40 Years of AIDS—A Call To Action For Long Term Survivors

It’s been 40 years since the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report that documented cases of pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) in five young, “previously healthy” men. It was the first official report of the disease that would come to be known as AIDS.

There have been great strides in prevention and treatment, the two most remarkable being the advent of PrEP which can prevent transmission and of U=U “undetectable equals untransmittable.” Specifically, it means that people living with HIV who have an undetectable level of virus in their blood due to treatment are unable to transmit the virus to others.

June 5th is also is also HIV Long-Term Survivors Awareness Day (HLTSAD). Tez Anderson, a Long Term Survivor with HIV, and the founder of Let’s Kick ASS (AIDS Survivor Syndrome), says, “We stand a precipice. We can elevate the goals of the Ending The Epidemic to include improved Quality of Life, it is more than treating the virus, which is paramount, but so is increased focus on mental wellbeing. It is beyond surviving toward a mindset of thriving.”

Anderson (in the photo above) also notes it is a pivotal moment as he articulates in his manifesto, “AIDS at 40: Envisioning a Future We Never Imagined.”

Between now and September 5, 2021, we will compile your priorities, and together we’ll mobilize for change.

Send an email to Action@LetsKickASS.org in the “About” section include #HIVsurvivorsAction

“On September 18, 2021,” HIV and Aging Awareness Day, “we’ll begin working on tangible calls to action to ensure our needs are addressed. This is about creating a grassroots agenda and making that plan is implemented.”

“We’ve waited long enough,” Anderson writes “People living with HIV and AIDS deserve to age with dignity.”

Anderson was able to leverage his voice and efforts to the cause because of his past. In what seems like a lifetime ago, he served as a creative consultant 1994’s PBS miniseries Tales of the City. In addition he and Tales‘ author, Armistead Maupin were a couple at the time and a major character in the series was based on Anderson. In 1990 Maupin and Anderson were featured in People magazine as a serodiscordant couple — one of the first to speak publicly.

In a profile in HIV Plus Magazine in 2016 Anderson said the show made invaluable contributions to visibility, LGBT visibility, which was critical to him, since as a gay rights activist “for decades my agenda was visibility.”

Anderson founded Let’s Kick ASS  and helped initiate HIV Long-Term Survivors Awareness Day  in 2014 after he made the connection between the post traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) experienced by soldiers returning from the concurrent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and what he and his friends who had survived past the date they were told they would die. Anderson realized, “I was in the troughs of complex post-traumatic stress from years planning to die and not planning to live. The big crisis point for me came when I began wrapping my brain around the idea that I was not dying from AIDS, but living with it. I remember thinking, ‘Oh damn you might be an old man with HIV.’ It was the one thing I had not imagined and that sent me into a tailspin of depression, anxiety, and panic.”

Photo above: An AIDS quilt at the Yuerba Buena Center, San Francisco. California. Photograph: Alison Wright/Corbis via Getty Images

To mark the occasion, the National AIDS Memorial invites the nation to honor the more than 700,000 lives lost to AIDS, the survivors and the heroes, during the past four decades. During a powerful LiveStream ceremony, leaders of the AIDS movement will provide touching tributes of activism, resilience, hope and remembrance.”