Even though AIDS was formally identified in 1981, it wasn’t until 1984 that researchers finally closed in on the causative virus.

In that anxious intervening period I, like so many other gay men, became obsessed with scanning for symptoms that  would, effectively, confirm an AIDS diagnosis. The ‘top two’ were Kaposi’s Sarcoma lesions (a.k.a. ‘the gay cancer’) and Pneumocystis pneumonia. In practice, the appearance of any skin blemish or any sense of shortness of breath – no matter how fleeting -was sufficient to engender panic.

And then there were the vaguer symptoms, of which ‘persistent night sweats’ was by far the most worrying. These could be caused by a number of innocuous things – including anxiety about having them – but it seems the gay community only discovered night sweats with the emergence of AIDS.

And so a huge element of fear and uncertainty was introduced into the lives of all gay men who had been sexually active (and even those who hadn’t). What better time, then, for people to start espousing their own theories of causation.

There was a range of motivations behind these theories. Some sort to make sense of it, others sought to make moral capital. Either way, looking back on that period now offers an interesting – and somewhat depressing – insight into human behaviour in times of crisis.

So what lay behind some of these theories?

Paranoia

In some cases the fear brought a certain level of distrust and paranoia to the surface. For example, during my visit to San Francisco in 1983 I regularly saw stickers declaring, “It’s not your lifestyle: AIDS comes from a government lab.” Similarly, as the poster below illustrates, some people really believed that AIDS was US Government germ warfare against “gays and blacks”.

This image copyright Jerry Pritikin. Used with permission. 

‘Science’

Scientific exploration is supposed to be guided by rational and logical thinking, yet it was clear that not all ‘scientific’ theories were quite as neutral as they should have been.