It’s one of those things where you legit had to be there. Although watching it now it still is heartbreaking in the classic young tragic love kind of way.
I was a teenager. I grew up with Robin, who was unique at the time for being allowed to age and stay on the show after her parents were killed off. The meds for HIV were new, and for many people they just didn’t work. It would be a couple more years before the real world science made it manageable, and nothing like the meds we have now. There had been other AIDS stories, but this one was unique because it was Robin Scorpio and GH still had a strong pop culture impact. We saw Stone decline in a very realistic way, from one medical issue to another because soaps have so many episodes. They stayed the course through falling ratings and actually having Robin be HIV+, and that was a big risk back then that no soap would do today. It was hard to watch, it also full of heart and community.
At the time, Stone/Robin on GH, Jeanie Boulet on ER, and Pedro on The Real World had an actual impact on American culture when it came to people living with HIV. Pedro being a real person telling his story and then dying had actual policy ramifications. President Clinton made a speech about his impact. Less than 10 years before that people in Reagan’s WH publicly mocked gay men dying from AIDS. Those stories were huge in what they did off the shows.
I never thought that we would ever be at risk of the kind of apathy that allowed Gay men to just die like that again, and yet here we are with research and funding being cut for PREP programs and other HIV programs. They cut all the international programs that helped with AIDS in other countries. But the cruelty is the point.
By
titan1978 ·
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