What Disease did Jenny Die from in Forrest Gump?

One of the big mystery’s still debated in film theory is what illness Jenny was dying from in the movie, Forrest Gump.

It was AIDS.

The Bathhouse Flu.

Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID; yes, this was really used).

The Gay Plague. The Gay Cancer. The Bug. The Bugaboo. The Virus. The Gift. Good old-fashioned AIDS.

There’s a lot of names for the bug, but HIV and AIDS finally stuck around for the long haul.

HIV wasn’t mentioned specifically in Forrest Gumpt. Just some kind of “virus.” Any old virus will do. It always seemed pretty obvious it was HIV, though.

Hepatitis C is also proposed by analysts, but that doesn’t really make any sense thematically, and certainly wouldn’t work dramatically.

Was there ever a “Hepatitis C” scare that swept the country? Did 21 Jump Street have a very special episode about Hep C, about how nobody wanted to touch the kid who got it from a blood transfusion?

Remember how Johnny Depp had forgotten his milk, and the AIDS kid offered him a sip of his own. Johnny Depp looked down at it, and said, “I don’t like chocolate.” He never would have said that to a Hep C kid, only an AIDS kid.

If you came of age in the 1980s, you know that it was AIDS, AIDS, AIDS, all the time. AIDS, AIDS, AIDS, for everyone. On the sides of buses: “AIDS doesn’t discriminate against race, age, or gender.” In sexual education class: “You will get AIDS and die!” In the news: “AIDS! AIDS! AIDS!”

So on and so forth.

The rise of HIV and AIDS is historically and popularly considered to be the final culmination and end of 1970s decadence, which itself was the hangover from the 1960s free love movement (which “officially” came to an end after the Manson murders).

“Jennnnnnnyyyy! Jennnnnnnyyyy!”