Kaposi's sarcoma?

Actually - I think - Kaposi's was relatively slow moving. Unless you got a lump in your throat (keep in mind the kaposi's was also inside) and it blocked your breathing, you could live for years with it. (There is a fairly horrific story in And the Band Played On where a doctor was seeing a patient at home who was propped up because if they laid down at all, the tumor in their throat - from KS - would basically close the windpipe, and they wouldn't be able to breathe). The problem is, it was basically the sign the disease was there - and that usually was when it was AIDS not HIV and it would be basically end-stage - so there were other opportunistic diseases that would pop up then.

Keep in mind, you have a smallish group this movie is focused on. Also, the "first" victim, Craig, did NOT have KS.

Bottom line, if the person had KS, there was a strong likelihood they had other problems that the movie, and play, kinda brush over. I.E. Albert, Bruce's final boyfriend, probably had some form of lymphoma that had gone to his brain judging by his actions in on the plane.

Those deaths by "pneumonia"? TECHNICALLY likely true. Without the proper immune system, AIDS victims would develop pneumocystis carinii - which is pneumonia, but it's a pneumonia that people with healthy immune systems are not likely to get.

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Kaposi's was simply the visible outward symptom that one had full-blown symptomatic AIDS (as opposed to simply being infected with the HIV virus, which can incubate for years).

Death was usually a long, drawn-out affair, and in the end due to either wasting from a series of various opportunistic infections which the body could not fight off, or from pneumonia, or from septicemia, or any number of other infections. Usually pneumocystis pneumonia in the very end, as that can so easily be fatal if the body cannot fight it off.

The horror with AIDS was/is that the dying process was so long, gruesome, and grotesque.

And you have to remember that no one knew what caused the disease back in the early 1980s. They didn't even know that it was a virus, and didn't know how it was transmitted. That's why it was called "gay cancer" for a year or two, and after that was called "GRID" (Gay-related immune deficiency).
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Randy Shilts, in his Band Played On movie, said that KS was prevalent in gays while pneumocystis was prevalent in drug abusers, hemophiliacs, and those infected by blood transfusions. African KS, the slow growing cancer that "usually affects old Italian men who die of something else" was even prior to 1980 know to be associated with cytomegalovirus (CMV) which was a fairly common venereal disease in the late '70s/early '80s (also associated with venereal warts.)

In NYC many of the early PWA were afflicted with KS. It wasn't just a skin cancer, it also lined the stomach and other internal organs which led to much of the "wasting away" from anorexia and uncontrollable diarrhea. (Africans tend to call AIDS "Slim Disease" because of the wasting (cachexia.)



I only have one person on ignore, but I've had to ignore him 625 different times.

For most of the history of AIDS, the primary cause of death has been pneumonia, largely because the various infections that can lead to it are so plentiful and easy to catch, especially for someone with a compromised immune system, and partly because the cardio-respiratory system in many people is more vulnerable than the body's other systems. Other opportunistic diseases like KS weren't usually the actual cause of death, but their presence contributed heavily to the weakening of a person's overall vitality, making death more likely.


You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.