AIDS is an everyday experience. These dates represent milestones in the AIDS epidemic. Some dates are known globally; others commemorate individual experiences. AIDS Is Everyday is an ongoing art project produced in conjunction with Visual AIDS to help break down the silence, shame and stigma surrounding HIV.

Add a date about your history with HIV to our online calendar at poz.com/aidsiseveryday-submit. 

OCTOBER

3 – The exhibition Art AIDS America opens at the Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, Washington. (2015)

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6 – Françoise Barré- Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier are awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of HIV. (2008) 

8 – The AIDS Candlelight Vigil/Rally is held in San Francisco. Sponsored by the AIDS/KS Foundation, the event marks the first time people with AIDS come together in a public demonstration. (1983)

10 – San Francisco closes 14 bathhouses and sex clubs because they are “fostering disease and death” by allowing high-risk sexual activities to take place. (1984)

The AIDS Memorial QuiltDreamstime.com

11 – The AIDS Memorial Quilt is displayed for the first time on the National Mall in Washington, DC, during the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. (1987)

15 – National Latinx AIDS Awareness Day

NOVEMBER

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7 – Magic Johnson announces he is HIV positive and is retiring from basketball. (1991)

8 – Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton releases the U.S. government’s plan for attaining an AIDS-free generation. (2011)

11 – Pedro Zamora, AIDS educator and cast member of The Real World: San Francisco, dies of AIDS-related complications. (1994)

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12 – Congress enacts the Ricky Ray Hemophilia Relief Fund Act, honoring the Florida teenager who contracted HIV through contaminated blood products. The legislation authorizes payments to individuals with hemophilia and other blood-clotting disorders who contracted HIV via unscreened blood-clotting agents between 1982 and 1987. (1998) 

21 – President Obama signs the HIV Organ Policy Equity Act, which allows people living with HIV to receive organs from other HIV-positive donors. (2013)

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22 – Dallas Buyers Club is released nationwide. The film is based on the true story of Ron Woodroof, an HIV-positive man who smuggled unapproved HIV drugs into the United States to meet the demands of people dying of AIDS-related complications. (2013) 

24 – Singer-songwriter and Queen front man Freddie Mercury dies of AIDS-related complications. (1991)