In this world, due to some twist of fate, the conditions we know as the human immunodeficiency viruses never manages to leave a small corner of West Africa before dying out. What are the results of this? What is the impact on LGBT rights, on culture in general, of this massively damaging disease never ravaging the population of the US? Your thoughts?
WI: A world without HIV?
- Thread starter woweed
- Start date
Less money invested into needle exchange programs, since it's only Hep C that would be cause for concern.
Gay rights movement negatively impacted. HIV played out just right with the political zeitgeist OTL for maximum boosting.
Herpes gets bigger, since there's no huge safe-sex campaign.
Herpes gets bigger, since there's no huge safe-sex campaign.
Judging from recent evidence that has come out regarding the DRC's history, you'd basically have to slow down the development of Kinshasa and other urban centers in the then-Belgian Congo - which is kinda difficult for various reasons. Probably the best in that case would be to actively intervene in the Congo Free State to get Leopold to stop, despite the whole balance of power in Europe thing.
Not certain how that would change things, considering that HIV-1 was a Chimpanzee virus and HIV-2 jumped species from the pet trade in smaller Macaques that was an artifact of habitat destruction in the Niger River basin.
The biggest issue is the bushmeat trade. Is there any way to steer it away from primates and toward, say, rodents, chevratains, and Afrotheres?
Gay Liberation would move from more assimilationist demands like marriage to priorities Iike healthcare and employment, and you'd never see the "It's God's righteous plague on the evil homosexuals" backlash of the 80's. Africa would be in a much better state as well without the disease become epidemic there. Pop Culture would be completely, totally unrecognizable I do not even think you could start to estimate it.
Freddie Mercury would just be 77!! Think of 30 more years of Freddy taking the stage or at least 20 more.
LGBTQ rights on par with OTL with a weaker Backlash being counteracted by no AIDS crisis speeding up organization, cancelling out.
Opinion on LGBTQ a bit less generationally stratified with boomers/pre-boomers being more pro-lgbtq than OTL being counteracted by at least slightly weaker pro-lgbtq opinions among xers/millenials/zoommers. Probably laso less regionally polarized which means both more pro-lgbtq views in red states and at least slightly less pro-lgbtq views in blue states without consies to countersignal against.
Opinion on LGBTQ a bit less generationally stratified with boomers/pre-boomers being more pro-lgbtq than OTL being counteracted by at least slightly weaker pro-lgbtq opinions among xers/millenials/zoommers. Probably laso less regionally polarized which means both more pro-lgbtq views in red states and at least slightly less pro-lgbtq views in blue states without consies to countersignal against.
Especially since many of the people who got sick and died from AIDS were in their prime working years.
I don't see how the lack of HIV would make gay activists focus more on healthcare.
The developing world in general would be in a much better state. 1990s China had this thing called the Plasma Economy, which involved people in rural areas donating their own plasma for money as part of a government campaign. Eventually, the result was a spike in HIV cases; by 2001, 600,000 (yes, 600,000) were infected according to official estimates.
Last edited:
I read something years ago suggesting that HIV had jumped into humans regularly but those infected usually died from tropical diseases like malaria before they could develop it. Therefore the disease control measures implemented after WW2 perversely opened an opportunity for it by reducing the incidence of those diseases and enabling people to survive them. I don’t know how true this is but it’s a horrible thought…
Didn’t the raise if HIV slow rates of other STDs, similar to how COVID resulted in less influenza? Maybe without HIV there would be more multidrug resistant gonorrhea.
Yeah. Gay marriage and monogamy were a response to the danger of disease. AIDS devastated the gay community, and the survivors had fundamentally different lifestyles.
Beyond gay folk, AIDS was the big killer for loose sex. In the old days, we had syphilis, the clap, crabs, and those sucked. Herpes was the new thing, and it sucked more, but it didn't kill. I remember when I was 18 (1992) my father gave me the closest thing to The Talk I was ever going to get from him:
"When I was your age, I was a virgin, but not for long. If I were your age today, I'd be scared to death."
on a more personal scale. as a member if the generation that was just coming of age when HIV hit its stride, i. can say that my colledge. social life would probably have been “better”. 
Those of. us of that generation sort of had the tug pulled out from under us, The world was partying ip a storm and just as we got old enough yo join the party the party ended in a huge THUD.
Those of. us of that generation sort of had the tug pulled out from under us, The world was partying ip a storm and just as we got old enough yo join the party the party ended in a huge THUD.
Wow. That is really negative. How the hell does a young person process something like that?
Definitely - and what didn't help matters was the whole nature of the colonial system in Africa in general and especially in the Belgian Congo. (There's also the whole thing regarding bushmeat, but that's still a matter of debate of how SIV acquired in that case would become HIV - or, rather, HIV-1, the one that spread far and wide, as opposed to HIV-2, which was more regionally confined - although it's possible that's how it started.) The growth of urbanization in places like Kinshasa as a result of colonialism provided yet another opportunity for HIV to spread alongside other STIs like syphilis. In that case, the easiest way to imagine an alternate history without HIV is basically to imagine a world without colonialism - which would have changed a lot of world history so as to be unrecognizable - or at least found an alternate development of Central Africa that would minimize colonialism in the region, or at least in the area that would become the Congo Free State/Belgian Congo and the infamously exploitative practices there. Controlling HIV's spread through controlling prostitution would be far too simple in that case (not to mention playing into European stereotypes of Africa as the "dark continent").
I think the sexual revolution will still taper off eventually, like how the sexual liberalization in the 20s ran out of gas on its own. The reaction may well be more successful since AIDs also generated a lot of sympathy, drive organization, and gave a very concrete example of how homophobia can kill.
Last edited: