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SCantiGOP

(13,855 posts)
7. I remember this picture well
Mon Jun 10, 2019, 11:16 AM
Jun 2019

But another group of photos had, in my opinion, a much bigger impact on society. Life magazine ran a feature with, as I recall, about 200+ pictures over 8-9 pages of everyone who had died of AIDS the month before. Preachers were still calling it a righteous judgment from god, and the general public largley viewed this as just a gay man’s disease that was a result of bad choices.
The Life pictures included a lot of effiminate men that could reinforce the bigots’ perceptions, but also included were dozens of picture of babies and infants who were born with the disease and lived less than a year or two; several nuns and people in medical garb who had contracted the virus caring for the sick; and a cross section of typical Americans, all of whom had gotten a death sentence from a blood transfusion.
Life was widely read at the time, and was in every waiting room you would go to. I think this visual representation went a long way towards changing the attitudes of even the generally homophobic public of the Reagan Era.
One particularly nasty woman who lived next door (and had harassed me for my liberal bumper stickers over the years) contended that all the gays (of course perverts was her preferred term) would soon die off and that would be the last we’d see of homosexuality. My Mother told me that she had seen her visibly shaken by the photo spread and its depiction of how this supposed “judgment from a merciful god” was killing people without regard for their personal behavior.
When I attended church with my Mom over Christmas and heard the strict and very conservative priest include those affected by “this terrible plague never before seen”
in his prayer, I knew that attitudes were changing.

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