AIDS Mary

**AIDS Mary - Linden Haydell**

Legend Summary:

Around the year 1986, a young man is celebrating his twenty-first birthday with his closest friends. As a gift for this fun celebration, the man’s friends decide to locate the man a prostitute for finally becoming a man. When the man wakes the next morning, he is in shock when finding a note written with lipstick left on his mirror, “Welcome to the World of AIDS.”

History:

The "AIDS Mary" urban legend is a rumor that circulated during the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United States. This legend revolved around a character referred to as "AIDS Mary" or "Mary Mallon" (loosely based on a real historical figure named Mary Mallon, also known as "Typhoid Mary"). The legend claimed that a promiscuous woman named Mary deliberately infected numerous people with HIV/AIDS by engaging in risky sexual behavior.

Depending on where you find the story, or who you hear it from, the victim can be either the man or the woman. There is not a lot of research to back up the AIDS story itself, but during the ages of the typhoid fever, there is proof that a woman was unknowingly spreading her condition. The AIDS Mary legend seems to have drawn inspiration from this story of Typhoid Mary, who was a real historical figure who unknowingly spread typhoid fever.

Adaptations:

There are plenty of other versions of the AIDS Mary story, like “AIDS Harry” which consists of a man and woman meeting in a bar and immediately hitting it off. The man asks to take the beautiful woman on vacation, and after dropping her off at the airport, he gives her a coffee maker as a gift. When she opens this coffee maker there lies the famous phrase, “Welcome to the World of AIDS.” In this story, the woman was the victim and the man, Harry, was the one with AIDS. These different variations of the AIDS Mary story prove that this urban legend has been modified multiple times due to word of mouth and misinterpretations. Because this story was being told all around the United States and Europe, there are bound to be multiple different versions. The one thing all of the versions of AIDS Mary have in common is the message at the end, “Welcome to the World of AIDS.”

Analysis of Adaptations:

The AIDS Mary legend was being told during a time of fear from the disease and was very relevant then, but the versions that are being retold are now concluding with ideas that would relate to viewers now. For example, the most updated version of the story has brought in a coffee maker, obviously coffee makers have become more popular and this version makes the story more relatable to people nowadays. Overall, this urban legend comes with multiple different theories of origination and is still being told in other versions today.

Works Cited

Fine, Gary Alan. “Welcome to the World of AIDS: Fantasies of Female Revenge.”

Manufacturing Tales: Sex and Money in Contemporary Legends, University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 2018, pp. 192–197.

Mikkelson, Barbara. “AIDS Mary.” Snopes, Snopes.com, 7 Sept. 2000, www.snopes.com/fact-check/aids-mary/.

News, Deseret, and Jan Harold Brunvand. “Coffeemaker Boils up New Variation of the

Mary/Harry Aids Greeting.” Deseret News, Deseret News, 14 Feb. 1992, www.deseret.com/1992/2/14/18967818/coffeemaker-boils-up-new-variation-of-the-mary-

harry-aids-greeting.