August 11, 1981. That was the day when Dr. Larry Mass and his friend Larry Kramer, the late writer and activist, summoned everyone they knew for an emergency meeting about the mysterious and frightening new diseases killing gay men.
“There was a very real sense of panic, and we needed to figure out what to do. It was an epidemic that appeared to affect marginal groups – sexually active gay men and drug users, both disenfranchised minorities whom society considered disposable,” said Mass. Soon after, he and Kramer founded GMHC with four other gay men to respond to the crisis.
To mark GMHC’s Founders Day, Mass shared his recollections of the early days of the AIDS epidemic and some hope for the current political moment.
At the meeting, some 80 gay men crowded into Kramer’s Greenwich Village apartment to hear from Dr. Alvin Friedman-Kien, a dermatologist at New York University’s Medical Center, about the rare and unusual skin cancer, Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS), that he was seeing in some of his gay male patients. The group contributed $6,635 to support research on KS and opportunistic infections: It was the first fundraising for the epidemic that became known as AIDS.
As the New York Native’s medical writer, Mass had published the first news report about the emerging epidemic, “Disease Rumors Largely Unfounded,” on May 5, 1981, based on information from the NYC Department of Health and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
But a month later, the CDC published the first clinical report about gay men dying of a rare lung infection called pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, followed by a New York Times article: “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” For the Native’s July/August issue, Mass published the first in-depth feature on the epidemic: “Cancer in the Gay Community.”
“Right after that, we got together in Larry Kramer’s living room,” Mass said. “We didn’t know what we were dealing with, but we realized from the get-go that we were at Ground Zero, and we had to organize, educate, and raise money for research.”
From the outset, there were tensions about how to respond to the growing epidemic. “We were in the midst of a very serious, deadly public health emergency and we didn’t know what the hell was causing it – but we knew we had to raise the alarm,” Mass recalled. “At the same time, we were very concerned about the public’s reaction to hearing about this new, possibly communicable disease among gay men.”
“As a medical doctor, I wanted us to be careful about what we said, so that we weren’t giving out misinformation or starting a panic. I was also worried about civil rights issues, since we had no such protections in place. Homophobia was pervasive, a powder keg ready to explode.”
One thing was clear, Mass said: “We had to start warning people.” To do that, he and Kramer formed GMHC in early 1982 with journalist Nathan Fain, former Green Beret Paul Popham, businessman Paul Rapoport, and novelist Edmund White.
“We decided to call it our Gay Men’s Health Crisis,” Mass said, since the disease still had no name. “We were on our own, in the dark, didn’t know what we were dealing with, had no allies or resources, and we had to find a way to move forward on all these different fronts – that’s what GMHC was.”
The mission
“We needed activism big-time, but we also needed to be an information and services organization. People were getting sick and dying. They needed resources and referrals,” Mass said, noting that Kramer left GMHC and started ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, in 1987. “Both organizations were essential,” he said.
GMHC quickly started a Buddy Program in 1982 that enlisted volunteers to visit people who were sick, and then it began home meal deliveries. “At that time, you couldn’t tell anybody that you had this disease,” Mass explained. “You would be thrown out of your apartment, put out on the street, fired from your job, and abandoned by your family.”
People also needed basic information about what symptoms to look for and what to do if they got sick, Mass said. Another tension was whether to tell gay men to stop having sex or to limit their partners, since the disease seemed to be transmitted sexually. GMHC took a sex-positive approach and provided safer sex information.
“Once the cause was finally established, we could respond with much greater clarity,” Mass said. It wasn’t until September 1982 that the CDC named the disease “acquired immunodeficiency syndrome” or AIDS. Then in May 1983, HIV was identified as the virus that causes AIDS.
To educate the public, Mass wrote GMHC’s seminal guide, Medical Answers About AIDS, which he revised four times over the next decade. Notably, his pamphlet advocated for gay civil rights and public acceptance of same-sex relationships as “essential considerations in the preventative medicine of AIDS and other STIs.”
Today, Mass sees troubling resonances in the rise of right-wing political forces that threaten hard-won civil rights gains for the LGBTQ+ community, as well as funding for HIV prevention, treatment, and care services. “What’s going on right now is scary, not unlike the early days of AIDS,” he said. “But as daunting as things may seem, we’ve shown that we can stand up to overwhelming challenges and prevail.”
“We’re not all firebrands like Larry Kramer, but a lot of us can do a lot of little things that change the bigger picture,” he continued. “When we come together to protest, write or call a legislator, or say something to our family, friends and colleagues, these things count.”
“We are resilient — as LGBTQ+ people, people living with HIV/AIDS, and as an organization. We started out with no civil rights and achieved changes we never could have dreamed of,” Mass said. “That’s our legacy.”
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