♪♪
Jupiter Adams is part of a silent epidemic.
-My very first HIV test came back positive.
It was hell.
Like, the first two months,
I couldn't talk to nobody.
I couldn't do anything.
I didn't hear about HIV.
First time I heard about it was in a history class
where they were talking about the ACT UP movement,
so I told everybody I thought it was like the Bubonic Plague.
I thought it came, it left, so I didn't worry about it.
-"Public awareness about HIV has faded,
and that's contributing to a health crisis today,"
says Dr. Larry Mass,
an AIDS activist for nearly four decades.
-I wish they could go on indefinitely, thinking,
"Oh, those old guys and then all that old stuff,
we don't have to deal with that."
This history is not just history.
It's them,
and it's situations that they're facing today.
-That history goes back to the early days of the epidemic
in the 1980s,
when the public often reacted with prejudice,
if they acknowledged the disease at all.
-The setup was that this disease
was something striking
almost totally undesirables.
-It appeared a year ago in New York's gay community.
-Investigators have examined the habits
of homosexuals for clues.
-To some traditionalists, AIDS is a gay plague.
-Gays, drug addicts, injection, heroin addicts...
-At the very least, there should be a quarantine
of all homosexuals, drug abusers, and prostitutes.
-This is their disease.
Ordinary, everyday heterosexuals, normal people,
have nothing to worry about.
-Scientists believe AIDS is not likely
to spread beyond these groups,
but it is still a deadly epidemic.
-It was the dark years. It was terrible.
People were dying at a very high rate.
The hospice facilities were filled with people.
We had no therapy at all, so it was, like,
unfortunately, putting Band-Aids on hemorrhages.
-More than 1,500 cases have been discovered so far,
and most experts believe there will be more than 3,000
by the end of the year.
-People were very secretive
because it was extremely stigmatizing.
-I've had friends tell me to go and die,
"Just get away and go and die."
-Although federal health authorities
found no evidence of transmission
through casual contact,
public concern remained high.
And as the epidemic spread, so did the fear.
-40,000 Americans will get AIDS this year and next.
-One out of seven people polled
said they would favor tattooing all AIDS victims,
better than half said they should be quarantined,
and nearly as many would require anyone who tests positive
for AIDS antibodies to carry an ID card.
-Then in 1985,
AIDS came to a small Indiana town.
-It was last Christmas that Ryan White,
a hemophiliac,
learned that because of a blood transfusion,
he had contracted AIDS.
-Ryan was just playful, silly,
loved skateboarding and pretty carefree,
and he was very well aware
that his life was going to be cut short.
He just wanted to attend school and be with his friends
like everybody else does.
-But local school officials barred the 13-year-old
from returning to middle school,
and some concerned parents fought to keep him out.
Lawyer David Rosselot represented them.
-People were very panicked.
We don't know anything about this disease.
The only thing we know that if you have it,
you're gonna die. -I think we have to prove
that there's beyond a shadow of a doubt
that my child is not gonna be infected with this.
-Ryan had no control over getting AIDS,
and we've just had to fight for it seems like everything,
and now we'll just have to keep on fighting.
-When a court eventually ruled in Ryan's favor,
some protests turned ugly.
-There were, like, a picket line at school --
It's the only way I can describe it --
of people in scrubs
and Halloween masks
and signs,
like, telling him to die.
Just hurling insults,
screaming at him and his family.
-But the coverage of his story turned Ryan White
into a symbol of resilience.
-And finally this evening, our Person of the Week --
the young boy who learned, when he was 13,
that he had a terminal illness.
-Ryan was singled out by the governor of the state
as a model of courage and inner strength.
-Every time you'd turn on the TV,
you turn the news on, there's a picture Ryan.
It just seemed like everywhere you looked,
there were celebrities that were speaking out.
-I don't think he wanted the role that he was put in,
but at the same time
that he saw how much people needed to be educated.
-Ryan's success at reaching the public
highlighted how much other voices had been ignored.
-Ryan White was a figure who, in fairly short order,
began to elicit public sympathy.
It was difficult to just say, "Those nasty faggots."
Ryan White was the innocent victim.
