As Attitude turns 21, it’s a good chance to reflect how far we’ve come these last couple of decades. Gay people the world over are visible, empowered, and equal in many ways, and while there is still much work to be done, and many more battles to fight, it’s an incredible achievement we should all be proud of.
A decade before, we were facing a different kind of battle. GRID (gayrelated immune deficiency), or ‘gay cancer’, was becoming part of the global lexicon, after an “unexpected cluster of cases” of Kaposi’s sarcoma and pneumonia was identified by public health scientists among gay men in Southern California and New York City.
Of course, today, we know it by another name: AIDS, and over the past 30 years, it has decimated communities in both the developed and undeveloped world. But those scientists and their successors have never stopped working, and there’s hope on the horizon. More and more headlines are telling stories of functional cures. We have the means to prevent new infections through PrEP, and several studies have delivered irrefutable evidence that if a positive person is undetectable and on medication, it’s virtually impossible for them to transmit the virus. The conversation about beating this epidemic has changed from ‘if’ to ‘when’.