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AIDS Since the 1980’s:
It's been nearly 40 years since AIDS came on the scene in the 80's. You don't hear a lot about the community of AIDS survivors.
The AIDS project has been interview and following the progress of many people whose lives have been touched by AIDS.
Back in the 1980's there was so much panic and prejudice around the world towards AIDS patients. Thanks to medical professionals and scientist hundreds of AIDS survivors have lived healthy lives for decades. The survivors living with HIV are not your basic sick people but they represent a multitude of people who have been infected.
There is an organization that has dedicated the last 30 years to interviewing and videoing AIDS patients and are preparing to produce a documentary on the subject. The project is expected to show what it is to live on beyond this traumatic experience. This would include what it is like to live into the older ages alongside elderly hearlth problems.
The interviews expose the ignorance and prejudice of the early 80s, a point when sufferers couldn't disclose their status for horror of losing their jobs or health insurance, when death certificates had been doctored and funerals hushed and undersized.
"All of life is in these interviews." "Take the homosexual community, it was teeming with clubs then this horrible thing happens. You can merely understand how horrible if you comprehend the world in which it happened. London's gay community wasn't huge and many lost their entire social circle, people had been horrified. Your lover unexpectedly falling ill, the outrageous homophobia in the media, visiting friends in hospital, what does that do to your sense of self?"
"Many were dear friends, some colleagues, what struck us was there were no funerals. People at work were suddenly gone. You'd discover out they'd died and the family had a little private ceremony with no way of saying goodbye. There was such extraordinary fear of contamination they'd be buried in concrete coffins."
Interviewees tell of being "given a certificate saying you are going to be deceased in six months", or getting the physician to sign any cause of death but AIDS. "Society are busy moving on and don't want to talk about it, but we realised a community of people had never gone on record."
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