Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for October 06, 2017

1982 … early days. I had an eerie moment when I was housecleaning and tossed out a lot of old Playboys. Happened to glance at the news column in one of them, and saw a bit about this disturbing new syndrome cropping up in the gay community of NYC … Kaposi’s sarcoma. The issue was late summer of 1981, and I wondered whether that was the first mass media mention of AIDS.

What year is this strip?

Gotta hand it to Mr. Trudeau, it ain’t easy to get a laugh out of AIDS. He got one from me!

Why would anyone want to beat on an overpass with a stick?

She suddenly seems knowledgeable; must have checked the Web.

The “Web” didn’t exist much in 1989. But there were periodicals and news papers to read at a library.

And a half-hour of news on tv at night. Mostly, they were on at the same time, so you had to choose one.

I love mom. Her idiot husband trying to “protect the little lady.”

Sounds like mom knew a lot more about AIDS than her husband thought she did.

Claiming someone’s not ready really means you don’t want to get off your mental butt and deal with it. It’s an excuse to hold back talking about AIDS, or telling kids about sex, or doing the extra work to teach a kid that’s smarter than all the others in school.

Is Andy still alive? (This strip was from 1989.)

1982 was seven years earlier… a lot of fluids have passed under the bridge since then.

This arc brings back a lot of bitter-sweet memories for me. I lost a son to AIDS in 1988. He died just four days before his 19th birthday. I recall, only too well, how his mother’s rock-ribbed Mormon family were in denial about his sexual orientation, and the disease that took his young life.

Trudeau’s ironic humor struck a chord with me then, and still resounds.

I was in grad school studying immunology in the early 80s. At first studying AIDS was tantamount to coming out as gay. Later it became the “in” thing to study.