Survival
Is Noble

On June 5, 1981, the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report describes five cases of a rare pneumonia among gay men in Los Angeles. It is the first official recognition of what will become AIDS. HIV Long-Term Survivors Awareness Day is observed on this date each year, a day Tez Anderson founded in 2014.

Tez Anderson unknowingly contracts HIV. There is no treatment.

People living with AIDS publish the Denver Principles, which comprise a foundational document asserting patient self-determination: "Nothing about us without us." San Francisco General opens Ward 5B, the world's first dedicated AIDS ward.

The Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco's gay newspaper, runs pages of obituaries each week. The death toll accelerates through the mid-1980s.

Tez Anderson gets tested for HIV after moving to San Francisco and beginning a new relationship. When results come back positive, his doctor tells him he has 18 to 24 months to live. The news comes two days after his 26th birthday. He begins planning his death. That same year, activist Cleve Jones delivers a speech at a candlelight vigil in the Castro.

"We are survivors. We shall survive again, and we shall be the strongest and most gentle people on this earth." — Cleve Jones, San Francisco, 1986

Cleve Jones's AIDS Memorial Quilt is displayed on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. for the first time. It contains 1,920 panels, each the size of a grave. Half a million people walk through it.

AIDS deaths in the US climb through the early 1990s. In 1991, 29,850 Americans die of HIV-related causes — accounting for 19% of all deaths among men aged 25–44. Deaths peak at 43,276 in 1994. HIV becomes the leading cause of death for American men in that age group. Tez Anderson is still alive.

Named for a teenager who died of AIDS-related complications, the Ryan White CARE Act passes, providing federal funding for HIV care for uninsured and underinsured Americans. It becomes the backbone of HIV care in the US, eventually serving over 576,000 people annually with a 90.6% viral suppression rate.

Highly active antiretroviral therapy, the protease inhibitor cocktail, transforms HIV from a death sentence into a manageable chronic condition. AIDS deaths in the US fall by roughly half between 1995 and 1997. It is the turning point Tez was told would never come. His husband, whose name is now carved into the Circle of Friends at the National AIDS Memorial Grove, dies in 2000 — after the new drugs arrived, but too late.

Tez's husband dies. His name is carved into the stone of the Circle of Friends at the National AIDS Memorial Grove in Golden Gate Park. Tez still visits. He walks the circle and finds names he had forgotten he knew.

As HIV-positive people live longer on treatment, a new wave of challenges emerges: accelerated aging, cognitive decline, social isolation, survivor's guilt, and what Tez Anderson would name AIDS Survivor Syndrome. It is a form of complex trauma unique to those who lived through the epidemic's worst years.

Tez holds a town hall at San Francisco's LGBTQ+ center, expecting around 40 people. More than 250 attend. He names what they have been living with: AIDS Survivor Syndrome. He founds Let's Kick ASS — the nation's first and largest organization specifically for HIV long-term survivors.

Tez founds HIV Long-Term Survivors Awareness Day, observed on June 5, which is the anniversary of the 1981 CDC report. The day is now observed nationally. There are an estimated 400,000 long-term survivors in the US today.

The Trump administration's FY2026 budget proposes eliminating all CDC HIV prevention programs and ending Part F of the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program. Congress rejects the deepest cuts in the final spending bill, but the threat drives home the program's fragility. A Johns Hopkins study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine finds that ending Ryan White entirely would cause 75,000 additional HIV infections across 31 cities — a 49% increase by 2030. Globally, PEPFAR cuts leave an estimated 2.5 million people without access to PrEP by October 2025, according to the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition.

Tez Anderson is 67. He was told he had two years to live. He has outlived that prognosis by four decades. He manages multi-drug resistance with three pills a day and a shot every six months. He sits on a bench in the National AIDS Memorial Grove — where his husband's name is in the stone, where his friends' names are in the stone — and he talks about empathy.