The Photo That Changed The Face Of AIDS.

In November 1990 LIFE magazine published a photograph of a young man named David Kirby, his body wasted by AIDS, his gaze locked on something beyond this world, surrounded by anguished family members as he took his last breaths. The haunting image of Kirby on his death-bed, taken by a journalism student named Therese Frare, quickly became the one photograph most powerfully identified with the HIV/AIDS epidemic that, by then, had seen millions of people infected (many of them unknowingly) around the globe. David Kirby was born and raised in a small town in Ohio. A gay activist in the 1980s, he learned in the late 1980s, while he was living in California and estranged from his family that he had contracted HIV. He got in touch with his parents and asked if he could come home; he wanted, he said, to die with his family around him. The Kirbys welcomed their son back. David Kirby died in April 1990, only 32 years old, seven months before the photo was published. By some estimates, as many as one billion people have seen the now-iconic Frare photograph that appeared in LIFE, as it was reproduced in hundreds of newspaper, magazine and TV stories all over the world focusing on the photo itself and on the controversies that surrounded it. As AIDS began taking lives in the early 80s, it was actually named the “Gay Related Immune Deficiency (GRID)” due to it primarily affecting the gay community. This reflected the public opinion that AIDS was largely a “gay persons disease”. This notion, influenced by the heavy homophobia of the time, caused many politicians to be weary of putting much funding behind treatment or containment of the illness.