Tag Archives: 1990s

History, Politics & Current Affairs

Why We Still Need World AIDS Day

Today is the 37th annual World AIDS Day. Each December 1 we commemorate the lives of millions of people who’ve suffered and died from HIV/AIDS around the world. On this day each year, we’re reminded of the millions who continue to suffer from the effects of the illness, the trauma caused by it, and the impact that losing loved ones to AIDS has had.

2025 White House World AIDS Commemoration Canceled

The photo here shows the World AIDS Day event at the White House in 2024, when Joe Biden was president. Note that the lawn was covered in AIDS memorial quilts that honor the memories of people killed by AIDS. These quilts have been international signs of commemoration and activism against the deadly disease for four decades now. But for the first time in 37 years, the White House under Trump has canceled all 2025 World AIDS Day events, and refuses to continue the tradition of annual remembrances of those lost to the disease. Trump has also ended former President George W. Bush’s phenomenal PEPFAR program, a U.S. government initiative which saved untold numbers of lives around the world since it was launched in 2003. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief was the largest commitment by any nation to a single disease. It focused on saving lives, preventing new infections, providing treatment and care, and strengthening health systems in over 50 countries. It provided antiretroviral treatment, pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), and care for orphans and vulnerable children, among other essential services. But now it’s gone.

HIV/AIDS is still a major health threat around the world. Despite Trump’s decision not to mark or mention World AIDS Day at the White House any longer, it is still an important day to commemorate the people we’ve lost, the battles we’ve won, the research that continues to improve treatment options, and the terrible inaccessibility of necessary HIV/AIDS treatments for millions of people who desperately need it.

But Isn’t the HIV/AIDS Epidemic Over?

No; it’s a continuing worldwide health threat. AIDS was first identified in 1981, and the link from AIDS to HIV was made in 1983. As of 2024, over 44 million people had died of AIDS worldwide. HIV continues to spread and kill massive amounts of people annually. An estimated 630,000 people died of it just last year.

It’s true that antiretroviral medications have saved untold millions from suffering and death caused by HIV/AIDS. But millions more with HIV still don’t have access to such drugs, and many people can’t tolerate them. About 1.2 million people in the U.S. have HIV today, and an estimated 13% of them don’t know they have it. Without treatment, they could become very ill, unknowingly pass the illness on to others, or even die.

Early Years of HIV/AIDS Awareness & Research

AIDS was an epidemic first identified in gay men, and prominent gay men were the first public faces of the disease. Entertainers like Rock Hudson attracted attention and scorn for being outed as both being gay and having AIDS in a highly homophobic era. But they had inspiring and powerful friends, like Oscar-winning actress Elizabeth Taylor, who’d been a close friend to Rock Hudson for decades. She co-founded amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, one of the nation’s most influential and important AIDS-related organizations. The UK’s wildly popular Princess Diana also made expanding awareness of and compassion for people with HIV/AIDS one of her biggest goals. Ms. Taylor and Princess Diana normalized treating people with HIV/AIDS with warmth and compassion, visiting them, hugging them, and holding their hands and laughing or crying with them, instead of treating them like pariahs.

In 1980s America, President Reagan refused to even say the word AIDS publicly for several years, while it ran rampant, eviscerating the gay community—including many of his personal friends, among whom were many closeted gay actors. But during that time, the spread of AIDS galvanized activists, who established powerful awareness groups like ACT UP. Public health giants like Dr. Anthony Fauci researched the causes of AIDS and its spread, and provided essential public health services and advice.

Fauci’s initial experiences with anti-AIDS activists were contentious. Many activists verbally attacked him for not taking their greatest concerns seriously enough. To his credit, he recognized that he was not working effectively with the people most hard hit by the AIDS epidemic. He met with them, listened, and apologized for his previous arrogance. Dr. Fauci turned leading AIDS activist Larry Kramer from an adversary to a friend by learning how to better work with communities impacted by disease through mutual respect and dialog. Over time, Fauci learned not to bristle when the famously (and necessarily) outspoken and irascible Kramer gave him hell.

AIDS Treatment in 2025

In 1992, after the death of many friends—including the 1991 death of Freddie Mercury—from AIDS, Elton John established the Elton John AIDS Foundation, which is still going strong. The foundation has raised over $650 million to support more than 3,100 projects in 102 countries to end the stigma, discrimination, and neglect associated with HIV/AIDS. Since the organization was established, the world has seen huge forward movement in the prevention and treatment of HIV.

As a result of the successes of hospitals, researchers, activists, and community health initiatives, and the excellent HIV/AIDS meds now available, it’s no longer the uncontrollable public health menace it once was. Indeed, many assume that getting HIV today isn’t that big a deal, since you can take PrEP drugs to prevent it, or antiretroviral drugs to treat it. However, about one in ten people with HIV develop intolerance to treatment, or they become drug resistant. Many more people have a lack of consistent access to healthcare or insurance, and can’t afford meds. So the need for awareness, healthcare access, affordable (or free) medications, and counseling for those affected by HIV/AIDS is still great, and the services are vital.

