The End of AIDS

One June afternoon in 1992, a dancer named Matthew Sharp died eight times. A siren shrilled as he repeatedly dropped to the street and let strangers draw a chalk outline around his body. Then he stood up, took the chalk, and each time wrote the name of his partner, Johnny Franklin, inside the empty space—just like a cop at a crime scene.

Franklin had succumbed to City two years earlier, and now Sharp was marching with the AIDS awareness group Act Up along Market Street in San Francisco’s annual gay pride parade. “Die-ins were a common form of AIDS activism in the 1980s and 1990s,” Sharp recalls. “They were conducted in complete silence every seven minutes while we were marching, because that was how often someone died of AIDS back then.”

After Franklin’s death, Sharp nearly became another victim when he came down with extrapulmonary tuberculosis. “I felt I was knocking on death’s door,” he says. “So I quit my ballet company, took the life insurance money Johnny left me, and moved to San Francisco, which was ground zero for HIV,” the AIDS virus. “For the next 20 years I stayed alive by participating in clinical trials of new drugs before they were released. I was aggressive about preventing opportunistic infections. When I began to die of wasting syndrome, I joined a trial for human growth hormone. I got an experimental thymus transplant. Combination therapy in 2008 finally brought my viral load down to undetectable.”