When AIDS Was Funny

December 1, 2015 2:22 PM

A new short film, When AIDS Was Funny, unearths never-before-heard audio reaction to the escalating AIDS crisis.
posted by mandolin conspiracy (39 comments total)

I have no words.
posted by janey47 at 3:02 PM on December 1, 2015 [2 favorites]

It's hard to believe that there was snickering on this issue, and jokes about 'fairies' in the White House press conference room - in my lifetime. Fucking childish.

Previously: Rock Hudson Dying of AIDS.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 3:04 PM on December 1, 2015 [6 favorites]

When people mention Ronald Reagon, this is what I think of: the hundreds of thousands of lives lost, the potential curtailed, the future constrained. This is Ronald Reagan's legacy.
posted by petrilli at 3:10 PM on December 1, 2015 [31 favorites]

You're actually low by a couple factors of ten in deaths, sadly.
posted by zombieflanders at 3:15 PM on December 1, 2015 [2 favorites]

It wasn't just the White House. It was everyone.

"I say, 'What's next? I guess you just put your dick in and explode.'"
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 3:24 PM on December 1, 2015 [2 favorites]

Eddie Murphy mining the AIDS epidemic for cheap homophobic laffs was examined on the reality-pop-culture-game-show Billy on the Street. Billy dressed up as Mark Twain and asked his contestant to guess whether the quote was by Mark Twain or Eddie Murphy (Murphy was being honored with a Mark Twain award) using delightful quotes by Twain and homophobic jokes by Murphy (capped off with Murphy's later 'I'm sorry people were offended' apology). I couldn't find it on YouTube, but it's one of the funniest bits I've seen on the show.
posted by codacorolla at 3:28 PM on December 1, 2015 [15 favorites]

It was seriously one of the funniest and most pointed things I've seen on TV in a while, and I hate that it only appears available online if you have cable with TruTV. (I've been looking for it for the last 7 minutes too)
posted by MCMikeNamara at 3:31 PM on December 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

Thirding the pointed commentary Billy Eichner was going for with that bit -- and landing it. He called the entire comedy establishment on their bullshit, and it was amazing. My partner and I watched and at one point, we actually had to pause it because we were so stunned at how masterfully Eichner handled his very real and justified anger.
posted by sobell at 3:35 PM on December 1, 2015 [5 favorites]

Fuck all of those people who laughed.
posted by Sophie1 at 3:40 PM on December 1, 2015 [4 favorites]

Eddie Murphy mining the AIDS epidemic for cheap homophobic laffs was examined on the reality-pop-culture-game-show Billy on the Street

Interesting - I want to hunt that down.

Marlon Riggs, in Tongues Untied, also took on Eddie Murphy.

He specifically uses Murphy's "faggots" bit from Raw, IIRC. I can't seem to find that exact segment.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 3:52 PM on December 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

From And The Band Played On:

"By the time President Reagan had delivered his first speech on the epidemic, of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, 36,058 Americans had been diagnosed with the disease; 20,849 had died."
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 3:53 PM on December 1, 2015 [8 favorites]

I stand corrected: Riggs was referencing Delirious - this contains the preamble to Cool Papa Bell's link above.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 4:14 PM on December 1, 2015

That was 1982 and in 1982 David Wojnarowicz wrote

"If I had a dollar to spend for healthcare I'd rather spend it on a baby or innocent person with some defect or illness not of their own responsibility; not some person with AIDS..." says the healthcare official on national television and this is in the middle of an hour long video of people dying on camera because they can't afford the limited drugs available that might extend their lives and I can't even remember what his official looked like because I reached in through the T.V. screen and ripped his face in half.

And I think that if words were weapons there would be a charnel house full of bodies and David's writings are all I can ever think of when faced with such vicious fuck ignorance as this.
posted by Zack_Replica at 4:18 PM on December 1, 2015 [16 favorites]

This is the same way the Australian government laughs about rising sea levels wiping out island nations in the Pacific. It was evil then and it's evil now.
posted by turbid dahlia at 4:21 PM on December 1, 2015 [3 favorites]

Malice and exultation of a boot slamming into the face of the weak. Disgusting.
posted by Pope Guilty at 4:32 PM on December 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

I can remember laughing at AIDS jokes with friends because we were five! (a kid had brought the word and it was a contextual fit for our concept of cooties.)
Leaders of the United States should have aimed to be better than that.