Well, does that imply that the others were the guilty,
deserving recipients?
-Hey, hey! Ho, ho!
Ronald Reagan's got to go! Hey, hey!
-Activists from the gay community,
including members of the ACT UP movement,
had been pressing the Reagan administration
to help those with the disease.
-The fact that it has taken the president five years
to begin to even address this problem publicly
demonstrates that this administration hasn't given it
the level of commitment that it deserves.
-As more people went public with their stories
of contracting AIDS,
Americans' understanding of the crisis was broadening,
a door Ryan White had helped open.
-You know, people just aren't listening,
and we have to make them listen.
-You had a young boy who turned the knob a bit
to get people to say, "The enemy here is the virus.
The enemy is not the person who has been infected."
-When Ryan died in 1990,
more than 1,500 mourners attended his funeral,
including David Rosselot,
the lawyer who had fought to keep him out of school.
-I knew I had to say goodbye,
if for no other reason
than to be able to say, you know,
"This wasn't about you. I hope you forgive me."
-The story of AIDS began to change.
Congress pushed through the Ryan White Care Act,
bipartisan legislation aimed at providing care
for people with HIV and AIDS,
and soon, new drug regimens offered a sense of hope.
-It was when we got the effective drugs
that it was really a transformation --
I mean, completely a transformation
in how we looked at HIV.
-People are gonna live longer, healthier,
more productive lives
and be able to live with HIV.
-As the years went by,
we had better and better drugs.
We have now drugs which will bring the virus down
to below detectable level,
which not only saves the life of the person,
but makes it essentially impossible
for that person to transmit the virus to a sexual partner.
-And for those at risk of getting HIV,
there's a daily medication called
"Pre-exposure Prophylaxis,"
or "PrEP."
-PrEP has been clearly shown,
if you take a single pill once a day,
you decrease the likelihood that you would acquire HIV infection.
So if you put those two things together,
you could theoretically
essentially end the epidemic quickly.
-But despite these medical advances,
HIV infections have continued to spread.
-The fact is that HIV is not an equal-opportunity virus.
Everyone can get infected,
but everyone is not getting infected.
-Just like in the early days of the epidemic,
it's striking populations who are often overlooked,
this time -- communities of color,
particularly across the Deep South.
"And once again," Dr. Mass says,
"the public isn't paying attention."
-There's a tendency to look at these Black and Hispanic
rural communities in the South as marginal.
It's the same kind of thinking that we had early on.
The thing is when you don't deal
with marginalized communities or issues,
they have a way of becoming forefront.
-The places where the epidemic is growing
are in those communities
where people of color typically have not had access
to resources, where poverty sits.
-Cindy Watson works with LBGTQ Youth
in Jacksonville, Florida,
which has one of the highest rates of new HIV diagnoses
in the country.
-We have these pills,
but if people can't get access to them,
if their lives are not stable and in a place
where they can continue to take them over time,
they don't have the benefit of the medication
and of living with a chronic illness.
And they're also infectious.
-Watson and colleagues help young people
navigate the medical system
and get access to costly drugs
for HIV treatment and prevention.
-Given my own identity as a queer person of color,
I know the turbulence that comes with people
trying to navigate systems, so many systems.
-While access the testing and medication is vital,
Jackson says continued education is also needed
to counteract deep-seated stigma and misinformation.
-I just think what's passed down for generations
what's passed down from, like, stereotypes and myths.
That has a more lasting effect, unfortunately.
But the more education that we push,
the more that we're able to flip the script
and change the narrative.
-We have the tools to do things
that we never imagined we could do before.
Are we implementing these tools to the maximum?
We've gone from being in the dark
and a terrible, terrible disease
to now being able to not only save lives,
but to actually end this terrible scourge.
-Like it's never really a wrong time
to have the conversation... -"Ending the epidemic,"
Dr. Fauci says, "will also require
a new generation of activists."
People like Jupiter Adams.
-I was once inside of that position, where I didn't know --
where I didn't know it was an epidemic.
The only thing I can do is do what I would have wanted
someone to do with me.
I want to save as many people as I can.
Me and my status, we have an understanding
that we are going to go very far together.
♪♪