When much of the world was first introduced to physical distancing when COVID broke out in 2020, gay San Francisco resident Kevin Bradley already knew what it meant to isolate.
“When I got HIV, I got really sick,” Bradley said during a phone interview, referring to over two decades earlier, when he started experiencing opportunistic infections – Kaposi’s sarcoma and thrush – in the 1990s. “It was horrendous. I had four T-cells.”
At that time, Bradley also had wasting syndrome, “horrible, horrible diarrhea,” and frightening dreams, he said. Because his immune system was weakened, Bradley was advised at the time that he should keep to himself as much as he could.
“I went to doctor’s appointments, went home, would eat by myself,” he recalled.
Bradley, 70, had first moved to the city from the Ohio Valley in 1977 with a “buddy and a lover,” he said.
“I used to be very social when I was younger and hotter,” Bradley said. “But when I got sick with HIV and started isolating, I found comfort in that. … I learned how to live and function like that.”
Bradley started taking protease inhibitors in 1998, and his HIV-related symptoms improved greatly. But he didn’t forget how he’d learned to pass the time alone.
“When COVID started, not only was I prepared for it, but I found solace in that I knew the routine,” Bradley said. “I’m going to die alone – and, not to be too morbid about it, I’m kind of OK with that.”
Jeff Taylor was among those who started the HIV+Aging Research Project-Palm Springs, of which he’s now the executive director, two decades ago. An HIV-positive gay man who said he first contracted the virus 42 years ago, Taylor was enrolled in one of the first clinical trials for azidothymidine, or AZT, a very early treatment for AIDS.
When COVID started, Taylor said members of the project “decided to use our contacts in the community to do monthly Zoom meetings.”
“We called it the COVID task force,” he said, and they met with service providers and the Riverside County Department of Public Health.
Taylor was dismayed by what he saw as a similar phenomenon of politicization regarding HIV, COVID, and the mpox outbreak, which was in 2022.
“AIDS at the time was much more fatal than COVID ever was,” Taylor, who was 57 in 2020, said. “A lot of us got [post-traumatic stress disorder] by watching the same shitshow unfold, with the CDC dropping the ball. [President Donald] Trump first ignored the problem, then made light of it.”
When mpox started spreading in 2022 among gay and bi men, Taylor said some public health authorities were “bending over backwards to be what we now call ‘woke;’” for example, having vaccinations in predominantly heterosexual areas “because they didn’t want to cause stigma with the gay community.”
“For anyone who lives with HIV it’s like, ‘Yeah, it can affect everyone, but it’s hitting us now and we want the response to reflect that,’” he said. “We saw really ugly and stupid politics unfold” in all three health crises, he added.
With regard of COVID, “the whole thing broke down on so many levels,” he said.
“Down here in Riverside [County] people think Palm Springs is a liberal bastion, but we live in a sea of red,” he said. “Our sheriff, who has policing responsibility for a lot of communities, refused to enforce any of the masking mandates the cities had put in place, and the governor had in place.”
(Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, who was elected in 2018, in February announced he was running for California governor in 2026, the first major Republican to do so.)
There was some research at the time Taylor’s group did as to long-term HIV survivors and resiliency during the COVID pandemic, he said.
“We asked long-term HIV survivors questions around resiliency and we found out people had coping skills,” Taylor said. “They wouldn’t be survivors if they didn’t but they became more isolated, demoralized and depressed.”
Bradley and Taylor are some of the many LGBTQ elders whose previous life experiences turned out to be useful when the world seemed to shut down five years ago in spring 2020. Since then, contracting COVID has largely receded as a day-to-day concern for many Americans, yet it has killed an estimated 1.224 million people in the U.S., according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics.
Reached for comment March 25, San Francisco AIDS Foundation CEO Tyler TerMeer, Ph.D., a gay Black man living with HIV, touted his agency’s successes in addressing the COVID pandemic. Nonetheless, he noted, “Our communities are still recovering in many ways.”
“Although SFAF managed to keep our sexual health, HIV, and substance use care open throughout the pandemic, many people delayed or went without HIV/STI testing, counseling, and other types of care–which affected STI rates, new HIV diagnoses, substance use treatment, and HIV care,” TerMeer stated. “Care for other chronic illnesses suffered, people delayed surgeries, and many folks lost their housing. We are still seeing the ripple effects from these issues years later.”
TerMeer also noted the effects, in particular, on seniors and HIV long-term survivors.
“There were impacts on mental health and substance use as well,” he continued. “Many of SFAF clients are people over age 50 and long-term HIV survivors - people who have lived through the worst days of the HIV epidemic. We heard that living through yet another pandemic brought back traumas from those early years of AIDS, and isolation made that trauma even worse.”
As time goes by, more people who use substances who relapsed during the pandemic are getting support, he stated.
“We saw that the COVID pandemic changed people’s substance use – people in recovery relapsed, people increased their substance use, or started to use in ways that were more problematic. Now we’re seeing that more people are seeking support for their substance use, have emerged to reconnect with their communities, and are taking care of their mental health,” TerMeer stated.
COVID complicated other medical treatment
In March 2020, when COVID started spreading like wildfire across the country and in the Bay Area, doctors thought William Dean, then 72, had contracted the virus.
