For the American LGBT community, the fight against AIDS as a lesson in the face of COVID

At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, when fear and isolation spread, Dave Perruzza immediately drew a parallel: “For me, it was like the AIDS epidemic again, how nobody took it seriously.”

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This American who owns two LGBT bars in Washington said to himself: “well, we are going to take this seriously”.

With the spread of the Omicron variant across the world and accompanying new restrictions, some older members of the LGBT community say their shared experience of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s gave them a head start. throughout the pandemic.

From July 2021, Dave Perruzza required his customers to show their vaccination card to enter his bars, popular with the homosexual community of the American capital. He thus became one of the first in Washington to put such a rule in place, several months before the municipality took a step in this direction.

“I think my generation is the last to have seen people die of AIDS,” Dave Perruzza, 43, whose first boyfriend died of the disease, told AFP. “I’m not going to let history repeat itself.”

The AIDS epidemic raged for more than 20 years in the United States after the country’s first case was discovered in 1981. In 2019, it still claimed the lives of nearly 16,000 people in the United States.

The main affected: gay and bisexual men, black and Latino men, and transgender women.

The crisis born of the spread of HIV was not declared a national priority by then-President Ronald Reagan until 1985, and the first treatment was developed in 1987. By the end of 2000, more than 450,000 people had succumbed to AIDS, according to government data.

The same “hysteria”

The Covid-19 pandemic also brought back painful memories to Eric Sawyer, one of the founding members of the AIDS association ACT UP, who also lost a companion to the disease.

“Misinformation, hysteria, the spread of outright lies and attempts by some individuals to respond to them were part of the problem,” said Eric Sawyer, who also worked for the United Nations program Unaids.

“The stigma and discrimination that people who have had Covid face…is totally analogous to the response to HIV,” he says.

But some lessons have been learned between the two health crises. “The HIV epidemic has taught us that education, screening, and access to prevention methods” can be effective, notes Eric Sawyer.

Despite the commitment of the LGBT community in the fight against Covid-19, the pandemic has affected the fight against AIDS.

According to studies conducted by UNAIDS and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the pandemic caused a 22% drop in screening in 2020, in particular due to the confinements which caused the closure of certain health services.

“Not afraid of science”

LGBT activists organized at the start of the pandemic to find financial help and safe housing for HIV-positive people. They have also set up Covid screening operations in sexual health centers and at LGBT events.

“Thanks to our community’s four decades of experience with HIV, we understand therapeutic trials, we understand antivirals,” Chris Beyrer, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, told AFP. “We are not afraid of science,” he says.

“As a community, we are very supportive,” he adds, pointing out that many HIV-positive people are immunocompromised and need extra support.

And if many gay bars across the United States began requiring proof of vaccinations upon entry, long before some states followed suit, it’s because “LGBTQ bars are different, a bit like neighborhood houses,” says Ed Bailey.

Co-owner of Washington’s Trade and Number 9 bars, Bailey, 55, points out that gay bars have been handing out HIV literature and condoms for decades.

“Our bars are sometimes the only place some of our customers can go and feel comfortable enough to be themselves,” he adds. “It creates a totally different level of responsibility.”

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