This is the final article in a three-part series examining the legacy of HIV/AIDS in Iowa City. In the early 1980s, Rev. John Harper was a fresh-faced graduate student at the University of Iowa and a semi-active member of the Gay People’s Union. He’d heard about some disease affecting gay men in New York and […]
HIV/AIDS Clinic
Posted inCommunity/News
‘No one believed that it would ever come to this place’: Fear and hatred clouded efforts to care for Iowa’s early AIDS patients
This is the second article in a three-part series examining the legacy of HIV/AIDS in Iowa City. Read part one here. It’s October 1980, and Jack Stapleton is treating a 19-year-old girl diagnosed with a rare lung infection: pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. Stapleton, then an internal medicine intern in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, became interested in […]
Posted inCommunity/News
A bill to restrict HIV/AIDS and HPV education in Iowa schools harkens back to the darkest days of the Reagan era
Thirty-six years after the Reagan administration began a long-delayed public education campaign about HIV/AIDS, Gov. Kim Reynolds and Republicans in the Iowa Legislature have decided that education about HIV/AIDS is no longer needed in public schools. One of the provisions of SF 496 — a bill introduced by the governor’s office that makes major changes […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
FilmScene marks the 30th anniversary of the University of Iowa HIV/AIDS Clinic with mini film series
When the University of Iowa introduced its HIV/AIDS Clinic in 1988, the U.S. AIDS epidemic was in full swing, with more than a 100,000 reported cases. The UI offered the first clinic in Iowa to treat not just AIDS, but HIV infection, and saw hundreds of patients within its first two years. Today, the UI […]