How You Can Help Stop HIV/AIDS

World AIDS Day is a great time to find a way to support AIDS prevention, treatment, or counseling organizations. To find reputable and successful organizations that rely on public donations in the U.S., check out Charity Navigator, which vets organizations and lets you know which ones are most reputable, reliable, and spend their money most wisely. You’ll find a link to Charity Navigator’s best AIDS charities in the comments below.

Music

With the Lights Out It’s Less Dangerous

NirvanaPhotos

Above: Dave Grohl, Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic of Nirvana.

[Revised from the version originally published on this site in 2014.]

With the lights out, it’s less dangerous
Here we are now, entertain us
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now, entertain us
A mulatto
An albino
A mosquito
My libido
Yay!

When Nirvana released the song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 1991, it helped make them into rock gods. Ironic, isn’t it, since the song was Kurt Cobain’s dig at mainstream culture. According to Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, “Kurt really despised the mainstream. That’s what ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was all about: the mass mentality of conformity.” But the song, which Rolling Stone magazine ranked ninth in its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, was too catchy, sexy, moody, hard to understand, hard-edged, frayed and nearly perfect to escape the clutches of the mainstream. Its hard-to-decipher lyrics were skewered by Weird Al Yankovic in his parody, “Smells Like Nirvana,” which featured lines like:

What is this song all about?
Can’t figure any lyrics out
How do the words to it go?
I wish you’d tell me, I don’t know

In a 1994 MTV interview, Kurt Cobain said of the parody, “Oh, I laughed my butt off. I thought it was one of the funniest things I ever saw. He has some good people working for him. . . . They really know how to reproduce things to the T. He had the exact same setup. It’s the same video with him in it. It’s great.”

The original “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is a perfect blending of droning, captivating, chant-like repetition; buzzing power chords; barely understandable but still compelling lyrics and ragged-voiced angst. It encapsulates suffering, cynicism, dry humor and teen alienation. It felt fresh 15 years ago, and it still sounds fresh and raw today, despite being named the Most Played Video on MTV Europe in the 2000 Guinness Book of World Records. Even though it’s one second over five minutes long, it doesn’t feel drawn out; its pacing, its bridges, even its repetition make it somehow stronger rather than monotonous. The layering of instruments makes for a great, pulsing wash of sound, but within the layers are subtleties, long-held and echoing guitar notes, a threatening bass line, and Cobain’s growling voice matching the bending notes and jagged timbre of the instruments around him, so his voice becomes an instrument to match them. The melding of his own voice and the growling guitar when he says “Yay!” is spookily satisfying, and gave me the same little shiver after the hundredth listen that it gave me the first time.

While the music on Nirvana’s second album, “Nevermind,” from which “Smells Like Teen Spirit” comes, is classified as grunge, it’s really just a polished, pure and more accessible form of punk, slowed down enough to be grabbed and ridden on, but it channels the anarchic spirit of British punks like the Sex Pistols, whose seminal album “Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols” probably inspired Cobain to name the Nirvana album “Nevermind” in their honor. (Some say it’s also a tribute to the Replacements song “Nevermind.”) Unlike American punk bands like the wonderful Ramones, whose screamingly fast-paced songs about sniffing glue and teenage lobotomy patients, punk rockers and beating on brats with baseball bats were essentially all in good, mindless fun, the Sex Pistols really were about anarchy, giving the finger to the establishment, protesting the moral bankruptcy of middle- and upper-class British twits, the monarchy and the conservative political leaders of the 1970s and 1980s. They were the real deal, and Cobain admired that twisted, angry, anarchic vibe.

That punk vibe was bent, reformed and polished into some of Nirvana’s best work, and their songs were musically inventive and attractively melodic enough to grab people who would never give straight punk a second thought while being honest enough to appeal to pure punks as well. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was essentially a crossover hit, and its success rather embarrassed Cobain, since it made him and Nirvana superstars beyond imagining and, it seems, beyond Cobain’s ability to handle the attention, the adulation, and being co-opted by the mainstream until he became a media darling largely against his will. His drug problems and ultimate suicide of course only fueled his legend and turned him into a mythic figure of alienated youth and artistic purity tarnished by too much interaction with the filthy mainstream, the same mainstream which his widow Courtney Love alternately woos and trashes.

So where does the title come from? Kurt Cobain dated Tobi Vail of the group Bikini Kill, she used Teen Spirit, a deodorant marketed to teen girls. Bikini Kill member Kathleen Hanna painted “Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit” on his wall to imply that he was marked with his girlfriend’s scent, but Cobain didn’t realize the reference and thought he was being complimented on his spirit of youthful rebellion. Again, how ironic: his anti-mainstream screed also served as inadvertent advertising for a Colgate-Palmolive product aimed at the teen masses.

[2014 version revised from an article originally published in Laura Grey’s Little Hopping Bird blog.]