Pride in Tech: How Lotus Championed Gay Rights During the AIDS Crisis

How do you compare plagues? If you’re like me, an elder member of Generation X, then your late adolescence and young adulthood were profoundly shaped by a plague that still stalks us today—HIV/AIDS—even as your middle age is being refashioned by the savagery of COVID-19. The differences and the similarities between these two overlapping plagues are haunting. COVID-19 has been a much faster killer. While AIDS has claimed more than 700,000 lives in the United States since the late 1970s, COVID-19 has robbed us of nearly 600,000 of our neighbors in less than two years. With both plagues, though, the most devastated group has been Black men—a testament in both cases to structural racism.

For the HIV/AIDS epidemic, an additional defining factor has been homophobia. Those who were infected with HIV and died from AIDS were primarily gay men. At the height of the epidemic in the United States in the 1980s, it was enormously consequential that much of officialdom—politicians, business leaders, the media, cultural and religious figures—were openly, even officially, anti-gay. Their inaction and antipathy put the plague on the path to claim so many lives and to remain so persistent today. The extent of official homophobia is chillingly captured in recently recovered recordings of White House press briefings from the first half of the 1980s, with laughter and crude jokes accompanying questions about AIDS:

In the 1980s, public health and medical officials began to see the true nature and extent of the HIV/AIDS crisis, and they began working with members of the gay community to raise the alarm. Individuals and organizations then faced the challenge of how they would respond to the crisis. Many chose to ignore or downplay it. Others, though, at some risk, chose to step up and take action.

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