Hi, and welcome to this podcast Will Kill You, the bonus episode. I'm Aaron Welsh.
And I'm Aaron Almond Updyke. First of all, holy crap, Holy crap. Hi to all you literal thousands of new listeners.
It's insane, it's We are completely.
Overwhelmed with the response and with the love from all of you. Thank you, thank you, thank you, yes, thank you. Thank you for listening and for rating and reviewing us on iTunes.
And also for engaging with us on social media. These last few days have been an absolute whirlwind in the best way, and we're very excited to have you all here.
Yeah, this is our first bonus episode, which we're releasing while we work on gearing up for season two. If there are any diseases or epidemics that you'd like to hear about in season two, let us know. You can find us at all of our usual places on email where this podcast Will Kill You at gmail dot com, our Twitter, our Facebook, Instagram, etc.
Yeah, look us up.
Yeah.
Well, this week we will be sharing more of Frank, Hillel and Brian's stories, which you heard a bit of at the beginning of last week's episode. So if you haven't listened to episode twelve, HIV AIDS apathy will kill you. Go and do that now, We'll wait, Yeah, just kidding, We won't just go do it.
You press the pause, but yeah, we'll still be here. Yeah. Yeah, So we when we interviewed these three men, their stories were just so powerful and there was so much more that we wanted to be able to include in last week's episode, but we couldn't fit it in.
So what we decided to do was to bring them to you in a special bonus episode and consider this kind of like the director's cut of episode twelve. Yeah, it's bigger and better and yeah, but honestly though, we are really excited and honored to be able to share these stories with you all. So let's get to the interview.
Yeah, we sat down with Frank and Hallel, who are both gay men who lived through the HIV AIDS crisis in the US in the nineteen eighties and nineties. So we asked them to tell us about where they were at the time at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic and what they remember about how it was perceived right at the beginning.
Well, my name is Frank and my last name is I am Ellie. I was living in Boston, I mean outside of Boston. I was about twenty seven, I guess, or twenty eight when we first started to hear about it. I remember distinctly walking into work one morning and this woman I worked with, she hadn't read the newspaper, and she said something about, hey, have you heard about this gay plague. It's going on, this gay cancer, And I
had never heard of it before. So we read the article together, and I distinctly remember that they were saying that one of the signs of the gay cancer at the time you were calling it was a rash on your feet. So I immediately went and everything was fine.
You know.
When we first heard.
About it, there was, well, we don't have to worry about it because it's happening over there, you know. And then when it hit here, it didn't seem to be an immediate panic about it. That all changed within a very short amount of time when people started to get sick here, because they died pretty quickly when it happened, because as far as I can remember, there were no
treatment protocols there was. There literally was an immediate sense of panic throughout the whole city, and you know, if you would go to a bar or something on a Friday night and you'd meet with your group of friends and have a drink, and all of a sudden, the conversations got, hey, we haven't seen so and so in a couple of weeks, we had to check on them, or I heard so and so was sick. And it was, like I said, just that a horrible, horrible panic that
went on right at the beginning. But then as more people started to get sick, they quickly organized informally into being caretakers for your friends that got sick, because in many instances, you know, people didn't have families. Families that you know, cut them out of their lives, and the only families that they really had was their network of friends.
So I want to say, within probably two two and a half years of me first hearing about this, you know, we were already attending to our friends that had come down with Originally it was called it was called POSTI sarcoma was the big thing, I think at the time, but we all sort of went into this state of mind where we need to help those that are sick, and we need to try to be as cautious as we can be. In taking care of them, because we still didn't know that much about how you can catch it.
My name is Hillel Wasserman. I lived in Los Angeles, California, and at present time I work in the should picture business. At the time of the age crisis, I was, of course here in one of in what was in fact the epicenter of the epidemic. The first three cases of a new assistant pneumonia were reported at the UCLA Medical Center as a matter of fact, so we were very much in the center of that storm living here in
Los Angeles. At the time that I first learned about HIV, I was about I guess I was in my late twenties. We started to hear these whispers about this weird gay cancer that was going around, and you know, there was a lot, there was a whole you know, I understand this was now the like mid eighties to really put in a time frame on it, and there was a whole stew of sexually transmitted diseases that were getting passed around, and they were getting progressively more and more exotic in
the gay community. I was just beginning to wade into that world myself, and so that's what I was greeted with, you know, sort of the fruits of the sexual revolution. And we started to hear first there was some kind of a strange a meeba that was going around, and guys were getting terribly sick with ridiculous diarrhea and the like. There were other things like that, and then finally the whispers of this gay cancer, which you know, a lot of us discounted because come on, cancer is amal disease.
