Few folks know about this historic mass grave of HIV-positive people near New York City
Hart Island is a small islet located a mile east of the Bronx. It’s one mile long and a third of a mile wide (roughly 213 acres), and during the mid ’80s and ’90s, New York City buried thousands of people who’d died of HIV on the island out of fear the bodies might infect others.
The island and its dark history were recently explored in season two of Ryan Murphy’s groundbreaking FX drama series Pose. Two HIV-positive queer characters travel to the island in 1990 to visit the grave of their dead friend.
True to history, the friend’s grave is marked only by a number. Crates, each with a dead body (some weeks or months old) were stacked atop one another deep in the soil. Men in hazmat suits, some of them Rikers Island prisoners forced to become gravediggers, walk around the island rubble as bulldozers covered the graves in earth.
Although the city only buried 17 HIV-positive people there during 1985, they continued to do so well into the ’90s. The number of HIV-positive people buried there is estimated to be in the thousands, but city officials are reluctant to provide exact numbers because of longstanding criticisms of the island’s crude handling of deaths at the time.
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