Early Media Coverage of AIDS

Of the primary sources, three are from The New York Times, dating from July 3, 1981, to December 10, 1981. The earliest one entitled "Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals" indicated that a rare form of cancer was seen in an outbreak in New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles (Altman 1981). The article is rather serious in tone, focusing on the medical aspects of the disease and the fact that the victims tended to die within less then twenty-four months after the diagnosis was made. The article focuses on the type of cancer called Kaposi's Sarcoma, normally a disease that has a slow course of up to ten years, but the new cases start with "one or more violet-colored spots anywhere on the body. . .often mistaken

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s on the identity and lifestyle of the patients, rather than the specific behaviors and symptoms. Langone goes so far to say that some writers seemed to think that the new disease was the wrath of God thundering down on the promiscuous homosexuals, making it a matter of morality rather than biology (Langone 17). Langone also notes, as did the third brief article discussed previously, that there were "vague allusions to low levels of the hormone testosterone in the blood of homosexuals, which supposedly, in some mysterious way, made them vulnerable to disease" (Langone 17). Patton says that the media reports sounded as if AIDS (although it was not yet named) was something you got for being gay, using terms such as "gay pneumonia," "gay cancer," or "gay plague" (Patton 6). There was the between the lines implication that AIDS came from overindulgence and that continued sex within the gay community would eventually lead to the disease, more or less like Russian Roulette. These unfortunate attitudes and beliefs came at a time when the gay and lesbian community was starting to gain acceptance, socially and politically. The articles seem to harp a bit heavily on the active homosexual lifestyle with up to ten partners within one n
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1766
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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