We are continuing our coverage of the AIDS crisis during the 1980s. If you have not listened to part 1, we strongly encourage that you do so. We begin in 1983 when the crisis is finally gaining widespread medical attention. By now, the mystery disease had gone through several name changes. Starting with the misdiagnosis of pneumonia and the cancer Kaposi’s sarcoma, changing to the offensive ‘gay cancer/gay plague’, and finally landing on the well-known acronym of AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome). At the dawn of 1983, 900 people had been officially diagnosed with AIDS, and time would later prove that this number was woefully inaccurate. Doctors in New York, San Francisco, Miami, and several other large cities had been treating patients for 5 years. Thirty states reported cases and 52 worldwide cases in 15 countries had been recorded so far. There were many reasons why the number of deaths was so underreported. For one, the very nature of AIDS made it difficult to diagnose. Because the virus breaks down the immune system, the individual usually dies of a different illness. And because there was not a lot of knowledge of AIDS at the time, many people who had died in previous years had a different cause of death marked on their medical record. Another reason the numbers were so deflated was due to the stigma around AIDS. Many patients who had AIDS requested a different cause of death be marked on their death certificates. As one wealthy businessman told a nurse, “Better to die of cancer than to die of AIDS”.  But the final reason the numbers weren’t reported was due to medical and professional refusal to acknowledge AIDS in any person who was not a homosexual. Even though the very thought of a virus targeting a person because of their sexual orientation defied all science and medicine, officials insisted that only gays could get AIDS. Gays and Haitians anyway – another group that politicians and medical leaders didn’t mind slapping the stigma upon. It was frustrating that officials ignored the studies of doctors such as Dr. Rubenstein, who by now had recorded close to 20 cases of AIDS in children, and Dr. Guinan who had been tracking AIDS in drug users since 1981.  But most alarmingly, it was incredibly dangerous to ignore that heterosexuals could get infected. Since 1982, several physicians had warned that AIDS could be transmitted through blood transfusions. But blood banks were not interested in the news. If they acknowledged that AIDS could be passed by transfusion, then the banks would be between a rock and a hard place. Either they spent millions in bolstering and pre-screening blood donations, or they banned all gays from donating blood which tanked their annual donations by 7%. Ironically, while public health officials seemed to care little about the lives and well-being of queer people, they still needed their blood. And again, the stigma of believing that AIDS was a ‘gay disease’ allowed for plenty of heterosexual and ‘straight passing’ individuals to continue donating blood with no screening.  As the crisis approached the mid-1980s, two large obstacles seemed to stand in the way of proper AIDS education and safe sex promotion. The first obstacle being the obstinancy of public health officials to see AIDS as anything other than a gay exclusive virus. While the second obstacle came from the queer community itself as LGBTQ leaders refused to confront the rampant, rubber free orgies that took place in the bathhouses night after night. Any person who attempted to suggest the bathhouses should take a safer approach to sex was decried as a nazi with internalized homophobia. Yet even though people claimed they didn’t believe in safe sex, their bravado fell away when no one else was around. A survey of 600 gay men in San Francisco found that 2/3rds of respondents had changed their sexual activity in at least a few ways since learning of AIDS.