I have been on the front lines of the epidemic for as long as the front lines have existed, and know more about HIV/AIDS than most because of who I am, when I was born, and how I've lived my life.
I was born in 1960, so I was a teenager in the free-wheeling 70s when drugs were iniquitous and there were no permanent, untreatable repercussions from having boatloads of sex (that we were aware of). I grew up with a sense of freedom few younger than I can imagine, and in Boston, which has always been a gay mecca.
From 1977 until 1981 (the first reports of deaths from a mysterious cancer plaguing "homosexuals, hemophiliacs and Haitians"), I was a very busy young man with two relationships under my belt and hundreds of sexual experiences. I spent most of 1979 working at a gay disco and was acquainted with almost everyone in town.
AIDS first came into my life (beyond troubling news accounts) in 1983, when a guy I'd been having sex with off and on for several years tried to avoid me on the sidewalk. His face was covered with KS lesions.
By 1989, my first two lovers were dead, two others were positive and struggling. My roommate was one of the first in my circle to try AZT. I was going to more memorial services than parties. It seemed as though everyone I'd ever met was failing or already dead.
I didn't get tested because there was no way to process such information at that time, and monotherapy AZT seemed as destructive as the virus itself. I kid myself by thinking that, as a top, my risks were so minimized that I'd escaped, somehow.
In 1990 I went on a long-overdue vacation in Spain, fell in love on a beach in Sitges, and moved to Paris to be with him all in the space of a couple of months. I thought that I'd escaped the pain a death all around me in Boston, only to discover that my big love was dying too. I was his caregiver and protector for the last eight months of his life. He died at the age of 33, weighing 35 kilos, in April 1992, and it took me years to recover emotionally.
I fell ill in 1996 and tested positive. But with such terrible numbers, it's certain that I'd been infected 10-15 years previously and was a long-term slow progressor. My health has since been erratic, but is OK at the moment.
The denialist who started this thread spits on the graves of everyone I've loved and lost (I stopped counting at 60, and that was a long time ago) when he questions the science behind the causal effects of HIV in the spread of AIDS.
These people did not die because they were stressed, or because they did drugs (many did not) or because they lacked the skills to feed themselves properly. They died because they lost the fight raging between their immune systems and HIV. I am still alive because, for whatever reason, my immune system has kept the upper hand (so far). As far as I know, I am the last of my very broad circle from that time and place.
I am a senior and highly respected member of AIDSmeds.com, a support/information online community for those living with HIV. I get all the latest information, where it is picked apart by folks who specialize in such things. The one sacred rule there, the one that can never be broken by a member, is to reject denialist propaganda and it's (ultimately evil) proponents.
They are as uninformed and anti-science as your average creationist, PhDs notwithstanding.
Arthur Ashe died before the decent meds came on line. Magic Johnson receives the finest medical care in the world. If one of his meds would start to cause his cheeks to hollow out as it drained all the fat from his face (it's called lipoatrophy), he can certainly afford the best cosmetic surgeons available to have his face filled. As he has become, essentially, a career PWA (person with AIDS), any caustic side effect would be detrimental to his cause, so it's no surprise that you'll never hear about any of his days spent on the toilet or sweat-soaked sheets.