Jonathan's POZ Blog

Jeff getty died.

For folks who don’t remember, he was an amazing AIDS activist who was most prolific in his struggles in the years before Protease Inhibitors. He pushed and pushed, advocated for access to experimental, even dangerous, sometimes foolish, desperate therapies at a time when people with HIV simply died.

He was the recipient of an experimental baboon blood marrow transplant in 1995. The transplant was neither a success nor a failure (didn’t kill him, but PIs came out a year later and the entire HIV landscape changed overnight) but his work advanced the cause of science immeasurably. Thanks to his efforts, researchers were/are better able to understand the connection between stem cell therapy and HIV. In addition, the procedure opened the door for organ transplants among HIV infected people, surely a necessity in a situation where kidney and liver failure are far from rare.

He was also a fierce advocate for primate research (hence the baboon marrow transplant) at a time when terrorist groups like the ALF and PETA were spinning disinformation and untruth in order to curtail HIV research using chimps, macaques, and other simians and primates. He argued, using logic and truth, that though SIV and SHIV were indeed different from HIV, they shared more than enough similarities to make amazing advances in HIV theory at a time when little was known about the structure and actions of the virus.

It’s people like that, who dare to try, who advocate not only for others with their words and politics, but with their very bodies, who we absolutely HAVE to remember. They might be dinosaurs in today’s HIV experience. But like the dinosaurs, we live and thrive today on the distilled fuel of their legacies. We would do well to remember that, whenever we can.

Getty died of heart failure, after a long battle with cancer. Were these related to the toxicity of the drugs he took for his HIV infection? Were they related to the myriad of experimental and alternative medicines/therapies he attempted? No one seems to know for certain. He was only 49 years old.

HIV infection can bring out the absolute worst in people. It can make a person psychotic, drive them into drug and alcohol abuse, create stunning sociopathologies. It can create a bitter, angry, blackness where a person’s heart used to be.

But HIV infection, and adversity in general, can also bring out the very best in people. It can turn an average person into a hero. It can facilitate bravery, self-sacrifice, true and noble altruism. It can create a need to help make the world a better place, even at the expense of self. People like Getty did not make the choice to be better people, to be heroes, to be groundbreaking and invaluable. They simply followed their calling, and did what they knew they had to do, whatever the cost.

It’s important to recognize the heroes when we encounter them. And encourage that unfettered love for life and humanity whenever we find it. It’s important to remember that we all have the capacity for heroism and bravery. Even if it’s a gesture as small as standing up for the weak, or helping the sick. Even a kind word, an email, is an act of bravery in a world which feeds so voraciously off of anger and fear.

Jeff Getty is gone. I cannot help but wonder who will take his place, now that HIV is considered by many to be a low-level non-crisis, a manageable disease unworthy of great works. Those who forget history, who consign the last generation to the landfill of irrelevance, do so at their own peril. I certainly hope that activism does not die with the activists. On that front, I have guarded optimism.

We just have to be brave, even if we are afraid.