23. The AIDS Crisis
Just as the decade began, a new disease began spreading in America, one that was initially referred to as GRID: gay-related immune deficiency. It was so-called for how it initially spread almost exclusively among gay men, but it came to be known more broadly as AIDS. It quickly spread outside of the LGBTQ community, especially among drug users and people who needed drug transfusions.
Reagan didn’t take the disease seriously, even though it killed every single person who contracted it. There wasn’t any funding for AIDS research until the end of the decade, by which time it had infected about 100,000 Americans.
