I had a friend back then that had just started a nursing career and worked on an HIV unit. There was one patient that had cut themselves and ran thru the halls flinging blood on everyone on purpose.
the first reaction?....not to identify the person/disease to other staff....
next reaction was to come up with "universal" precautions that we were supposed to practice on everybody ...that way of course the gay hiv patients wouldn't be treated "differently"....
even then, they were trying to cover the sensitivities of the gays and look what it got us...
Had a flight crew member show up late to our plane because she had been in the supervisor’s office. On her previous flight, she had walked into the galley in time to see a gay male co-worker squeezing blood from a cut on his thumb onto the pilot’s steak.
There was a definite psy-op component to the "AIDS Crisis" of the '80s and early '90s. Looking back, it was all about fear bordering on terror then, magically, it was gone.
I suspect a lot of what we're going through now was honed 30 odd years ago. In fact, a key player now was a key player then. Interesting that.