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Just 4 years ago, the Spanish government issued a mandatory quarantine throughout the country due to the presence of an unknown deadly virus. We will all always remember how we lived those days: the fear of infection, the fear of infecting our loved ones, the fear of death, the frustration of not being able to do anything, the desire to escape.
In these months, I have been immersed in the construction and rehearsals of a new play (never staged in Catalonia) with the company La Funcional which will be staged in Figueres during the month of May and which made me think a lot that we were afraid of Covid-19. I will explain to you.
Called “An Ordinary Heart” and about the beginnings of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, the play follows one man's efforts to break the administration's conspiracy of silence, indifference, and hostility to the public and much of the gay community, and gain recognition for the disease that threatens to change everything. Do you see the parallel?
See, the first recorded case of AIDS in Estonia was in 1981 in the Hebron Valley. The doctors said we didn't know what it was, that it was a symptom they had never seen before, and that it could cause death after a few weeks without much explanation. It was not until a year later that they were able to name the virus: HIV. The first retrovirus did not appear until 1987, although it was not very effective.
Initially there were no diagnostic tests for HIV, and cases moved very slowly, so in that sense it was very different from the Covid-19 pandemic, when things moved very quickly.
The most shocking aspect was the stigmatization of homosexuals. At the time of sexual liberation, they were identified as an at-risk group and the same scientific articles mentioned the sexual orientation of patients; There was a lot of discrimination both at the collective level and against people living with HIV, both at work and socially. At the beginning of the Corona virus, something similar happened to us with the Chinese and Asians, right?
As with Covid-19, everyone in those years knew or knew someone who had AIDS or even died.
Within 40 years, AIDS killed 35 million people. Every year 1.5 million people are infected and 38 million people live there. It is estimated that there are 3,000 new infections in Spain every year. In Catalonia, about 600 HIV cases are diagnosed, a figure that represents an average of approximately two diagnoses per day.
I invite you to come and see An Ordinary Heart and learn more about how the gay community experienced the AIDS epidemic in New York in the 1980s. here we are!
“Infuriatingly humble social media buff. Twitter advocate. Writer. Internet nerd.”
