When “A Charlie Brown Christmas” debuted in 1965, CBS executives were nervous. The special used children, not adults playing children, for the voices; the soundtrack featured jazz; and Linus’s speech on the true meaning of Christmas was overtly religious. But these supposed liabilities were the things viewers loved most. The show immediately met with critical and popular success, and it’s been on the air every holiday season since. This year, children—and sentimental adults—can play with the recently released “A Charlie Brown Christmas” app for iPhone and iPad, which includes an interactive-storybook retelling of the show—narrated by Peter Robbins, the original voice of Charlie Brown—as well as a play-along piano and a game version of the Lights and Display Contest.
In June 1981, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia issued a landmark report about five young gay men in Los Angeles who had died from a mysterious condition that had destroyed their immune systems.
Within two years, Aids (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) was changing the world. Any disease with the capacity to infect and kill millions will have a profound effect, but this modern ‘plague’ was different. It was an odd, horrible disease; a collection of separate illnesses. Chest infections, typically Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP) were a common indicator, as was Kaposi’s Sarcoma, a rare form of skin cancer. But most sufferers were swamped by a tide of common, usually trivial bacterial, viral and fungal infections that overwhelmed their weakened bodies.
The advent of Aids would forever alter the way we think and talk about sex and sexuality; it would bring previously taboo subjects out into the open. It involved issues of race and celebrity, wealth and poverty, highlighting as never before the inequalities between the rich West and the developing world.
This was a disease that was co-opted by gay-rights activists, liberals and bigots alike. Who can forget the infamous comment by James Anderton, then Chief Constable of Manchester Police that gay men were ‘swirling in a cesspool of their own making’? Or celebrities such as Elizabeth Taylor, Elton John and Madonna who championed the cause and the victims?
Aids arrived just as Western Society was on the verge of a decadent sexual free-for-all. The sexual revolution of the Sixties and Seventies had gone mainstream. Drug use was at an all-time high, sex tourism (an important factor in the spread of the causative agent HIV) was a major growth industry. And across Europe and North America an exuberant gay scene had emerged to replace the furtive life homosexuals had endured only a decade previously.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/8920482/World-Aids-Day-the-disease-that-changed-the-world.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/8920482/World-Aids-Day-the-disease-that-changed-the-world.html