How can you, you know, transfer cancer from one person to another. It must just be a way for the repressive society that we were living in to kind of quash the gay you know, liberation revolution, whatever we were doing, and so, you know, it was easily discounted, but it was getting harder and harder to overlook. Guys were getting together for funerals more often than we were getting together for brunch, and people were showing up at the gym that looked like walking skeletons.
I mean, it really was.
It began to be a kind of overwhelming, and then you started to see, you know, weird articles in the newspaper.
And where it really.
Hit home for me was when Rock Hudson began to die all over the front pages of the La Times. You know, you couldn't open up the paper without seeing another story about this man. Now, I don't know how many people really remember who Rock Hudson was, but he was probably the biggest movie star in the world. I mean, he was Hugh Jackman, he was Tom Cruise, he was Daniel Craig.
He was all of that rolled up.
Into line, you know, and comedies and action movies and dramas and the like. And here was this man, this buff, handsome man that we all watched in collective horror as he shrunk before our very eyes. Now, you know, among my community and friends, the perception of this, well, it suddenly became a whole lot more serious. Right, Like I said, this was something that we could no longer discount.
Since the federal government's response to the crisis was so woefully inadequate. Division played a huge role in creating real change, And so we asked Frank in Hellal whether they were personally active in any political groups at the time.
You know, honestly, I wasn't because, for I would say a good five to six seven year stretch after that, my life was, you know, was working and taking care of everybody that was getting sick around me. You know, there were periods of time throughout the eighties where I had a partner at the time, and he and I were caring for probably about the at one time, probably seven or eight different people, just one night with this, one, one night with that, one, one night with this one.
And then when we weren't doing that, there were memorial services because you know, people were dying left and night, and as angry as you as you would get from seeing this carnage, I just thought, for me, my energies were best spent in caring for those that I loved, you know. And there was certainly plenty of people that had joined Act Up, which was the age you know, after this group, and they were doing their job, and you know, I felt like I was doing mine, you know,
in the trenches kind of thing. And I do want to say that something that is not really I don't think it's really well known, but the lesbian community was truly the unsung heroes of the whole age crisis because they stepped up to the plate. I mean, this was a disease that relatively did not affect them at all, and I got they just stepped up and they were in there taking care of people left and right, and working in hospitals and volunteering and so their gay men friends, and it was amazing.
At the time that I was diagnosed, As I had said, I was concerned for my job security because I was perfectly healthy, though I did have this bus to do anything my blood. So I really was not involved in any activist sort of groups, at least not in a
public way. I gave money because you could do that anonymously, but I didn't show up at HIV social groups because who knew who I was going to run into there and what they might say to somebody, and what that somebody might say to somebody else that could cost me my job.
So no, I wasn't.
But at a certain point it was post cancer, and I'm not that much of an egomaniac, but I could not help but believe that there must be something in my experience that somehow could illuminate the lives of others. And that's when I decided that it was my turn to step up. And what I did was I sought out a speakers program, and there was one. There was one, tiny little speakers bureau, I should say, the remnants of a speakers Bureau. It was being run by an organization
called Being Alive Los Angeles. Look them up on the web. Being Alive as la dot org. Being Alive was founded now some thirty thirty or more years ago by two HIV positive guys. Remember this was the darkest days of the epidemic, and they founded this as a way for HIV positive men and women to come together and speak openly to another of our fears and share the rumors we heard because our doctors were completely stumped. But here they formed an organization where people could speak in an
authentic voice because we were living it every day. I'd given lots and lots of money to Being Alive, but finally it was my turn to put my put some skin in the game.
