (via Poynter and FAIR); William F. Buckley Jr., New York Times, 18 March 1986, p. 27 (via FAIR); CBC Archives and Pew Research Center on Jerry Falwell, as cited there.
- Slate (2015) on the 15 October 1982 Speakes briefing; Reagan Library, news conference of 17 September 1985 and remarks of 31 May 1987; Washington Post, 1 June 1987, as cited there.
- National Library of Medicine, Surgeon General's report on AIDS (1986); Understanding AIDS (1988), CDC Stacks; UPI, 4 May 1988; Nowak et al., Public Health Reports (1991) on America Responds to AIDS, as cited there.
- Ballotpedia and the Online Archive of California on Proposition 64 (1986); ACT UP Oral History Project on Stop the Church; Smithsonian and Brooklyn Museum on Silence = Death; V&A on the Gran Fury poster, as cited there.
- Washington Post, 21 April and 6 December 1990, and UPI, 20 April and 5 December 1990, on the donor exclusion; Bennett and Sharpe, Wall Street Journal, 1 May 1996; Thomas Boghardt, Studies in Intelligence 53:4 (2009), as cited there.