Memory is not enough. Attention is not guaranteed. Justice must be demanded.
World AIDS Day is not just a memorial. It is a challenge.
This post is a challenge between the past and the present silence that endangers lives. It honours those lost, confronts ongoing injustice, and insists that we remember not only what happened, but what continues to unfold. From Melbourne to Kampala, from memory to moral action, our imperative to care must be honoured.
Early badge from VAAC (Victorian AIDS Action Council – later VAC and now Thorne-Harbour Health)
In a recent social media post, people were asked for their recollection of the 1980s and 1990s. Most of them happily recalled musicians or musical groups, movies, videotapes, the arrival of home computers, or generally reminisced about “the good old days” before the arrival of modern-day stresses.
My recollections are somewhat different.
The 1980s marked my arrival into young adulthood. Work. Freedom. Autonomy. Meeting others and developing my first extended family outside of my biological one (like Mary Anne Singleton and Mouse from “Tales of the City”). But the times also featured the insidious arrival of a terrible epidemic that started attacking and killing many of my friends.
The next fifteen years were frantic, full of illnesses and deaths, of stigma and discrimination, of angst and activism. There were days and months full of pain and fear and people living in a double closet: homosexuality and HIV.
Very few people nowadays seem to either know about (or recall) those days when a whole generation of young men (and others) was effectively decimated. How quickly we forget, especially because there are lessons we can learn a generation later. It seems the stigma of AIDS lingers a generation later.
This is not just an academic exercise. I recently learnt of the death from HIV/AIDS of an African Facebook friend. The dangers and outcomes are still very real.
Over forty years later, the virus still claims lives; not in the same neighbourhoods, perhaps, but in communities across Africa and Asia where silence and stigma persist. The difference now is not ignorance, but indifference. We know what works. We know what saves lives. And yet, we ignore.
In Uganda and Kenya, millions live under laws and social norms that stigmatise or criminalize their existence: laws shaped not by local tradition, but by imported hate. In 2023, Uganda passed one of the world’s harshest anti-LGBTQ+ laws, introducing the death penalty for so-called “aggravated homosexuality.” These laws were seeded by decades of lobbying from U.S. evangelical groups, exporting their hate under the hypocritical guise of “pro-life” and “pro-family” agendas.
The consequences are devastating: queer Ugandans are hunted, HIV-positive individuals fear seeking treatment, and human rights groups are silenced. In Kenya, similar pressures have led to rising violence and legal crackdowns. This is not just a moral failure, it’s a public health catastrophe. It’s part of a Third-World War.
In July 2025, the U.S. Congress passed the Rescissions Act, slashing $7.9 billion in foreign aid. PEPFAR was spared, but only narrowly. The broader rollback has disrupted HIV care in over 70,000 programs across 50 countries. A Lancet-backed study warns that nearly 500,000 children in sub-Saharan Africa could die from AIDS-related causes in the next five years if PEPFAR funding collapses.
“Silence = Death.” — ACT UP
“The opposite of forgetting is justice.” — Geoff Allshorn
“We are not post-AIDS. We are post-attention.” — UNAIDS advocate
World AIDS Day is not just a memorial. It is a challenge. If we forget the past, we risk repeating it; not in San Francisco or Sydney, but in Kampala, Nairobi, Dhaka. The virus is still here. So must we be.
Related Posts from my Humanist blog:
- PEPFAR: A Lifeline Nearly Lost — The global stakes of U.S. foreign aid cuts and their impact on HIV care.
- We Cannot Look Away: A call to moral attention in the face of injustice and forgotten futures.
- Dream It Forward: Reflections on legacy, imagination, and the power of remembering.
These posts remind us of memory, justice, and care, all worthy and noble considerations for World AIDS Day 2025.
©2025 Geoff Allshorn with editorial and layout assistance from Copilot AI. I show my respect for Elders past and present and acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the Land on which this blog was prepared.