Pedro

[maddalfred]

One of the "first " faces of AIDS in the U.S. on Logo tv this evening.


http://www.logoonline.com/schedule/

Pedro
In 1994, Bunim/Murray Productions made the ground-breaking decision to cast openly gay, HIV-positive Cuban-American Pedro Zamora as part of MTV's The Real World: San Francisco. Zamora's time in the Real World house on Lombard Street brought a face to the AIDS crisis; and U.S. President Bill Clinton...

DATE TIME
Wed 04/01 8:00 PM

[Elephant]

That was so sad.

[decayingsinner]

I finished watching the movie when it was on again on MTV (sorry, had to watch American Idol ).  It takes a lot for me to cry and I seriously think the last time I cried was when I was diagnosed last year, but this movie had the tears rolling down my face by the end.  Overall, the movie displayed his strong  determination to show all of those uneducated that all of the myths, are in fact, just myths.  In that aspect it was a really positive movie, but knowing exactly what he is feeling and being a carrier of this awful disease, it really puts things in perspective. 

My only question is, "Does anyone know if he was medicated?"  It obviously seems like he was diagnosed late, but even in the early 90's with the medication that was available, was it too late? It just seemed like a rapid descent.

[clsoca]

I think HAART was introduced in the USA in 1996. AZT was available before this, but I was told by a west hollywood old-timer that you had to be rich to get it.

[Miss Philicia]

AZT was FDA approved ~1987 and it was expensive at first, but fortunately thank to the work of folks in ACT UP Burroughs Wellcome agreed to lower it by 20% in 1989.  The price was originally $8,000 but keeping in mind that this was 20 years ago you do the inflation calculation.  I would assume that it was difficult to get insurance to pay for it at first, but I can't recall.  However, I would assume that by the time he was diagnosed in '89 it was.  If he was not insured then he was out of luck because there was no ADAP back then, though there was a year later.  AFAIK it's never been disclosed what his treatment situation was, and at any rate he would have been on mono-therapy and high doses of AZT and many people died regardless.  Keep in mind that because AZT was so new there were many infected people that swore up and down that AZT was causing people to die quicker than going without it, which in the end wasn't necessarily true.  Many of these people had progressed so far in their infection that they weren't able to get any benefit from the medication.

[Basquo]

Most of the beautiful poz men that I met when I moved to Austin in 1990 were dead by 1992, or disfigured by AZT and dead by 1993.  The rest...Rick died in 1993, as beautiful as he ever was, and R.A. and Henry died in 1995, mere months before we knew about the "cocktail" down here in the border sticks.

I can't help but wonder, damn near every day, if R.A. and Henry would be with me now if they'd just hung on a few months longer.

A high school friend was visiting my mom, who spilled the beans (her worry) about me. My mom told her my numbers, and the friend's comment was that I must have started taking the cocktail early to be so well...and my mom was happy to tell her that our Spanish blood made me a medical freak, and yes, my boy's in a study...