If you’re a younger gay man, you got lucky. You were born after the scourge of AIDS had started to pass, after the development of effective medications that make it a manageable condition and not a death sentence, and after the development of PrEP and PEP.
So you don’t understand what it was like to be gay in the 80s and 90s. You don’t understand just how much fear and contempt AIDS patients received. You don’t know how common it was for families to abandon AIDS patients, for them to die alone and unmourned. And you don’t know what lengths some people went to care for those unfortunate young men.
So read this. It’s the story of one remarkably kind woman, a woman who took care of AIDS patients when others wouldn’t, men she had no reason to care for but cared for them anyway. It’s beautiful and it moves me to tears.
You need to understand this. You need to know what the previous generation of gay men struggled through. Even while that generation was dying so young, they were fighting to build what we have today, fighting for research into AIDS, fighting for the legalization of gay sex, fighting for gay marriage and inheritance rights and anti-discrimination ordinances, and all the other things that have made a better life for you then the one you were born into. You owe it to them to take a few minutes and learn a little about their struggles.
Remembering those we lost during the Reagan Genocide. 30th anniversary of World AIDS Day, December 1, 2018.