As Dr Paul Volberding, a San Francisco medic who helped to set up America’s first hospital inpatient ward for Aids sufferers, recalled to The Guardian in 2016: “This is the most fatal infectious disease ever seen. Ninety-five and a half per cent of those diagnosed with AIDS between 19 died. HIV had been spreading, undetected, through America’s gay population since around the early 1970s, a result of sexual transmission among a demographic whose promiscuity was not only a convention of queer sociability but a revolutionary political act in the wake of the 1969 Stonewall rebellion. These were opportunistic infections resultant of Aids, a chronic condition caused by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) which effectively destroys the immune system. This came some weeks after a report was published by the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention describing how five previously healthy gay men had been diagnosed with pneumocystis pneumonia. In July 1981, 26 cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma, an exceedingly rare cancer, were identified exclusively in gay men by doctors in New York and California.
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