National Minority AIDS Council Building Healthier Communities

June 5, 1981

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) publishes the first report about AIDS in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), called Pneumocystis Pneumonia -- Los Angeles. The new disease comes to the attention of the CDC in both Los Angeles and New York City when a drug technician, Sandra Ford, of New York City, first noticed requests for refills for the drug pentamine, used to treat PCP, which had never occurred before.

The CDC report profiled five young male patients in Los Angeles diagnosed with PCP, a disease normally found only in people over age 50 that have severely compromised immune systems due to cancer or other severe illnesses. Two of the patients die prior to publication.

All of the patients profiled were young men with no report of serious illness prior to their PCP diagnosis. All of them displayed symptoms that later would be associated with the early onset of AIDS.

None of the patients knew one another; however, all had a history of inhalant drug use and frequent homosexual contact.

In the Wake of the June 1981 MMWR Article

The first mainstream reports about what would later be called "gay cancer," are provided by the Associated Press, and appear in the LA Times the day that the MMWR report is issued; the San Francisco Chronicle

follows suit the next day.

Shortly afterward, the CDC forms the Task Force on Kaposi's Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections (KSOI) to examine the new illness.

In New York City, writer Larry Kramer (left) headed a meeting attended by 80 men to address the threat of the new disease in the gay community and to raise money for research.

This informal meeting led to the formation of Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) that would be officially founded in 1982 by Nathan Fain, Larry Kramer, Larry Mass, Paul Popham, Paul Rapoport, and Edmund White. Though its focus would expand with the changing focus of the epidemic, it was named initially to address the most visibly impacted group in the early 1980s.

 

Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), now known as the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, opens its first Washington, DC-based office in 1981. It was headed then by activist Mel Boozer, a powerful gay activist who was outspoken on AIDS issues until his death from the disease in 1987. (at right, Mel Boozer's AIDS Memorial Quilt Panel.)

July 3, 1981

The New York Times prints its first story about AIDS, entitled "Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals," by Lawrence K. Altman. The article explored the unusual spike in Kaposi's Sarcoma cases in formerly healthy young men. Like PCP, Kaposi's is typically found only in people over age 50 with severely compromised immune systems. Oddly enough, the writer noted that researchers reported that:

Indirect evidence actually points away from contagion as a cause. None of the patients knew each other, although the possibility that some may have had sexual contact with a person with Kaposi's sarcoma at some point in the past could not be excluded.

This article that suggests a strong link between homosexuality and what would be called AIDS:

Dr. Curran said there was no apparent danger to nonhomosexuals from contagion. 'The best evidence against contagion,' he said, 'is that no cases have been reported to date outside the homosexual community or in women.'

December 1981
Dr. Curran and his supporters are found wrong when similar cases of prolonged PCP are found in other communities throughout the United States. Heterosexual injection drug users (IDUs) in communities of color are particularly hard hit by the increase incidence of this once rare form of pneumonia.

The first support group for people living with Kaposi's sarcoma begins in San Francisco under the auspices of the Shanti Project.

Nurse Joan Vileno (left with patient) who worked at Montifore, in the Bronx, recalled in a 2006 New York Times article that many of her early patients in 1981 were not gay, but heterosexual IDUs.

Due to the strong stigma against the disease and its connection to homosexuality, many of Vileno's patients feared coming for treatment. All of her patients died, many of them estranged from their families.

 

Before 1981, there were 234 known deaths from the unnamed illness worldwide. In the U.S., the number of AIDS diagnoses grows from 100 to 439 between 1980 and 1981; 130 of those diagnosed died.