[Music]
In the first years of the 1980s,
a mysterious disease began to appear
in young, otherwise healthy people.
The disease was given the name AIDS.
The HIV virus was identified as its cause in 1984.
No treatments were available-
a diagnosis was essentially a death sentence.
AIDS activists, artists among them, frequently argued
that the Reagan administration was refusing to address
the growing crisis. The president himself didn't
mention the disease publicly until 1986,
after more than 20,000 people had died.
Patrick Buchanan, who was Reagan's press secretary at the time,
called the syndrome "God's revenge on gay men."
A number of AIDS activist groups formed in this context,
including ACT UP: AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power.
With protests and a war of images,
ACT UP pressured the government to invest in research
and speed access to effective drugs.
Many of the AIDS activist groups appropriated
the techniques of corporate advertising.
This placard by the art collective Group Material
appeared on buses in Hartford, Connecticut-
the heart of the insurance industry-
at a time when many people with AIDS were denied coverage.
And this billboard, which stood opposite the Stonewall Inn-
site of the riots that initiated the gay rights movement-
also served to write large a number of milestones
in gay history and activism.
General Idea's AIDS logo mimicked
Robert Indiana's 1960's "LOVE" icon.
Ironically mimicking the power of the HIV virus
to reproduce itself,
General Idea replicated this logo everywhere.
They made wallpaper, billboards, subway ads, and low-cost multiples
that could easily be purchased by the general public.
By the end of 1989, the year General Idea
began working with this AIDS logo,
almost 90,000 people had died.
Five years later, in 1994,
two of General Idea's three members would also die
of AIDS-related complications.
In light of the growing tragedy,
many artists also began documenting the tremendous impact
of the AIDS crisis, and exploiting the power of art
to put a human face on the disease.
SUE COE: I was invited to go to the University of Texas Hospital
at Galveston by Dr. Eric Avery, who's also an artist,
and Dr. David Parr, who was part of the AIDS team there.
And it's one of the great centers for infectious disease.
So I spent a week going through the wards,
and it was following the doctors, social workers,
psychiatrists, cleaners, technicians, scientists.
Twenty-six years old, white, gay. Generalized weakness.
Temperature 30... 39.5.
Lost forty pounds in a month, a quarter of his body weight.
So he said to me, I've been dealing with this disease for eight years.
My family didn't want me there for Christmas.
And I could remember exactly what he said after that-
when he went to visit his family
they'd bring out plastic plates and cups.
Oh this is the cleaner, she was beautiful.
Sue, cleaner, cleans up bodily fluids, vomit, blood, urine, diarrhea.
"I volunteered to work here." That's something else I remember.
People wouldn't work on that unit, because they were frightened.
It was more or less a hospice.
And so everyone I drew in the sketchbook died.
NARRATOR: It was only in 1996-
after more than 360,000 Americans had died of AIDS-
that effective antiviral drugs became widely available.
That year, AIDS deaths in the U.S. dropped
for the first time since the epidemic began.
Today, more than 1.1 million people
are living with HIV/AIDS in the United States.
That they are living with AIDS - not dying of it
- is due in part to the activist movements
that included the artists we've been discussing.
As of the year 2013, more than 33 million people
are still living with HIV/AIDS.