The Castro, 1983

And gave each other the AIDS.

Pozzing each other up like there's no tomorrow. Cute, though.

Can't believe we still don't have a vaccine for it. I was so fucking certain it would have happened by 2020, it seemed like such a futuristic date back in the aughts.

....and then they died.

It's like an hour of Falcon loops without the sex.

So gay! 😁

R2 we have prep so all is not lost.

Link?

OP, thanks for the memories! I was in San Francisco summer of 1982 for my 21st birthday.

Oh, they interacted.

I mean r3 is not wrong.

I see dead people.

That was gallows humor.

The plague had already started, which is mentioned by the narrator of the video. It had become known a year before. I wonder how many of those men were already infected. I first heard of it in June 1981, a Friday evening on the local evening news (WCBS). I went to the Ninth Circle that night. I asked a few people if they had heard of this gay cancer. I couldn't remember how to pronounce it (Karposi Sarcoma). No one had heard of it and they all thought I was crazy. In a year or two, most of the guys in that downstair bar, most of us under 25 and more than a few underage, would be dead or dying.

- R3

^^^Sorry, it had become known just over 2 years before.

To put this into perspective, in 1982 the CDC coined the term Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) for the first time. It took The New York Times until 1983 to publish a front page story about the new health crisis.

Watching these old clips always makes me feel sad about our current culture.

Everyone was thin - and they didn't eat great food either.

People are interacting because no phones.

And it wasn't about corporate signage, alcohol brands, etc. I know every generation complains about how things change as they got older - and I wouldn't want to go back to the discrimination and fear from back then - but it feels like we've lost a lot.

But we’ve gained so many likes and subscribes, R15!

Not to split hairs but this is more likely 1985. At around 41 minutes in they're playing Phyllis Nelson's "I like You." That song was from 1985. Yet, still wild to see this video and think of all the pain from the time.

So many assholes in so few replies. Fuck all of you, and your dead-unhappy existence.

I was there. And here I am, still. Thanks to the gays who pushed, and pushed, to create a new world of big medicine that save me and millions of others.

*saved

It’s bizzare how ignorant so many men can be, on what is allegedly *the gay* chat site of record. The combination of willful ignorance and outright asshole-ness (which is not, by any stretch, the same as pointless bitchery) is extraordinary in the way it unfolds on this site. On the one hand, the boomers will live out our lives spending our money and preserving our real estate…and the rest of you will die trying to survive the forthcoming dumpster fire. That’s on you. ☮️

[quote]So many assholes in so few replies. Fuck all of you, and your dead-unhappy existence.

R18 - You sound neither happy nor healthy. You come across as angry and bitter.

See R19. I rest my case.

How could I be bitter, as I’m alive and well 40 yrs later.?

What I am is irritated…at the ill-informed, if not pathetic, posts saying nothing more than AIDS! death! Bad!

R21 you rest your head in your ass. FIFY

R17, great catch. I was 14 in 1983, and the clothes and hairstyles in OP's clip are more mid-80s. Believe it or not, there's a shade of difference.

I got sad watching this and thinking how about 80% of these men are gone.

Best movie theater I’ve ever been in, The Castro.

R24 - well most would be between 65 and 75 today regardless of the toll from AIDS. The sadder part is how many on that street never made it to 1990 or 1995.

R24 your post implies that 80% died of HIV-related illness. Please, no.

I moved there in 1983. Had a couple of good years before everyone started dying. I loved it after living in Los Angeles. Clean air, cute boys, but everyone looked a little worn out in the Castro. Like they'd been partying nonstop for years. It was the meth.

I've watched some of these before. In the 1982 video, there's a cute guy at 30:15 who is either talking to the camera guy or someone directly adjacent/behind him. Gone in 1988.

R29- I first stumbled on these videos a year or two ago. The guy with the mustache and red shirt at 3:27- he was good looking. I wonder what happened to him.

I’m confused —according to the Spencer Garbett thread, gays were hiding away in a dark corner lest they be arrested, abused, fired, mugged or all of the above. They had no life—they were not seen as human.

It’s only been in the last decade that gays could walk free and easy, upright and proud. Or is that other thread full of shit?

R31 to be fair, this is San Francisco. Probably the gayest place on Earth at this time.

Was Greg there?

R32 that WAS Gay America—no different from any other large city at the time. How is that not representative of the era? Is Chattanooga or Duluth somehow more representative of the times—no…of course not.

[quote]Is Chattanooga or Duluth somehow more representative of the times—no…of course not.

In number, yes, and possibly volume, too.

R17 does the music even play at the event or was it added in the video editor and the volume turned down?

It was usually Sylvester singing at that one.

These make me sad.....so many lives lost. I hope they are celebrating in the afterlife.

I was 21 in 1982 and in college, University of Colorado at Boulder. The gay life was in Denver but so few of my friends rarely hooked up. I did a couple times and got anal warts in1984...took a good 3 years to finally leave. With that, I really didn't partake in sex. I became more active in the 1990s and was awarded, herpes.

It could be worse but that time period changed my life and I am single to this point because of the fear of what I could get.

