(on World AIDS Day 2025)
Because of those men who lived, dying,
in the houses of friends like my
sister-in-law—and so many others—
men looking like victims of famine,
skin stretched tight over skulls, men whose
hands we held in the early 1980s when we
stayed with Annie in her Noe Valley Victorian.
And because later, after my husband’s heart
surgery and blood transfusions in San Francisco,
we had to be tested for a good decade. Because
he had other people’s blood in him, we found
ourselves at the epicenter of the epidemic.
We lived with the risk, too. And yes, because
we knew people who died, holding our breaths
until the results thankfully came back:
negative, negative, negative. We cheered
the miracle of the first antiretroviral drugs,
watching people live longer and longer.
Some 1.2 million Americans still live with HIV.
They remember, as do I—even if our government
now chooses not to—how many did not.
Still do not. More than 600,000 die worldwide
each year with HIV, many of them children.
If my husband were still here, if a stroke
had not shut down his brain and heart in 2001,
if Annie were still here, had she not died
six months after her brother, they would share
my outrage as citizens of this country that until
recently saw it as its duty to contribute mightily
to the global eradication of this disease,
a nation that only last year on World AIDS Day
displayed the AIDS memorial quilt on the White
House lawn, a small part of the gigantic whole—
each square created in memory of someone
who perished, as heroic as those who gave
their lives when they shouldn’t have had to.
•••
• “For the first time since 1988, the U.S. is not officially commemorating World AIDS Day,” NPR, Dec. 1, 2025.
• AIDS statistics from the World Health Organization.
Güd wrtr 
Beautifully expressed, Jan. I think all of us of a certain age lost someone back during the dark ages of the first decade of the appearance of AIDS and a President initially reluctant to get behind research on the virus. If I may add a few thoughts . . .
As it now stands, conditions are ripe not only a potential death sentence for the gay community, but for all of us. Pulling back as the government has on HIV and AIDS research and treatment support (including providing affordable access to antiretrovirals) means more people will get infected, making it a near certainty that deaths will rise. It means ever more gay and heterosexual couples could pass the virus to one another–or that any of us, sexually active or not, could end up with it through blood transfusions if the virus load from a donor is too low to be detected. Think of tennis champion Arthur Ashe, who received a blood transfusion tainted with HIV during heart surgery and later died of AIDS-related pneumonia. Or the infamous case of Kimberly Bergalis who died at age 23 after contracting the virus from her dentist, testifying bravely about her condition before a doubting Congress in the days before succumbing to the disease.
This current, devastating policy shift doesn’t even seem to consider the mothers who will pass the virus to their babies. I sometimes wonder if my late son’s shockingly rapid decline from non-cancerous liver failure might have been related to HIV being present in one of the twenty-odd transfusions he received–and there simply hadn’t been time enough for it to present itself physiologically. It is not something routinely checked at the time of admission to a hospital unit, though it should be now.
U.S. Health and Human Services today is staffed in some key positions by unqualified pretenders whose medical decision-making is downright medieval. We just might have better diagnostic potential with the caladrius bird.
Thank you for these insights, Terry. Very good points, most particularly that deaths will certainly increase because of this withdrawal of support for AIDS/HIV prevention and testing programs.