When AIDS first appeared, here in Mississippi peoples attitudes were, like every social trend, it won't come here for another twenty years. Unfortunately for a lost generation, they were dead wrong. People started dying in 85. By 1990 the numbers were actually alarming.

In 82 & 83, the HIV virus hadn't even been isolated yet. It acted like a virus but science had never dealt with a retro-virus before. CDC nor anyone else in the medical community knew enough about HIV/AIDS to state anything definitive about it. It appeared to be a virus. It appeared to be sexually transmitted. It appeared to have a long incubation period before the immune system collapsed. It appeared that those who were infected were contagious from four to ten years before before they got sick.

However- at the time no one actually had the smoking gun. Various entities had pieces of the puzzle but bureaucratic rivalries and wrangling by Nobel prize hungry scientists kept many of these institutions from working together or even sharing data. No one in the various health bureaucracies would risk their reputation by making recommendations or issuing guidelines.

In 1984 I worked with an all volunteer team at the University of Southern Mississippi to create a mathematical model of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The results were frightening. Given a geometric growth rate and an average seven year contagious latency period, our model showed that by the 1990s, infections with HIV/AIDS would be in the 10's of millions in the United States alone. We had difficulty publishing our findings. Many journals wanted nothing to do with AIDS, some commented that it was alarmist while others accused us of fear mongering. I left USM in June of 1984 and the results were finally published by a European Infectious Diseases Journal in early 1985.

Worse yet, opportunists like Pat Robinson and Jerry Falwell were preaching that HIV/AIDS was the righteous wrath of an angry God inflicted on homosexuals who had no one to blame but themselves.

Culturally AIDS could not have happened at a worse time. The sexual liberation of the sixties came full circle in the seventies. Gay people were more accepted than at anytime before. Record numbers of people were leaving the closet with no intention of ever going back. Part of that liberation was a permissiveness about sex that by todays standards is shocking. Every big city (and even some smaller ones) had gay bars, caf