Post 50 - April 30, 2020
Day 50…
In 1992, nearly a full decade after the AIDS epidemic had really started, Jerry Mitchell put together the first BROADWAY BARES event. He and seven of his friends from the cast of WILL ROGERS FOLLIES danced on a bar and raised $8,000 and some public awareness for a disease that had decimated the artistic community in New York but that had gone largely unnoticed and unfunded by the federal government.
In the decades since, BROADWAY BARES has raised nearly $30 million for HIV/AIDS-related illnesses and the show now involves hundreds of people each year.
This year would have been the 30th Anniversary performance.
I can still remember where I was standing on campus at Columbia in 1983 when I first realized that the AIDS epidemic was serious and was going to affect me.
I was very much in the closet, but I was experimenting.
(I was a senior in college, of course I was experimenting.)
I had slept with a choreographer of a show I was working on.
He was older than I was and well established and somehow, because of his resume, I has assumed that because he was on his way to being well known that I was safe.
The friend I was talking to about this pointed out the obvious - that it was a disease it didn’t care who it struck.
I remember that moment of realization as vividly as I remember anything.
AIDS is a very different disease than COVID-19.
It isn’t respiratory.
You have to have actual physical contact with body fluids for it to transfer.
We didn’t know that at the beginning.
In the beginning people were terrified to even get close to each other let alone touch each other.
In 1987, Princess Diana visited an AIDS hospital in London and shook an AIDS patient’s hand.
You want to know why people love Diana so much?
For a lot of us of a certain age who lived through that time, it was because of THAT.
This was five years into the pandemic - FIVE YEARS - and nobody with anything like her visibility had ever done anything like that before.
She held babies who were infected with AIDS and the pictures of her doing that gave everybody hope that maybe this disease wouldn’t kill us all after all.
It gave us hope that maybe we’d be able to live with it.
One of the reasons Jerry started the BROADWAY BARES event is because the sheer terror of HIV/AIDS had changed how we behaved with each other.
We were scared to touch.
After ten long years of this, he wanted to show that there was a way that we could.
Safely.
We are all now used to the idea of Safe Sex.
Use a condom.
Gay or straight, I don't care who you are, nobody goes into a sexual encounter without thinking about safe sex.
We may ignore it, (at our peril) or scoff at it, but we all know it’s there.
The FDA finally approved Truvada or PrEP as an HIV prophylactic in 2012 - thirty years after the AIDS epidemic started.
THIRTY YEARS.
People who weren’t even alive when the epidemic started now routinely take PrEP so that they can have sex with some relative safety.
Relative safety.
We may ignore safe sex guidelines, but we know that we are ignoring them.
Safe Sex as a concept didn’t exist before the early 1980’s.
Certainly, there were all sorts of other STDs that people got, and still get, but a shot of penicillin and you got rid of it.
They weren't usually fatal.
People just had sex.
32 million people have died from HIV/AIDS since the start of the epidemic.
37.9 million people are currently living with it.
My point in all of this is that the HIV/AIDS epidemic changed everything about our behavior.
It has been nearly forty years since it started, and we have learned to live with it.
It is no longer the death sentence it once was, but it hasn’t gone away.
It is manageable.
It is a part of our everyday lives and we have had to make space for it.
There is still no definitive cure for it.
Getting closer, but no cure yet.
After forty years.
COVID-19 is a novel coronavirus.
Novel means new.
It is not the same as the coronaviruses that have been circulating among us - like the common cold.
It is similar, but we don’t know enough about it yet to be able to predict with any confidence what it even does.
In the last ten days or so, for example, we have now learned that it can cause blood-clotting in otherwise asymptomatic patients aged 20-40 that can lead to strokes.
We have only just learned that.
There is so much about this virus that we still don’t fully understand.
There is still much about the HIV/AIDS virus that, after forty years, we don’t fully understand.
Nobody knows what our life after this virus is going to be like.
In all likelihood, there won’t be an “after” - this virus has arrived, and we are going to learn how to live with it.
After millennia, there is still not a cure for the flu.
There are countless remedies that ease the symptoms, but once you get it, you got it and you just have to get through it.
We live with it.
5% to 20% of all American get the flu every year.
Many people die from it each year, but we don’t really report the deaths that way.
They are usually reported as something else like pneumonia.
The incubation period for the flu is a far shorter one than the incubation period for COVID-19.
You get exposed to the flu and you’re getting symptoms in 2-3 days.
You come into contact with far fewer people before you stay home than that you do with COVID-19.
With this new virus, you are out in the world - asymptomatic - for as long as two weeks before you start to feel anything.
In New York, that means you come into contact with THOUSANDS of people.
This is a NOVEL coronavirus.
It isn’t the same as anything we have seen before.
There is a lot about it that we simply don’t know about yet.
Testing and research take time.
There are some things that you just can’t rush.
You can only study the long-term effects of something over the LONG TERM.
We will get through this immediate crisis, but it is unlikely that we will get beyond this virus.
Now that it’s here, it’s here.
So what do we do?
Well, we are going to drag yet another chair up to an already crowded table and make room for it.
That’s what we have always done.
There have been some diseases that we have ALMOST gotten rid of.
So close.
There is a growing part of the population, however, that has started distrusting vaccines, so they are not inoculating their kids and quelle surprise, those diseases are coming back.
People don’t trust the science.
They are distrusting vaccines because of the hearsay and unsubstantiated nonsense that is out there circulating like a disease itself.
I’m fascinated to see what those people do if we ever get to a point where there is a vaccine for COVID-19.
Will they be vaccinated?
Most of the diseases that are ALMOST gone seem ridiculously hard to get.
Before the vaccines, there were whole epidemics of these diseases.
The vaccines for Yellow Fever, Smallpox, Diptheria, TB, Whooping Cough - you name it - stopped those diseases from reaching epidemic proportions again.
I am genuinely interested whether in the face of this new virus that is all around us - the same way as those other ones once were - whether they will trust the science, or will they stick fast to their anti-vax guns.
Back to today.
We are madly starting to re-open everything without having a clue about what we are doing.
It’s only been about three months since we even became aware that COVID-19 existed.
It’s only been six weeks since everything started closing down.
We are going to figure out how to live with this thing, but for heavens sake, take a breath.
We aren’t there yet.
It is possible that the “cure” that we have come up with in the meantime to deal with the virus- shutting down the economy - may end up being more harmful than the disease itself.
Yes, radiation and/or chemotherapy can potentially zap cancer, but oy what it does to the rest of the body.
Sometimes those cures can be as lethal as the cancer itself might have been.
Having taken the step, however, and shut everything down, we are now going to need to restart in an organized, thought-out way so as to have the best chance to do it properly.
It is a potentially lethal side-effect that must be dealt with so that it doesn’t kill the patient.
We all want to get back to the way it was before COVID-19.
Heck, we still all want to go back to the way it was before HIV/AIDS.
Forty years later we are somewhat closer to that, but we aren’t there yet.
We may never be.
HIV/AIDS is a part of our lives here on the planet earth.
We deal.
We are going to learn to deal with COVID-19, too.
There is nothing in our collective history that suggests that we won’t.
It is just going to take a minute.