The long, tragic history of the Aids epidemic – and how far we’ve got to go
HIV four years ago.A straight woman, Ellie wasn’t exactly clued up about HIV – all she knew was Ste Hay from Hollyoaks living with it.So Ellie became silent.
Negative stigma, she tells Metro.co.uk, made her feel her status had to be a secret – something to hide from everyone. Something to be ashamed of.‘I’ve been ghosted, ignored or had people make unpleasant remarks,’ she says of dating. ‘I mostly see it as a litmus test to weed out people who aren’t worth my time, if they’re going to be negative.’Some of this might be all too familiar for LGBTQ+ people who were alive in the 1980s – it’s business as usual.
But other parts of Ellie’s story would have been unthinkable only years ago.‘I do find the history of HIV quite upsetting to think about,’ she says. ‘It’s bittersweet to know how effective and accessible medication is now and to think of the people we’ve unfortunately lost.‘I think it’s incredible how far we’ve come with medication and cultural acceptance, but it really does still feel like we have a long way to go with stigma.‘A lot of people still find sex a very taboo topic and still don’t know their status.’Living with HIV is not what it was in the 1980s, and the clue is in the first word: living.
Thanks to medical leaps, many HIV-positive people live long, healthy lives.For LGBTQ+ History Month and HIV Testing Week, we briefly look at the history of HIV and Aids while experts tell us what we can expect the future to look like.For an epidemic that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, Aids appeared relatively silently.It’s hard to say when the virus first began circulating, though some scientists have traced it as far back as 1959 to a man who died in the Belgian Congo.