Effective treatment for people with HIV didn't really emerge until the mid nineteen nineties with the introduction of anti retroviral therapy. All of a sudden AIDS diagnosis was no longer the death sentence it once was for a lot of people.
Though Frank remained HIV negative throughout the epidemic, he lost countless friends and his partner at the time, and Hillel had been diagnosed with HIV in nineteen eighty seven, we asked them both how things changed once these so called miracle drugs came onto the scene.
We're talking of good at least ten years or so, I'm guessing from my memory of when we first heard about AIDS up to that point when those recombination therapies came into play. During those years, just seemed that every week there was some other drug or some other treatment that was coming into play. There was a z ty, and then there was this, and then there was that, And so in retrospect, when those drugs, those therapies came out, we did not know at that time obviously what a
game changer it was going to be. But you know, to us, it was just let's see what the hell this one does, you know, that kind of thing. So it wasn't really that big a deal to us at the time.
Credation inhibitor drugs had entered the scene, and that changed everything. People were getting up off of death edge, returning to work, returning to life as productive citizens. There was real reason for hope again, and so the last thing people wanted to do was get up in front of a bunch of high school kids or junior high school kids or community college kids talk about how miserable their lives were with HIV, and in fact, we were starting to live
good lives again. But that's what was most important, That's what made my participation so urgent, was because you can't tell by looking. You know, the joke is, you know, you walk into a gay bar, you can tell who the hid the guys are there are really fuss good looking runs because you know, we're taking care of ourselves, right, but we're walking around with this and you know, as I grew find as telling my audiences, you really cannot
tell by looking. And that's why I thought it was so important to carry that message out, to put a human face of what at that time was a terrifying, mysterious disease.
We also sat down and spoke with Brian Jackson, whose story you hurt a little bit of last week. He was infected with HIV when he was only eleven months old after his father, a phlebotomist, intentionally injected him with HIV infected blood in an attempt to avoid paying child support, which is just the most unfathomably evil thing I can even think of. Yeah, and he is now his father is now serving a life sentence in prison for this act.
Yeah, my name is Brian Jackson. But when I was eleven months old, my father, who was a probotomist at a hospital, decided to her HIV sainted blood and then sinsuly injected me with the HIV bias, hoping I would die off and he wouldn't have to pay child support. My father stayed in the picture for about a month longer and told my mom don't worry about looking me up the child support. This child's not going to live on.
So she didn't think anything about that until nineteen ninety six one for being this playful, hockey energetic five year to this loaded beavers sick kid. In the amounter of months, my body began to break down and doctor started custody for numerous diseases, even forever and then just another country. In conclusion, they came to say, you know, I know he's not a risk for HIV, but let's.
Testing for HIV.
The results came back and I was diagnosed with full blown AIDS. Given five months to this, my T cell.
Count was at zero.
They put me on twenty three or medications through IVY in a Vatican two ingestion's daily the majority of those were not available for SHIVEN at the time. But three months past, five months past, and as I stand before you today, wasn't supposed to see my sixth birthdays. But come next month, I'll be celebrated my twenty seventh birthday.
As we talked about last week, a diagnosis of HIV or AIDS carried with it a stigma and a feeling sometimes of impending doom, particularly during the height of the AIDS crisis from the mid eighties to the end of the nineties, when treatment was hard to come by and ignorance of how the disease worked was rampant, both in the scientific community and in the public. Hellal and Brian discussed with us the emotional told that their diagnoses took on their lives.
When I first became diagnosed with HIV, my body was just sharing that day.
By day, the muscles of my legs.
Were breaking down, my boundary becoming brittle, and achy.
Was vomiting all the time.
If if it wasn't HIV or the opportunity to conceptions that were making me sick, it was the side effect that THEATIS. I've also lost a little bit of my hearing because the doctors weren't moditing the drug that I was on, and therefore I lost my hearing. And then all those years of just battling this illness, I'm actually another thing I speak about besides HIV is mental health.
When I was thirteen years old, I was.
Really struggling with the question that was left out a birthday Piet.
And this is when Bullian was really high for me.
