The end of ACT, Canada’s oldest HIV service agency, and other AIDS organizations should be a cue for today’s 2SLGBTQI+ activists to start again, this time hopefully from a place of less fear and ignorance…
By Paul Gallant
In this season of the hilarious FX TV comedy The English Teacher, the titular gay English teacher is quietly delighted when his high schoolers decide they want to perform Angels in America, Larry Kramer’s epic two-part play about, among other things, the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s. But then Mr. Marquez, played by out show creator Brian Jordan Alvarez, is thrown for a loop when his students want to adapt the landmark work into a performance about their own experiences of COVID-19.
“I mean, this stuff all happened, like, 90 years ago,” declares one student.
“Why didn’t the gay guys just stop having sex? Wouldn’t that have solved the problem?” asks another.
“That’s not possible for those people, no offence, queen,” replies the first student, looking knowingly at Mr. Marquez.
“You have to understand,” the teacher tells his class. “They didn’t know what AIDS was. They didn’t know where it came from. There was so much fear and so much misinformation.”
“Like with COVID?” says the student who gets the last word.
Since the summer of 1981, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the U.S. reported a rare pneumonia and Kaposi’s sarcoma in five young gay men in Los Angeles, the fear of HIV/AIDS – or the denial of that fear – has been intrinsically connected to the lives of gay and bi men. First, it was a mystery disease. Then it was a disease caused by sex, especially gay sex. Fear of AIDS became as much a part of being gay as coming out. My own coming out in the 1990s was paired with buying a large box of condoms, and having my GP tell me I needed to get myself into a monogamous relationship ASAP. That’s what gay life was: being casual and sometimes greedy about who we have sex with. But also being diligent in how that sex unfolded. The management of bodily fluids was a matter of life and death.
AIDS was a societal crisis, an emotional crisis and a spiritual crisis as much as it was a health crisis. And it struck the gay community just as we were asserting ourselves on the wider social and political stage, particularly in North America and Europe. More people were coming out, more bars and saunas and other gay-oriented businesses were opening, more mainstream entertainment was referencing gay life, more politicians were acknowledging 2SLGBTQ2I+ people. It should have been pure euphoria. But it wasn’t, because there were also, at the same time, more funerals for men who were dying very young. The most vivid memories for many gay men who are over 50 today was of friends’ unexpectedly quick, painful deaths.
Prevention strategies improved: first, the wider use of condoms, then PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) in the form of daily prevention pills and now injections. Treatments improved dramatically after a decade of being as toxic as the virus itself.
But that first decade of HIV/AIDS inflicted a wound on our psyches, our sense of ourselves, of what it meant to be a good gay. For the religiously inclined, there was a sense that AIDS was a punishment for the sin of homosexuality. I knew gay guys who, right up until the 2010s, believed they were probably HIV-positive but avoided getting tested, and therefore avoided treatment, because they could not come to terms with the weight of being HIV-positive. Though highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) came onto the market in 1996, allowing HIV-positive people to live long and healthy lives with fewer side effects, and PrEP started being prescribed in 2012, the story that a certain generation of gay and bi men told ourselves about HIV/AIDS did not change very much. In the early years of the epidemic, we were neglected and ignored. Sometimes anger seemed like the only way to get results.
Forty-four years later, our institutions are finally feeling the pressure to reframe the issue, to let the facts of HAART and PrEP, rather than our collective trauma, inform decisions. Next spring, Canada’s oldest HIV service organization will close after 42 years of leading the charge against the disease. The AIDS Committee of Toronto (ACT) is not the only HIV/AIDS organization that is acknowledging the new world we live in, a world that seems to be shifting away from progressive thinking and empathy. In the U.K., NAM aidsmap, a long-running HIV information charity, closed up shop in 2024, transferring its assets to the Terrence Higgins Trust and National AIDS Trust. AIDS Fund Philadelphia shut down in 2024, while the San Francisco AIDS Foundation went through a dramatic downsizing in June 2025.
This is mostly good news. When a societal problem is mitigated or solved, there is no sense in directing community resources towards it. If only we live to see the day when homophobia, transphobia, racism and poverty no longer require vigilance and attention – now that will be a peace dividend. Organizations other than ACT are still doing good work. But few victories are clear-cut. The AIDS “solution” has primarily been a pharmaceutical one, one delivered by corporate entities beholden to shareholders. Reduced HIV infection rates, and healthy lives for those who are positive, are in the hands of big business, government funders and regulators…not the most dependable friends.
Though grassroots campaigns to get gay and bi men to use condoms were perhaps less effective in the long term than pills and injections, there’s a loss of a sense of community, a loss of empowerment in handing over our health to big pharma. Our well-being has been commodified. Our community’s crisis has become one of a thousand demands on the healthcare system. Even for the gay community, monkeypox and drug-resistant syphilis have become tougher nuts to crack. ACT was founded in 1983 by a group of concerned community members, all volunteers and activists. Toronto’s Hassle Free Clinic, founded in 1973, also had humble grassroots origins. But they’ve been overshadowed by the slick efficiency of the self-check-in terminals at Toronto’s HQ, a hub for “cis guys into guys and two-spirit, transgender and non-binary people.” Funded by the provincial government as well as by donations from companies like Gilead Sciences, which makes the HIV treatment drug Biktarvy and the HIV prevention drug Descovy, HQ is a remarkable service. But it has less heart than its predecessors.
It’s hard to find a way forward after an emotional and monumental event. There’s an urge to fight the last war again and again. That’s true not only for HIV/AIDS and other horrors. Our community’s cockiness about the successful campaign for equal marriage, which was legalized nationally 20 years ago, has probably made us less effective in fighting the current backlash against our community, particularly in defending trans rights. Today’s issues are more about attitudes, health spending and educational policy than the legal rights we advocated for during the marriage debate. Organizations that were built to win court cases haven’t shown themselves to be great at other forms of advocacy.
The AIDS crisis did teach us something: how to start from scratch, from a place of fear and ignorance, to build something that saves lives and maybe changes the world. The end of ACT and other AIDS organizations should be a cue for today’s 2SLGBTQI+ activists to start again, this time hopefully from a place of less fear and ignorance.
PAUL GALLANT is a Toronto-based writer and editor who writes about travel, innovation, city building, social issues (particularly LGBT issues) and business for a variety of national and international publications. He’s done time as lead editor at the loop magazine in Vancouver as well as Xtra and fab in Toronto. His debut novel, Still More Stubborn Stars, published by Acorn Press, is out now.
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