Besides killing off some of the most gifted artists in the world, the “gay disease” decimated the inroads gay society had made in West Civilization. Trust me, unless you were there you have no idea what it did to people.
Intravenous drug use and unprotected sex were the main reasons but in the midst of the Reagan Revolution, US indifference to a deadly disease that killed degenerates lead to years and years of death before a cure was found.
If homosexuality is thought to kill you, tolerance for a sexual aberration is dead in a ditch
We lost Freddie Mercury to the disease and, believe it or not, people didn’t even know Freddie was gay. We also lost Rock Hudson and between the two losses, even as the stars were laid to rest, the mainstreaming of gay lifestyle was slowly occurring.
But back in the day? EVEN BOY GEORGE WASN’T GAY. He was just flamboyant.
Even Mike Stipes was pansexual.
Between the conservative boom in the US, and the fear of a death sentence, the sexual revolution of the 1970s came to a complete stop.
While the dress up lipstick and wigs would certainly suggest the possibility of same sex love, the 1980s were not the 1970s. The fear was too great. God was having his retribution.
And all a Queen like Freddie Mercury could do was die.
15 years later life would be different. But AIDS killed gays in popular music for at least a decade.