By Colby Malsbury

Do you want to be woke? Sure, we all do. One cannot attain to this eminent domain without first being familiar with one of the epoch’s great genocides – the demise via HIV of a handful of outgoing ebullient types not too discriminating as to where they ground their gears forty years ago. But how can Gen-Z ever hope to relate to the lessons learned then? After all, the 80s was a notoriously troglodyte time, when Eddie Murphy and other notable racists held the zeitgeist in thrall, and refrigerators contained Freon, and people smoked, and all kinds of things. Perhaps it’s time we altered the historiography just a wee bit for modern comprehension. Pulping encyclopedias is a cathartic experience.

Ah, June 1981. What’s not to love? The weather is balmy. The Duke boys are up to shenanigans in Hazard County on summer reruns. Pac-Man is in his arcade. There’s an actor in the White House with keen hair who promises to Make America Great Again.

But appearances can be deceiving. For in the heart of the American homosexual community, a new wasting disease caused by the funky virus HIV was beginning to make mincemeat out of sassy sophisticates from SoHo to San Francisco. Already, Village People concerts were performing at half capacity, prompting the supergroup to announce its descent into obsolescence. This state of pandemonium obviously had to be nipped in the bud.

Hence, President Reagan made a bold announcement: to stop the spread of this horrific blight upon the new aristocracy, he mandated a two-week national shutdown of all ‘non-essential’ businesses to ‘flatten the curve’ and prevent hospitals from being flooded with limp-wristed lepers. After an intense lobbying campaign, roller-skating rinks were deemed to be an essential industry.

At this point, it should be noted that, due to a myriad of ‘extensions’ based on unforeseen spikes that resulted in new waves of AIDS enveloping everything, that two weeks wound up lasting until the fall of the Berlin Wall at decade’s end. But what price safety??? If it saved the life of even one interpretive dance major auditioning for walk-on roles in A Chorus Line and videos by New Wave impresario Taco, it would have all been well worthwhile! President Reagan, in constant contact with poofters during his Hollywood years, understood this well and wholeheartedly approved.

Of course, this wise and enlightened policy was controversial among some selfish groups who were perfectly willing to let the likes of Freddie Mercury just die. Air traffic controllers, for one. Or at least the Gipper thought so, as he fired the lot of them in one fell swoop when they had the temerity to protest their enforced lockout. The gay community didn’t care. There were no good package deals available to the isle of Lesbos that year anyway.

And then the gay community woke up one fine noon day and wondered aloud: ‘Why is everybody always pickin’ on me???’ After all, literally anyone could contact AIDS….well, if they were involved in gross perversion, that is. But isn’t that what made life go around? So why shouldn’t everybody be compelled to live in the same mortal and just fear they themselves were subject to ever since the days of the Stonewall Riots?

Enter a brash young medico by the name of Dr. Anthony Fauci. He wasn’t mafiosi, but could have played an accountant for the Gambinos on television. He also had a hand in instigating the pandemic to begin with, but we need not go into that, as he never faced charges for doing so, and thus he’s obviously as pure as the morning dew. Anyways, he was a very egalitarian sort. He would never dream of discombobulating sodomites enduring the greatest catastrophe to ever befall mankind – make that “man”kind. Hence, he issued a solemn proclamation: in addition to the lockdowns, every American would be required to wear a condom at all times. Women would be allowed to stretch their condoms over their heads. You might remember Madonna’s wearing of just that in the Like a Virgin video – at the time, we all mistook it for a transparent yarmulke. The cultural arbiters of the period – better known in the period nomenclature as The Beautiful People – lauded Fauci’s genuine concern for the commonweal, and they permitted him to make a cameo appearance on St. Elsewhere as a compassionate hospital administrator with a picture of Ted Kennedy on his wall, for which he won an Emmy.

Neolithic rednecks of the time claimed that their chances of catching Gay Cancer were so remote that these measures ought not to apply to them. Little did they stop to ponder the swarms of casualties that bombarded them on their nightly newscasts day in and day out! Why, here is just a partial listing of the death toll:

• Rock Hudson, actor
• Roy Cohn, actor. (Best Performance as an Anti-Communist)
• Liberace, pianist who your grandmother loved because he was so charming and polite.
• John Lennon, singer. Instant karma got him.
• Lucille Ball, actress. I Love Lucy? Without protection, obviously.
• Larry MacDonald, congressman. OK, he himself didn’t have AIDS. But his pilot did, and tragedy resulted.

