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Surviving and Thriving: AIDS, Politics and Culture

The National Library of Medicine encourages you to mark the date October 23, 2017 for the opening of the exhibit, Surviving & Thriving: AIDS, Politics, and Culture at Southeast Community College, (Lincoln, NE). Stay tuned here for more information.

Lily says…
We remember those days. Parts of the USA were paralyzed with fear as a new shame emerged that furthered stigmatized the GLBT community, and continued to fuel hatred and homophobia.
What started then as a whisper would soon become screams of fear and urgent pleas from the public to notice this new killer and respond to it.
It would still take several years however before HIV became a National epidemic, one that the world finally had to act in response to, as it seemed like suddenly HIV was everywhere and most of us knew absolutely nothing about it, yet it was killing our friends, family and lovers alike.
This exhibition will educate through time, where “it” started and where we are now, and how politics and culture norms have impacted the fight.

About the exhibit
In 1981, a new disease appeared in the United States. Reactions to the disease, soon named AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome), varied.
Surviving and Thriving: AIDS, Politics and Culture illustrates an iconic history of AIDS alongside lesser-known examples of historical figures who changed the course of the pandemic. The title
Surviving and Thriving comes from a book written in 1987 by and for people with AIDS that insisted people could live with AIDS, not just die from it.
Centering the experience of people with AIDS in the exhibition allows us to see how critical they were, and continue to be, in the political and medical fight against HIV/AIDS.

“We condemn attempts to label us as ‘victims,’ a term which implies defeat, and we are only occasionally ‘patients,’ a term which implies passivity, helplessness, and dependence upon the care of others. We are ‘People With AIDS.’”
    —Denver Principles, 1983

Explore the Exhibition by clicking here

This exhibition was produced by the National Library of Medicine, & National Institutes of Health