Don’t forget the AIDS episode.
If you weren’t around in the 80s or you haven’t studied queer culture of the 80s, you have NO IDEA how fucking insane it is that they made an episode with this scene:
“AIDS is not a bad person’s disease. It is not G-d punishing people for their sins.”
That was a statement so radical in the mid-1980s that calling it “radical” doesn’t feel extreme enough. Nor is this the only moment that hits so hard: Sophia expresses the then-common fear that she might contract HIV from sharing Rose’s coffee cup, and in a later moment of the episode where Rose is at her cracking point, Sophia takes one of the coffee cups she’s marked as having been used by Rose, and drinks from it. If you’re young enough to say “…..okay?” or “so?” to that sentence, I don’t begrudge you your ignorance of the fear—I feel glad you’re blessed to have never had to live in that world—but I do need you to understand:
This is Princess Diana and this photo caused an international uproar because the man she’s shaking hands with had AIDS.
Princess Diana touched HIV/AIDS+ people and had to reassure the entire world this didn’t make her a bad mother or mean she was dying, and this would have been about the same time as the GG episode. Remember the initial terror over Covid, before there was a vaccine but after the pandemic was announced, when nobody really knew exactly what it was, only that it was killing people? Imagine that. Multiply it by a hundred. Maybe a thousand. The hospital scenes we saw in Covid aren’t much different from the AIDS crisis.
And the Golden Girls explicitly chose to give an AIDS scare—and remember, at this time there was absolutely no treatment whatsoever, AZT had been discovered but not yet approved, so basically if you got AIDS your treatment was praying like hell—to its most straightlaced, beloved character. Rose is an integral part of the show. Rose is not a “very special episode” shoo-in. And while Blanche could have been a cautionary tale about sleeping around, no—they chose to go with something that was a very real concern at the time, the lack of effective blood screening for donated blood. There wasn’t a person in America who could judge Rose. She needed surgery. She needed a transfusion. She trusted her doctors. This is the most natural thing in the world. The storyline was carefully crafted so that at no moment could bigots find some way to justify Rose’s possible diagnosis.
And for thirty minutes, the show delivered hit after hit after hit of AIDS education (VERY GOOD AIDS education, actually, some of it is now outdated but most is still solid and for the mid-1980s it was choice), forcing middle America to actually reckon with what the the then-President was openly mocking as “fag disease.” And not just the disease part of it: when Rose says she’d have to give up her job and doesn’t know what she’d do, that the medical bills will pile up, Blanche says “that’s what [house] mortgages are for.” She’s the one who owns the house they all live in. She’s ready to put herself into tens of thousands of dollars of debt—no minor sum now, it would have been MASSIVE in 1985–going into her retirement years, to ensure Rose receives what little medical care is available, should it be necessary. This episode forced people to look, really LOOK, at what HIV did to people emotionally, the choices it forced them to make. Yes, it’s somewhat sanitized for prime time, but ask any gay man who survived that time what it meant to hear Blanche say “AIDS is not a bad person’s disease” or to see Dorothy fold Rose into a tight embrace as she faced the possibility of being told “I’m sorry. Get your affairs in order.” It was HUGE. It was AN EXTREMELY BIG DEAL.
The Golden Girls came out swinging hard for older women, and then said “fuck that, we’re doing it for everyone” and they DID.