As it turned out, however, what was really going on was that Dean’s “white and red blood cells were very low, and it took them almost a month to find out how to treat me,” he said. When he came out of the hospital, Dean “was going back weekly to the infusion center at [UCSF Health] Saint Mary’s [Hospital] to receive the drug Mircera that would boost my red blood cells, because in the discovery of my treatment they found out that my body would not produce its own. … That’s what I was dealing with.”
And as the COVID death toll mounted – particularly for those who were elderly and/or had preexisting medical conditions – Dean’s condition made life all the more frightening.
“While I was in the hospital I was isolated,” he said. “I was transported to a room of my own, and it was on the floor with the COVID patients because I was treated just like that [as in] I was not allowed visitors. … It was traumatic, but I survived it.”
Dean, who like Bradley is living with HIV, came to San Francisco 36 years ago. He lives in the Fillmore neighborhood, and COVID reminded him of the dark days of the AIDS epidemic.
“1991 is when my friends started dying one after another,” he recalled. “It was just rapid for me in terms of seeing them, and most were from HIV complications. I had one who was diagnosed with cancer, and I was diagnosed also in 1991, but I was not getting sick; they were,” Dean said.
But Dean did get sick in 2020 when he contracted pneumocystis pneumonia amid his low red blood cell condition.
“My medical team this time became reminiscent of how they were treated back then,” he said, continuing he was prescribed the drug pentamidine.
“I had to have seven treatments and they were each 36 hours and they were infused,” Dean said. “I went through that and I survived.”
Dean has to go in for dialysis treatments three times a week after he was diagnosed with kidney failure. He told the Bay Area Reporter that he is involved with the AIDS foundation’s HIV Advocacy Network, and that he has “been able to sustain … a group of men who get together and read gay literature.”
“We meet Wednesdays for two hours, and that’s been going well,” he said. “We shifted from in person to online.”
The shift to virtual meetings allowed the book club to gain members, he noted.
“During the pandemic it grew because people were able to be online and things were shut down, so that prompted them to join the book club,” Dean said. “After the shutdown was lifted, we went back to in-person. Some of those people came, and some still wanted to be online.”
Asked if more people come now to the meetings virtually or in-person, Dean said more people come in person.
Easier to isolate
For Bradley, isolating “was easier the second time than the first time,” he told the B.A.R.
“When COVID started, there was more stuff available to me,” he said, “thanks to the [San Francisco AIDS] Foundation, having a therapist, and a rather tight circle of friends. I knew so many people with HIV who’d not gone through the AIDS epidemic.”
Because he’s a volunteer with the AIDS foundation, Bradley pivoted an in-person Wednesday night dinner he helped put on to Zoom meetings. (Bradley started as a client in 1994 and became one of the original founding members of the 50-Plus group in 2011, he said.)
“It emboldened me and encouraged me,” he said. “It was one of the themes we talked about and unified together a lot.”
This allowed him to help others who’d not had to be so physically distanced in the past deal with the situation, he said.
“I talked to them and advised them, shared my experience,” Bradley said. “It seems like it was helpful to them. … It helped them to realize it wasn’t the end of the world and there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.”
Because of his earlier experience with his immune system, Bradley was very concerned about the consequences of contracting COVID.
“I was fearful and back at square one again,” Bradley said. “I was afraid of getting COVID on top of HIV. I was really careful. … I was frightened watching the news every night."
Asked how he avoided contracting COVID, Bradley said that “having those Zoom meetings really helped,” and that “I was able to get out and walk – I can distinctly remember some people were afraid to go out, even with a mask on. Fortunately, because of the neighborhood I’m in [Lower Nob Hill], I walked every morning and every evening. I would also go to the gym masked up. … I always made it a point to get outside and, when I was outside, the streets were empty, especially during my evening walks, which I kind of liked, by the way.”
It was, nonetheless, “a lonely time,” as Bradley described it.
“I had one friend – a good friend who’d come over and we’d have dinner,” he said. “That was about it.”
Eventually, Bradley said he was “one of the first” to be vaccinated against COVID.
Studies, such as a 2024 UCLA study titled “Not Going Out Is the 'New Normal' Post-Covid,” have found that outside-the-home activities have not rebounded to 2019 levels.
That particular study found that Americans spend an hour less per day outside their homes than before COVID.
TerMeer noted that there’s more social and physical isolation in the world after COVID.
“But there are still effects even years later, with people who are more hesitant to seek services in person and even avoid gathering in large groups,” he stated. “That’s why our work at San Francisco AIDS Foundation remains more critical than ever – because healing from the pandemic’s lasting impacts requires continued investment in trauma-informed care, trusted community connection, and equitable access to the services people rely on to thrive.”
Asked if that particular impact of the pandemic has been a long-term one for him, Bradley said “that really does not describe me.”
“I get out as much and as often as I can,” he said. “Being 70 years old, I value and treasure the opportunity to just be able to go outside and walk. I do think that there was a part in the pandemic I almost kind of enjoyed because I didn’t get out that much anyway, but to answer your question, I try to get out even more. … I’m back to the same routine I was.”