Twenty Years

One columnist in The Village Voice called it “the despicable attempt of The New York Times to wreck the July 4 holiday break for every homosexual in the Northeast.”

Twenty years ago today — July 3, 1981 — a legendary article appeared deep inside the Times: “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” The piece was about 900 words long and only one column wide.

Early in the movie Longtime Companion, written by Craig Lucas, there is a montage in which different characters read the article to each other after coming across it on that July morning. Apparently it wasn’t the first article about AIDS to appear in the mainstream press, but it is the most famous.

It begins with a simple paragraph:

Doctors in New York and California have diagnosed among homosexual men 41 cases of a rare and often rapidly fatal form of cancer. Eight of the victims died less than 24 months after the diagnosis was made.

From deeper inside the piece:

The medical investigators say some indirect evidence actually points away from contagion as a cause. None of the patients knew each other, although the theoretical 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, Dr. Friedman-Kien said.

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.”

You can read the entire article here. In today’s paper, Lawrence K. Altman, M.D. — the article’s author — has a follow-up piece, “Recollections on the Age of AIDS.”

As someone who is enthralled by history, I’ve often tried to put myself in the position of someone in the past, to try to experience the unfolding of events without the benefit of the hindsight we all have — to experience the banality of the president’s trip to Dallas in November 1963, or the election of a new chancellor in Germany in January 1933. I can’t imagine how I would have felt upon opening the newspaper one Friday morning in July 1981 and reading that article in the New York Times. Would I have felt uneasy? Worried? Dismissive?

I think to myself how lucky I am that I was born in 1973 and not, say, 1960. Because if I had been born back then, there’s a strong chance that I would have caught it and that I’d be dead by now.

Apartment Envy

I don’t know what makes me more envious — the fact that Sparky‘s apartment got featured in the Apartment Envy section on nytoday.com, or the fact that he has an apartment that’s worth featuring in the first place. I love reading Apartment Envy, but I also hate it, because it only reminds me what a lame interior designer I am. The only area in which I’ve shown any creativity is my bathroom wall. The color scheme of my bathroom is blue and white, and I’ve put up these little shelves containing all the belongings I could find that are blue or blue-based: a blue keychain, a Charlie Brown pencil case with a blue sky, a little blue plaster horse, a couple of blue translucent D&D dice. That’s about it. Perhaps someday I’ll find myself living in an apartment that I want to keep, and I’ll dress it up all colorful and creative.

Way to go, Sparky!
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