R38 Sorry but our simulation will repeat itself for an eternity (or at least as long as the black hole in the real world that powers it, lives on). So these gay men will always die during the 80s aids epidemc. It is like limbo. Heaven can't be simulated because it would be too much data for the bacteria' souls that died since Earth's creation.

[quote]How could I be bitter, as I’m alive and well 40 yrs later.?

I don't know, R22, you tell us. Alive: obviously; Well: TBD. You sound like either: A) a morning drinker; or, B) a dry-drunk.

^ WOW - R22 triggered you bad! That was extreme.

R35 making little sense

I remember these years clearly. I wanted to visit the Castro, but I never got the opportunity. This is how gay men looked in the early 80s. I fooled around a little bit in 1980-82, but when I heard about the "gay cancer", my sex life was wrapped up and put in the attic. There were so many men I was attracted to, but I had to deny myself because I didn't want to die, or for my family to have to explain why I died so young.

I was in a fraternity in my college years, so I was in the closet in my college town. It would have been scandalous to be caught with my hand down another man's pants. Although I did blow a few fraternity brothers....

I would have shied away from that camera had I been there. Being seen among lots of gay men in public was not something I wanted. I look at these men and feel immensely sorry they lived a life they wanted to live, and they paid a price for it.

“ I look at these men and feel immensely sorry they lived a life they wanted to live, and they paid a price for it.”

Most of them lived long lives…but good for you.

I'm estimating that at least 50% of the men in that video did not live to 1990.

1983 was the year that I came out - not in SF but in Sydney - the South Pacific version at that time. No matter the event or the location, there’s always The Man With The Snake.

And you would be sadly mistaken…

Post a link to a single piece of evidence backing up your claim. Or just stop with the nonsense.

R45^

That is just my opinion from my own experience living in gay community in a big city. Out of my group of about 25 friends and acquaintances in NYC from the early 1980s only 11 were still alive in 1990. They rest had died from AIDS related illnesses. And of those remaining only 6 made it to 2000.

And so you have decided that a video of tens of thousands of men leads to an estimate that several thousand of them died early because of HIV. Your earlier post does a great disservice to those in your group who did in fact die too soon.

Will I be immune when I eat hiv?

Those of you who doubt the severity of the death rate from AIDS, were you there? Did you not see your friends quickly die all around you? I was on a gay volleyball team; we only played a third of our games because the other teams had too many players sick to play.

I had an acquaintance whom I only saw at the bars. I was out of town for about a month. He was dead when I came back to town. He seemed perfectly healthy a couple of days before I left. He was a bodybuilder who slimmed down considerably in six months. He said it was on purpose.

I've heard the Bay Area Reporter had ten pages or more of obituaries in every weekly issue in the mid-80s. We are not overstating it.

R52 So it was like covidé in Italy back in April 2020?

R52 yes I was there. I was the one who questioned ridiculous assumption that 50% of the tens of thousands of men in that video never made it. I stand by my post.

R52 those obits are so sad but an amazing record. I lived in the City from '83-'95 and wrote some for friends. The BAR was diligent in publishing most the local guys' obituaries with a photo. It's is astonishingly sad to watch the toll rise as you track them through the mid-late 80s.

Man - it's sobering to choose a few years in that obit search. Thousands and thousands of names.

R53 - like Covid? No - I would say imagine Covid but it was mainly contained only within a few square miles in gay urban ghettoes. Literally people dying all around you. For about 12 years - not 18 months.

And the non-stop funerals and memorial services. It was just constant.

Yes, the continuous flow of funerals in the mid to late 1980s. That was something I never got over.

I was going by my own experience with the gay community in Greenwich Village in the 1980s. AIDS decimated not just my group of friends but an entire community. That had a lot to do with why the gays migrated to Chelsea, the gay community was mostly gone. Many also lost their long term leases when their lovers died and they had to move out. There are different opinions on how many gays from Greenwich Village and East Village died in less than ten years. An article i read several years back estimated that as much as 50% of gays living in downtown Manhattan may have died during the first 8-10 years of the HIV crisis. That startling number startled me but also seemed likely. Obviously San Francisco and other cities with clusters of gay communities would have experienced different percentages of fatalities.

R57 - some sources say that by 1995, 10% of all gay men in the US between the ages of 25-44 had died. Considering the high concentrations of gay men in NYC and SF and, unfortunately, the early rise of HIV in those communities - I don't doubt that probably 35-40% of the community died.

Other areas throughout the US didn't have the high density of HIV and were spared. NYC had it the worst. AIDS was the #1 cause of death for men between the ages of 25 and 44.

It's hard for some people to understand how bad it was. And ZERO support outside of the gay community. Nobody fucking cared. Over 100,000 men in NYC died.

People STILL don't give a fuck.

Killing all the right people, R1 ?

Nobody is attractive enough anymore, OP. Guys who identify as Gay are over 60. Hot young fluid/bi guys are on the downlow and living off their fat girlfriend Emme who has a job and a rich father.

Julia was a white woman from the South. She could have been referencing Sickle Cell Anemia.