(And I only remember that because a teacher shut us down so quick and hard and earnestly that we knew it must actually be something big and serious and scary.)
posted by anonymisc at 4:35 PM on December 1, 2015 [6 favorites]

“It was said that everyone appointed by the Reagan administration in a major public health capacity was either a Mormon or a fundamentalist. The chief spokesman for the administration now was the overripe and venomous Patrick Buchanan, one of whose major qualifications for the job was his widely quoted remark that nature was finally exacting her price on homosexuals for having spilled their seed against her.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 4:37 PM on December 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

Jesus, talk about punching down - it doesn't get a whole lot lower than ridiculing people who are dying of an incurable (and at the time all but untreatable) disease. The shameful self-riotousness, unbridled contempt, and genuine hurtfulness of this shit brings me right back to the 1980's. There may be a few things for which I feel nostalgia from the early and mid 80's -- college! my 20's! -- but this sure isn't it. But as much as I hate reliving it, it's good to show it as it happened and simultaneously expose it as vile.

I fucking hate the "Reagan Era" for its sanctimony and cold hearted brutality towards the weak, underprivileged, and marginalized in American society. Reagan's response to the AIDs crisis constitute Exhibits 1 through 1000+ as to why I feel this way, but I can certainly add "comics making fun of people dying from AIDs to my list of reasons of "Why I H8 the 80's."
posted by mosk at 4:44 PM on December 1, 2015 [10 favorites]

It's hard to believe that there was snickering on this issue, and jokes about 'fairies' in the White House press conference room - in my lifetime. Fucking childish.

File this under "things I thought were common knowledge". The transcript of one of Speakes's press conferences, with everyone making jokes and laughing about a question about AIDS, has been floating around for ages.
posted by asterix at 4:49 PM on December 1, 2015 [5 favorites]

This is an interesting article on Koop.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 4:55 PM on December 1, 2015 [9 favorites]

Koop was a decent human being.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 5:26 PM on December 1, 2015 [3 favorites]

Les Kinsolving is an interesting guy in his own right. He was the first to report on Jim Jones' group, for example.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 6:05 PM on December 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

Whatever nostalgia I have for the eighties is inalterably tempered by the fact that people like me were dying and the mainstream American fucking laughed, along with their idiot president and their stupid comedians and their pastors snickering in their pulpits.

I have florid, complicated stories to tell about my life in the ugly eighties, but even at the best times, it was life in wartime, and the bad guys got away with their crimes. I'm nostalgic about the eighties on the whole as older black people are about firehouses and police dogs in the swingin' sixties.
posted by sonascope at 6:33 PM on December 1, 2015 [22 favorites]

(And I only remember that because a teacher shut us down so quick and hard and earnestly that we knew it must actually be something big and serious and scary.)

You went to a better school. I can remember teachers telling the jokes.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:25 PM on December 1, 2015 [2 favorites]

Was this really "unearthed"? I had known about that exchange with Larry Speakes ("I don't have it. Do you?") for a long time.

Reagan had a pretty malicious habit of simply ignoring federal agencies whose mission he had no interest in. HUD became a center of graft and corruption under his tenure, because he didn't care what was going on there. And in the case of AIDS, since he didn't care at all for the CDC, even though the agency was raising the alarm day after day, he just ignored it.
posted by deanc at 7:41 PM on December 1, 2015

Was this really "unearthed"? I had known about that exchange with Larry Speakes ("I don't have it. Do you?") for a long time.