At school, I would be getting jumped into the lack of room and I thirteen, You know, I said, do you know what? I'm just interview everybody at Favor and I'm going to kill myself. And I, as thirteen, I had three knives in front of me, asked myself which one.
He had deeper and I, in.
My moment of desperation, this voice caught me through my Bible and I read this passage and said why I said, downcast, tell my soul with your hope in God. And that would hold stuck out to me. And so this is about two thousand and three, so I couldn't just.
Go google you know what is hope? But I was really.
Fascinated by the word hope, and I really wanted to find out what it is, and gat Internet's not going to cut it, you know. So I'm like reading Booth and I'm reading I loved Encyclopedia before Wikipedia. And what I came to is that and I You're going to go through struggles no matter where. But the consistency we need to have is hope, and hope is vital. And so with that, I started to realize that we had huge choices.
When we have these oh plat moments.
It's either to be a part of the problem or to be part of the solution.
And I said, you know what, I'm tired of being a part of the problem.
I want to be part of the solution. I want to live in victory, not victim mode. And so a question I asked myself is if I believe that I have a purpose in life, what is my purpose?
And I started asking that question that we.
All asking that victim zone, It's what can I get out of this? And I realized that life isn't about what you can get, it's about what you can give. And then I started asking.
What do I have to give?
And I saw that I had a pass and I had a story, and my story is now a story of hope. And I think the word is missing hope. So I wanted to just start sharing that story of part And so since the year just thirteen, I've been in Motivation Speaking and traveled all around the world to Haiti, Ecuador, Kenya.
Last year I was main Canada Speaker of the Year and so Motivation Are Speaking for me is my tient to give back to people whoever struggling with something in their life, whether it's mental health, whether it's disease, whether it's just a day to day life problem. And I would just want to empower people that there is hope and that hope is vital and that regardless of your situation, you can do anything and you can overcome it and you can be.
The best person you're capable of being.
And so there I was sitting in my beautiful office when I get a phone call from the doctor after those seven days to tell me that the chest results came back and they were positive. And as I sat there and listened to all of that, all I could think of, first, Oh my god, how am I ever going to my parents? See I was between my thirtieth and thirty first birthday at that time, and I know to many people that seems impossibly old, but it is not.
When you are between thirty and thirty one, your entire life is ahead of you, or at least it should be. But there I was in my thirtieth and thirty first birthday, and the primary relationship I had in my life, for better for worse, is with my parents. I'm also the oldest of three kids, and I don't know if anyone out there is the oldest in their family, but I can clue you if you aren't, that is the oldest. That child that is the repository of all their parents. Fond,
just houpes and dreams. Right, we're the ones that are going to change the world. We're going to have grandchildren, We're going to shine in our lives and make them proud on that afternoon that no longer was a possibility for me. And you know, I'm no kind of an actor. When they walked in the house, they cleanly saw that something was wrong on their own. Say, no one knows
me better, or in this case, knows me least. But that's when I had to sit them down and tell them that it was time to start planning my funeral. You know, it's wrong for a parent to bury a child out of the national order of things. We're supposed to go to our parents' funerals, cause our parents' fuderals, right, every since the day they gave with those cartoons at sixteen,
they have not select a night. I guarantee you that I remember my mother's eyes filled with tears, and my father got this serious look on his face that he gets when they're thinking about something really important. And he looked me in the eye after a moment, and he said, it'll all. He said, you are our son, and we love you conditionally, and we will live to see you well. Which wasn't this astonishing thing to hear in nineteen eighty seven.
In nineteen eighty seven what you heard at the end of that story with how that guy's parents threw him out, how they turned their back on their own sick child. How can you do that and call yourself a parent. But that's what was happening. It was real. But that's not what I come from. Thank God, I come from better people than that. And I sensed a moment. I sensed an opportunity here, and I thought, Okay, what can I ask for?
Right?
