How It Felt to Live Surrounded by AIDS Before Treatment

Dying and dancing in the street

Image licensed from Adobe Stock

A few years ago, before I had begun to write regularly about HIV and LGBTQ issues, a young friend asked me to tell him what is was really like to live in a gay mecca like lower Manhattan during the height of the HIV epidemic, before effective treatment became available.

I blew him off at first, because I didn’t want to stir up old ghosts who still haunt me. I shrugged my shoulders and changed the topic. But after a couple days trying not to think about it, memories came swirling back — mist blowing ashore off an icy lake. Finally, I sat down and wrote him an answer. What you see next is a lightly edited version of that reply.

I don’t want to answer your question, because it’s very painful to take myself back there. But our stories need to to be told, I suppose, so I’m going to try.

I was outside the US and mostly isolated from the epidemic during much of the the 1980s. In my deployed military world, AIDS happened to other people, far far away. I worried about HIV in a detached sense, but not in a personal one. Then I left the Air Force and landed in Manhattan in 1990.

When the wheels of that DC-10 set down at JFK, they were delivering me into the very peak of plague I barely comprehended. It’s so…