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It became a human rights issue because both of those populations were generally deemed to be sinners and people tended to not care if they died.My father was a medical doctor at the time, specializing in diagnosing and treating brain cancer, and told me that although docs were scrambling to treat a growing flood of AIDS patients, there was a quiet resentment at the need to reallocate scarce resources for a disease that was largely preventable (except for tainted blood transfusions). Cancer was (and is) a much larger problem, killing hundreds of thousands of people every year; then there's heart disease which kills 647,000 Americans every year.
To say IV users and gay men were "generally deemed to be sinners" who didn't deserve to be cured is a vast exaggeration. Certainly there were and are people who think this way, but the general population, both lay and medical, certainly didn't. That would include the general non-fundamentalists among the American religious community.
The fact is that thousands of unsung researchers worked long hours, first to understand HIV's structure and mechanism, then to figure out how to prolong life, and most recently, how to actually cure it. Unfortunately, some gay activist groups such as ActUp felt these efforts were insufficient, and showed up at medical conferences to chant "killers!" at the scientists who were presenting findings. This created more resentment.
Look, everyone's feelings are inflamed in a time of crisis. It's important to let cooler heads prevail, and not descend to name calling or deriding this or that group. Especially in the current situation, we're all in this together, and we will sink or rise together.