I can ask for anything I want. Now I'd be like I'm sympathy on my side, and I asked if my parents not tell my younger sister or brother. I was just afraid of having them be heard by that news. You know, Like I said, I'm their older brother. I'm the one they looked up into reasons I still don't understand. And I couldn't bear the thought of them worrying about me. And that was an amazing thing to ask of my parents. I had no idea what an enormous demand that was,
what a strain that put on their everyday lives. There was no one they could talk to about this except me, and they were so afraid of upsetting my apple part that they just didn't talk about it. I really isolated them so terribly, and I feel I feel so bad for that. But you know, life comes. Life doesn't come with an instruction book, right. We make the best choices that we can given the information that we have, and in my life, that takes the form of trying to
spare the feelings of others. I did what anybody else would do at that point. I put one foot in front of the other and I marched onward. Because here's what was weird. I had a perfectly intact immune system. I had twelve hundred tees olves. I also had the HIV ryers circulating through my body. Who knew how long it would take before the damage store. But I was healthier than the doctor at that point. So, like I said, I put one foot in front of the other and
I marched. I walked into work every day. I stabbed people in the back and I got promoted. I climbed over the dead bodies and I got promoted again. I quit the studio. They hired me back a year later, at twice a salary. I quit again, started my own business. I did what any normal person does, right. I made contrifusions to my retirement line. I bought a condomitium with a thirty year fixed mortgage. Right. What dead man does that,
you know? But I did what just normal people do, because that was all I could do.
At the end of each of our interviews, we asked Frank, Hillel, and Brian to share with our listeners some of the things they felt were most important about the AIDS crisis or what it's like to live with HIV today.
But after I thought, even after, I can cream with my story and said, hey, I don't care about what you guys think, like this is who I am.
HIV doesn't define me. And I started showing.
People that I was lobbying in Washington, DC. Some of the ignorance went away, but still the ignorance is still consistent. And it's just it's mind bioing to me that we live in twenty eighteen now and there's still ignorance when it is hidna.
And just several years ago, I was dating.
This girl and her father had the audacity to tell me you can't marry or date my daughter because.
You're killing him and you're going to be just like your father. And I'm like, what what do you mean?
And what people don't know about me is that I have an open invitation for anybody who wants to come to the doctor with me. Like my house status, it's not hidden.
I'm an open book. I said, ask questions.
You know, I've done the research, I've lived with it, but still people are ignorant. And I was also adaptics who aren't well educated about HIV and they just lit the prescription under the door and not even come in and take a looking. But in twenty eighteen, you know, we have great medications that can help people live long
and healthy life and be undetectable. Most people can have a zophysic chance to pass and underbas but a lot of people the stigma is still live and real, so where people don't want to go get tested, or when people contracted by it, they automatically.
Think I'm screwed, I'm going to die, and that's not just true. It's like people who are living with HIV can lead successful.
Lives, and people who hang out with HIV positive people who are probably going to always remain HIV negative.
There's what you was saying from the tone, and the shaving the life of one person is like shaving the world entire and it's mind hopes that somebody listening today might change the way they think, where they act towards the people who they meet in their lives who are living with HIV. And if you haven't met us, you will.
If you haven't met us yet, you will. Because the CDC estimates that they're what seven hundred and fifty thousand to one point five million people living with HIV, and fully a third of them don't even know it right here in America, and they don't know it because they're not getting tested. That is so key, get tested, share the results with your partner, develop strategies if you have to to negotiate, you know, safer sexual practices, but get tested.
You know that that will feel like my life has been well lived, like I have done my part to try and fix the world. So giving me this platform to speak on this on this program is deeply touching and I truly think about.
And like I said, I really believe it's important to pass these stories down because the case, you know, we're all getting older and someday I'm not going to be here, and you know, life is just going to go on and those stories are going to be forgotten. And you know, part of that is just light you know that happens.
But at the same time, there's just still needs to be some record somewhere that you know there was a wonderfully live, vibrant community of people that loved each other and cared about one another and supported each other when you know, times were bad and now all that's gone. And honestly, that's one of the reasons that I'm doing this today is you know, if we don't tell our stories about what happened, who will.
Again, we want to give a huge, huge, Thank you to Frank, hellel and Brian for sharing their experiences with us. We feel so fortunate for their openness and willingness to talk about their lives, and we hope that it made as much of an impact on you as it has on us listeners.
Thanks again, yeah, thank you, and thank you for listening everyone.
Until next time, wash your hands
Yes, filthy animals.