1983 poster for candlelight vigils (inset) for those with the disease. (Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society)
The exhibit includes a photo of protesters in Brooklyn trying to keep children with AIDS out of NYC schools and a 1983 poster for candlelight vigils (inset) for those with the disease.. (
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Young men were dying, and no one knew why. Even as doctors and scientists struggled to come up with a name for the disease — let alone a treatment — people were calling it “the gay plague.”
As the death toll rose, claiming not only men but babies and people who’d had blood transfusions, New Yorkers ricocheted between denial, despair and downright fear and loathing.
Such was the beginning of AIDS in America — more specifically, “AIDS in New York: The First Five Years,” which is also the title of the timely, tough and uncompromising little show that just opened at the New-York Historical Society.
From the museum’s archives come pamphlets, posters, photos and videos that recall those early years, when the sexual wonderland of Plato’s Retreat and bathhouses gave way to shock, confusion and a deeply polarized city.
“A disease doesn’t operate in a vacuum,” says curator Jean Ashton, who worked on a previous museum show about smallpox. “We wanted to show how AIDS got a foothold in the city.”
A timeline at the start of the exhibit begins in 1981, with the first sighting of Kaposi’s sarcoma in gay men. It ends, five years later, when AIDS claimed its first major celebrity — Rock Hudson — and made a crusader of his longtime friend, Elizabeth Taylor. In between are accounts by researchers who struggled to make sense of a virus so clever that it could lie dormant for 10 years without manifesting a single symptom, making contagion that much more likely.
Into the breech stepped activists like Larry Kramer, whose call to arms ran alongside a beefcake photo in the gay newspaper, the Native. Headlined “1,112 and Counting,” it begins, “If this article doesn’t scare the s – – t out of you, we’re in real trouble.”
Here, too, are cheeky condom packets by pop artist Keith Haring, who lost his own battle with AIDS at age 31, and diary excerpts from “The Celluloid Closet” author Vito Russo, detailing the illness and loss of one friend after another. There are also before and after photos of once-beautiful faces rendered unrecognizable, and chilling testimony from survivors, gay and straight. An audio guide offers first-person accounts, including one from a woman whose grandmother contracted AIDS, probably through a blood transfusion, and was stigmatized even in death: Fearful of infection, hardly anyone attended her closed-coffin funeral.
Given the graphic language and images, the exhibit is intended for older audiences, and the museum’s posted advisory warnings saying so.
Then again, Ashton says, “Had we made it less offensive, it wouldn’t tell the history.”