Yeah, it wasn't "unearthed." But I had only seen it as transcripts wherever it was cited before. This was the first time I'd heard a recording. I was just posting this as a single-link FPP, so wanted to avoid editorializing in the it, and just quoted the wording from Vanity Fair. But I thought the video presentation of the recording was a good contextualization of what the fucker was saying.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 7:53 PM on December 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

But this continued. And it continues: cf. "Kill The Gays" OK with Cruz, Jindal and Huckabee.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 8:03 PM on December 1, 2015 [2 favorites]

That C. Everett Koop article is great and would make a good FPP on its own.
posted by Pope Guilty at 8:44 PM on December 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

I don't need to watch this. I have hated this for so long... It's not mostly unfound either. It's just been submerged unless you were paying attention.

I hate this SOO much... it it, the fe... flames... Flames. Flames.... on the side of my face... breathing... breathle-- heaving breaths.....
posted by hippybear at 1:00 AM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

MisantropicPainforest's response reminds me of something that's very important about context, and it invokes for me a recent lesson that makes it possible for me to not be a terrorist in a country that's still beset by a lot of idiotic thinking.

I remember my grandmother talking in what, for a woman born in 1899, might have been a fairly progressive way of thinking about black people, and just being astonished. How could you not know that black people are just people, just like us? I mean, isn't it the most obvious thing in the world?

Recently, I had an interesting conversation on the same subject with my mother, this time about interracial relationships.

"Joe, even though I know it's wrong to think so on every level, I just get a weird feeling when I see it. I make a concerted effort to not think that way, but it was just drilled into us in those days and it's hard to shake."

"Is seeing me kissing another dude less weird?"

"Well, that's all I've known from you, so no."

"But if I was with a black dude?"

"I don't know. That's interesting to think about. Would he be rich?"

"Ma."

"It'd probably still poke at that spot. It's frustrating, because it's 2015 and I know better, but we all have these little things in us."

—and I'd have probably disagreed, thinking that I'm hip and informed and modern, except that a career change six years ago landed me with my first transgender friend and man, it is really uncomfortable when you realize that you're only marginally less backwards in your understanding of how people navigating gender in 2015 live. Yeah, I thought I was Mr. Cool, but my cavalier attitudes to things that are actually important weren't, and my understanding was limited by my own complete comfort in my own gender, orientation, and status, so it was very easy to just try to smooth over complex topics with a gloss of "why can't everyone just be cool like me?"

It wasn't my fault, per se, because we're a culture that just doesn't take deep understanding of how others live seriously, but I'd spent seven years as a camp counselor in a leadership program that used context-shifting games and role-playing to explore things like race and class and religion and how easily we grasp or fail to grasp the way other people live and I'd never thought to apply any of those tools to my own thinking.

I'd gotten an inkling of my own blind spots regarding things like class and the issues of women, dropping out of the middle class and watching my nieces being reared and seeing how differently girls are treated from boys of the same age and status, but it was the transgender thing that really pushed me.

What if you apply the same focus to other things, like body policing, or the way we use shame to regulate behaviors and attitudes that are inherently not particularly worthy of shame? On the progressive side, it's pretty common to point out the weight of anyone we can't stand, because Rush Limbaugh is a big fat idiot, right? Or we sit back and sneer at how poor people in poor states where the education system is a ruin and laugh at the way that they're manipulated by cynical right wing shitheads into voting against their own interests…and never think "Hey, maybe those people aren't educated about their situation and therefore don't have the tools to process the conflict of interest that they support by voting for people who manipulate them," because it's a little too familiar. People with AIDS had it coming because they did all those "bad" things (a sentiment an awful lot of gay folks, too, hold). Uneducated people have it coming because they don't choose, somehow, to be uneducated. Fat people have it coming because they choose to be fat. Women could get ahead if they didn't act like that. We love the just-world hypothesis no matter how much evidence contradicts it, because it's a narrative beat into us by ten thousand years of religion, and we cry "karma karma karma" when we feel like we're so much better than our home narratives, as if that's any better.

