One of the first and most visible signs of the new syndrome was Kaposi's Sarcoma, KS, which created purplish tumors that often showed up on the skin. He said that some of the patient activists in the early days were looking for a way to talk about their illness and they found it in an unlikely place.ĭuring 1981 and most of 1982, AIDS still wasn't called AIDS yet and no one knew what caused it. Commentator Joe Wright spent most of the 1990s doing AIDS work in San Francisco. It's been just about 25 years since AIDS was first identified in the U.S.
