In This Broadcast

As an entire generation vanished, a government looked away.

In this opening installment of our four-part HIV Awareness Month miniseries, Dany and Claire step into the early 1980s—a time when an unknown illness was spreading through queer communities while the rest of the world refused to speak its name.

From the forests of Central Africa, where a simian virus first crossed into humans, to the bustling neighborhoods of San Francisco and New York, we trace the path of HIV before it even had a name. We follow the science, the fear, and the politics that turned a preventable epidemic into a decades-long tragedy.

The episode explores:

• The origins of HIV and how colonial trade routes, migration, and medical neglect shaped its global spread.
• How homophobia, racism, and classism drove the myth of the “4H Disease.”
• The U.S. government’s silence—from the CDC’s underfunded researchers to Ronald Reagan’s years-long refusal to utter the word “AIDS.”
• The activists, doctors, and ordinary queer people who sounded the alarm when no one else would.

By 1990, more than a million Americans were infected, and hundreds of thousands were dead—many of them gay men and trans women whose stories were erased or ignored. What we remember today as “the AIDS Crisis” was, for those who lived through it, a war fought without allies and a grief that never ended.

“That silence you feel in queer spaces sometimes—the sense we’re rebuilding something from fragments—it’s the sound of that missing generation.”

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Content Warnings:

This episode contains discussion of illness, death, governmental negligence, homophobia, transphobia, and medical discrimination. Listener discretion is advised.