In the midst of the Reagan Memorial AIDS Epidemic™, even the good guys couldn't really get the semiotics right. We heard all the time that AIDS was not a gay disease, and we repeated it to win over the masses, because we, too, bought into the narrative of fault on some subconscious level, and wanted to convince everyone that they should care because this was a common threat, but that's an artifact of a backwards time in the same way some of the demeaning, patronizing advocacy for abolition was. People were dying, which should have been all that mattered, because no one built a career on criticizing the lifestyles of Legionnaires or Tylenol users, but we weren't there yet.

And here in 2015, there's a lot of the same things going on that we just shrug off as unimportant, but gender is the faultline for the next big break, and the drive to connect bad people's inherent selves with their bodies is a faultline, and the way we hold people in the poverty class accountable for not thinking like college-educated blue-state originals is a faultline, and there are whole realms in which we, too, as wise as we think we are, just don't get it. Fewer people are dying this time around, but our grandchildren will look back and raise an eyebrow.

So I have to grind my teeth and cut the masses a break for the horrors of the eighties so I can live with them now, even as I wish that one day, in the same way the last concentration camp guards were rounded up in their golden years and called to account, the surviving architects of the genocide-by-neglect of a generation that had so much more they could have given us, and remind myself to catch the moments when I'm making the same old mistakes of generations of people who just don't get it. Vigilance is required at all times.
posted by sonascope at 6:34 AM on December 2, 2015 [19 favorites]

[Unless there's something weird going on with my browser, I appear to have replied to an exchange that's been moderated out, so ignore the user citation and proceed from there.]
posted by sonascope at 6:42 AM on December 2, 2015

Reagan was not the Great Man that conservatives like to worship. He was scum leading an army of scum. Just more proof here.
posted by Splunge at 8:47 AM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

IF I DIE OF
AIDS - FORGET
BURIAL - JUST
DROP MY BODY
ON THE STEPS
OF THE F.D.A.

- David Wojnarowicz's jacket
posted by wemayfreeze at 10:11 AM on December 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

Eddie Murphy was the person who taught me, as a very young kid, that I was supposed to stay deep in the closet. I'm glad others have mentioned him here, because he's very much of the same zeitgeist captured in the press corps that 8 year old me wasn't remotely aware of at the time. But that bootleg VHS copy of "Raw" sure was on my radar, and taught me a very valuable life lesson that guided my life for about the next decade.

I talk with my kids about this stuff all the time, because now we live in 2015 California and it's weird for them to think that this shit was the norm just a few years ago.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 11:58 AM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

One of the most pointed evocations of the social reaction to the AIDS epidemic is Coil's take on Tainted Love, released as one of the first public efforts to raise funds towards AIDS research for The Terrence Higgins Trust in 1985 (and apparently also the first video produced by MoMA). The imagery is.. relentlessly direct.
posted by FatherDagon at 12:00 PM on December 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

mandolin conspiracy, thank you for posting Marlon Riggs. I am white as they come but finding Reflections of a Snap Queen in the summer after my junior year of high school (through a teacher at the PFLAG meeting held at the Hendrix College Arkansas Governor's School I was attending) very literally changed the course of my life.

Maxi-snap!
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 12:06 PM on December 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

Looking back now, being a child in the 80's was shocking. I still have a head full of racist, homophobic jokes that went round the playground, and the jokes about other races that did the rounds at my white only High School - you can only imagine.

At the same time we didn't understand the jokes we were making. Not really. All things were perfectly fine targets for mockery and scorn. No such thing as Political Correctness.

I hope it's not the same anymore but guess it probably is to a degree.If there's ever a silver lining it's that we've come a long way (or I'm just now removed from it).
posted by twistedonion at 6:43 AM on December 3, 2015

At the same time we didn't understand the jokes we were making. Not really.

Well, the white kids didn't, at least.
posted by FatherDagon at 12:29 PM on December 3, 2015

twistedonion: "at my white only High School...we didn't understand the jokes we were making."

FatherDagon: "Well, the white kids didn't, at least."

I suspect all the non-white kids at the white-only high school just didn't notice because they were too busy hanging out with married bachelors making rocks so heavy they couldn't lift them.
posted by Bugbread at 3:02 PM on December 3, 2015