ATLANTA — When Jeff Graham came out as a gay man during his freshman year in college, he walked right into the AIDS-HIV epidemic.
“This was something I had to deal with every single day,” said Graham, the executive director of Georgia Equality, an Atlanta-based LGBTQ advocacy organization.
While the viruses are clearly different, Graham says there are familiarities between the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and today’s coronavirus pandemic.
“There was so much unknown at the time," Graham said. "Frankly, the sense of not knowing what to do, not knowing where to go for information."
Before scientists knew what caused AIDS, some called it cancer. Today, there is still much to learn about COVID-19, creating similar anxiety.
“How dangerous and deadly is it? What are the repercussions? How many will get sick? How do you deal with a lot of your friends and family who die unexpectedly? Those are some of the issues that we’ll be dealing with that’s the same,” Graham said.
At first, a large segment of the public incorrectly thought only gay men contracted AIDS.
Right now, some still think the coronavirus is a threat only to the elderly, as spring breakers explained in Florida during March.
“What is there to do here, other than go to the bars and the beach and they’re closing all of it … I think they’re blowing it way out of proportion,” tourist Brianna Leeder, told CBS News and the Washington Post in Miami at the time.
One familiarity gives Graham comfort. It’s seeing Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx nearly every day during the White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing.
Both doctors were leading researchers combating AIDS. Today, they’re guiding us through the coronavirus epidemic.
“These two people. I’ve known their work since I was 19 years old,” said Graham. “I know that they did so much in their early professional careers working on HIV that they have found a good balance between strong public health interventions and respecting the human and civil rights of individuals.”
Graham says one the most important lessons the HIV/AIDS epidemic taught the country was to resist the urge to blame marginalized communities.
When the president calls COVID-19 the “Chinese virus,” Graham says it casts a bias against innocent people, just like some did to gay men during the AIDS/HIV crisis.