This picture of David Kirby being held by his father captured more than placards protesting the treatment of AIDS patients in the late 1980s. It showed AIDS patients as victims with families.
For a long time, the argument had been from conservatives who struggled to uphold “Family values”, this picture presented a counterargument. It said, to have “family values”, you have to value families.
The picture was first published in the November 1990 edition of LIFE magazine. It showed David Kirby who was an AIDS victim, surrounded by his family members who watched in agony as he was about to die.
Therese Frare, a journalism student at the time, took the picture of David on his deathbed. This picture gave life to the realities of millions of people around the world who had gotten HIV.
David Kirby was a young gay activist in the 1980s. He grew up in Ohio and in the late 1980s, while he was living in California and separated from his family, he found out he had contracted AIDS.
He contacted his parents to tell them and ask if he could come home because he wanted to die surrounded by his family. They welcomed him.
As a result of the misinformation in the early 1980s, the public was stunned when the picture came out in LIFE magazine. AIDS was thought to be a “gay” disease and many thought of the symptoms in the abstract, as something only gays suffered.
David Kirby eventually died at the age of 32 in April 1990, seven months before the picture was released. It is estimated that about a billion people have seen the image that has gone through a series of reproductions after its publication.
A major contributing factor to the spread of HIV in the USA was as a result of the Sexual Revolution that lasted from the 1960s to the 1980s. The sexual revolution was a protest against monogamous and heterosexual relationships.
The young adults were very involved in it and had a lot of unprotected sex. The popular belief that “pregnancy is the only drawback to sex” was coined then and all the youth worried about was getting pregnant.
HIV spread rapidly as unprotected sex became the order of the day, especially in gay communities. It was then called “Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID)” because it was common among the gay community.
The homophobia at the time made politicians unwilling to fund the treatment and research. In 1984, the US Department of Health and Human Services announced that they had found the cause of AIDS. 15 years after AIDS illnesses were seen in the US and 3 years after it started claiming lives.