(The above data comes to us courtesy of the CDC, who are totally agenda-free – public servants, after all – and thus would never fudge anything meant for public consumption.)

Of course, the plague could not be contained within the shores of the New World forever. It eventually made its way around the world, spreading pestilence and discord everywhere. Not unlike a Michael Jackson concert tour of the period, come to think of it. But the nations did react:

The Soviet Union, fearful over the notorious debauchery of Los Angeles’s affluent bedroom communities – not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that in doctrinaire Marxism, mind – boycotted the city’s 1984 summer Olympics. When AIDS later turned up in Moscow anyway, the woke electorate of the Worker’s Paradise got irate and voted in Mikhail Gorbachev, a sensitive new age guy who would set things aright. Indeed, his policy of glasnost ensured that all the comrades would be able to hear Bono wail about how HIV was decimating Africa whensoever they desired to. Later on, he and President Reagan met in Reykjavik to ban intermediate-range missiles, because they were phallic-shaped. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that in doctrinaire materialism, whether of the Marxist or capitalist variety, mind.

In the UK, PM Thatcher mandated an immediate hard lockdown on literally everything in the country. This left a ton of Welsh coal miners stranded in their pits. This was spun to make it appear they were on strike, and many Britons froze to death that winter as a result. The miners were naturally irate, but they perked up when their union generously offered to pick up the tab on the pink awareness ribbons they were also mandated to wear in perpetuity.

In Australia, filming on Crocodile Dundee was halted when the entire country was barricaded with a wall to keep the AIDS out. Filming only commenced after a few thousand Melbourne residents were forcibly relocated to Thunderdome and made to battle to their deaths. All because they wanted to do a little pub-crawling that one Friday night.

In Canada, PM Trudeau issued a national AIDS passport. This was available on either a VHS or a Betamax tape, according to the user’s preference. Cultural critics complained that the tapes did not contain enough Canadian content, so a five-minute introduction featuring Bob and Doug MacKenzie was added, advising the user to ‘sheath up, eh’. This mollified the critics. Canadian critics are pathetically easy to mollify.

The disease impacted people in a thousand different ways, making for some peculiar situations. A few noteworthy ones:

• Bill Buckner, the Red Sox’s first baseman, was wearing his mandated condom the night of Game Six of the 1986 World Series. It began chafing at him badly, and while adjusting it a rather important tap sent a rather important baseball between his legs. This would cost the Red Sox the World Series, but Buckner advised everyone to use protection anyway. That bit of magnanimity caused Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis to grant Buckner clemency from the electric chair.
• The Eighth Wonder of the World, better known as the AIDS Quilt, began construction in 1987. Everyone on earth was mandated to pay homage to the sodomite of their choice, on pain of an $8 trillion fine and/or 56,271 years in Leavenworth. This was thought rational by most. Also: wherever the Quilt of Babel was displayed outside, it immediately killed all the grass underneath, given that so many of its panels are constructed out of everything from cardboard to lead to plutonium to diamond-encrusted satin (hi, Liberace!!!). Al Gore, beginning to take the lead in the nascent climate change movement, overlooked this obvious logical fallacy so as to schlep for more ‘special interest’ votes. More of that was to follow in the years ahead. Much more.
• As we all know by heart, an effective vaccine against HIV was never developed. But since the next best thing was for homosexuals to forget their troubles with a nice refreshing soda, Coca-Cola decided to cash in on the angst by introducing New Coke, a concoction with 50% less cocaine and 75% more salvia. And zero extra cholesterol, besides!!! Believe me, that mattered back then. President Reagan was eager to mandate that everybody drink this regularly, as well, but its promotional internet campaign backfired. Mainly because the internet of the time consisted of fourteen Commodore 64s and a Speak and Spell hardwired into Christopher’s mom’s big-ass C-band satellite dish. Oh well. Can’t win em all. But at least they got to pirate HBO.
• Real estate mogul Donald Trump was a firm backer of the fight against AIDS throughout the decade. Gee, maybe this guy will go places one day.

Of course, all good rackets come packaged with an expiration date, and by the mid 90s it was apparent that AIDS had become endemic. This happened under President Clinton’s watch, so it wasn’t a big deal, as hyper-globalization was rapidly becoming the name of the game anyway. A happy outcome that AIDS provided no little aid in helping to become reality.

And thus was the crisis baton passed on to the Project for a New American Century, who were cooking up a nice little surprise for a couple of office buildings in New York City….