The Plague Year

You are also reading David Black’s “The Plague Year.”  This article ran in Rolling Stone in March of 1985 and .  This article talks about activists, but also the entire context of the crisis at that time.  It is another of our contemporary reporting pieces, so you’ll get to experience 1985 like those of us who actually did.  The article isn’t exactly traditional objective magazine journalism, as you will learn, and is of its time.  For question #2, give a personal reflection on the article and talk about your impressions of the AIDS crisis and the social movement reactions to it.


I thought the article was really interesting, although I didn't appreciate the author so much. I thought Black was a little self-important and that while he kind of tried to expose himself as such, he was not as endearing as he thought he was. His working through the reasoning for why he used to word "faggot" to express anger towards a man (who he assumed to be gay) he found obnoxious and the way he broke down what happened (in retrospect of course) are sound, but I still didn't like him. I did think though, that the timeline he gave about the way the medical community approached the beginning of the AIDS crisis was really interesting. I guess it is largely due to the contemporary nature of this piece, but I have never read about the reaction of the doctors who figured out the pattern of an immune system deficiency, or how they figured it out, or the response of other medical bodies. Poppers were postulated first as the cause of the immune system deficiency, but that was soon disproved. Black also characterizes the gay community at the time as being resistant to realizing the pattern as a disease, for fear the disease be associated with gayness, which had been working as a social movement through tactics of normalization and assimilation to lessen the difference between themselves and straight (white) Americans. I thought Black's discussion with a dying man about whether he should be writing his article or not appropriately demonstrated the complexity about the issue of AIDS and the relative helplessness surrounding the person who has been diagnosed with it.