My First Encounter with AIDS, 1983, by Marshall Poe
From MemoryArchive
Who: Marshall Poe What: Learning about AIDS before it was AIDS When: Summer, 1983 Where: Seattle, Washington
In the summer of 1983, I lived in Seattle with a friend. He was studying Greek at the university, and I was just going (from college in Iowa) to play basketball all day, work a crappy job at night, and just hang out. You have to remember that in 1983, Seattle wasn’t “Seattle.” It was more like the way we thought of Portland (until recently)—a down and out, grungy, industrial, and very cheap Northwestern city. That it was. The “U” district, near where we lived, was full of street people, runaways, hippies, and folks on the run from one thing or another. Hard drugs were freely available. It was quite a scene. I traveled there everyday to play ball in the university gym and returned home every evening to work my crap job at Wendy’s. I got drunk on weekends. I love it.
One day after playing, I was walking to the bus and noticed a small gathering of hippies, street people, bikers and so on. It was a rough crowd. But I was interested, so I strolled over to take a look. It turned out to be the entrance to a plasma clinic, that is, a place where they pay you to give plasma extracted from blood. I thought “What a cool idea. I can supplement my income by doing pretty much nothing.” I decided to go in and check it out. I think they paid $15.00 a pop, which seemed reasonable to me. So I walked to the desk and signed up. The nurse or orderly gave me a short questionnaire to fill out. It asked the standard questions you would expect from someone who was more concerned about your blood than you: Have you had this? Have you had that? Do you suffer from whatever?—that sort of thing. There was, however, one very peculiar question, that went something like this: “Are you: a) a sexually active male homosexual; b) an intravenous drug abuser?; c) of Haitian origin?; d) a hemophiliac? I remember thinking “That is the weirdest combination of groups I’ve every seen. What in the world could they have in common?” Not that it mattered much to me. I wasn’t any of those things, so I checked “no”, handed the questionnaire in, and waited my turn to get drained. I looked around and thought “About half of the people in this line are dope addicts. I hope this is nothing serious…”
I don’t recall seeing the word “AIDS” in the clinic, but it wouldn’t have registered anyway. I didn’t know the word, or what it meant. Neither did anyone else. We’d soon learn.
