...with my 28 year old.

I was telling someone that I wasn't crying and rending my garments over Prince's death. I'm sorry. He was talented. It's a loss. But only one of my close friends from the '70s is still alive. And, like so many others, I watched so many brilliant and talented people die way before their time. (And I heard people make fun of them. And I still carry a little anger over that.)

I finally reached a point where I even stopped going to memorial services. There were just too many, and it was taking a toll on me.

So I now just accept death as a fact of life. It's too bad when it happens, but it doesn't derail me any more.

I'm not insensitive to the feelings of others, though, and I let them have their mourning and their grief. I support them in that and say nothing else.

took my cousin and many friends

so you could KICK IT!!!

That blasted disease took my father from me in 1995. All of those beautiful lives lost .

...another mother, and over 75% of our core gay family.

see again.

Was the greatest live performance of all time.

All of the bands at live aid were trying to compete with each other to get the crowd the loudest, play the best etc. After Queen was done with their set, Elton walked into Freddies trailer and said "you bastards"

Some of the participants of the concert said that he sound of clapping during Radio Ga Ga was deafening. I cant remember who said this but they went back stage and asked the bands who was playing/what was going on? Elton John said "fucking freddie mercury"

That always puts a smile in my face.

I recently went to a poetry reading a friend had at a mid-sized university in Michigan. One of his very moving poems is about AIDS in the 1980s and he reads it amazingly well. But what touched me the most was a young, burly guy in his 20s, bearded, wiping away tears. So it's clearly a subject that younger people can be moved by.

And, it is a forgotten generation. I too have the memory of the gaunt young men - I used to have a bunch of gay roommates and we'd go out dancing in the gay bar (late 80s) and I'd see these absolute spectors on the dance floor and it gave me a very somber feeling. It's like a whole chunk of people just vanished. No one would do anything about AIDS until Magic Johnson got it and then people woke up a little.

I came out in 1983 in Detroit. They were posting signs in the bars about a "gay cancer", and to limit your sexual partners. Have to admit, it was a scary time to come out. I knew about 10 guys, acquaintances, good friends, who got the disease and it was horrible, a death sentence. A good friend of mine died of it in the late 80s; he was a beautiful man and he looked like he came out of a concentration camp at the end. I went to work the day after his funereal, and had to listen to two neanderthals I worked with at the time making AIDS jokes. To keep myself from going postal on their asses (I was furious), I went to HR and logged a VERY large complaint about it. The two were went for "sensitivity" training and at least kept their mouth's shut after that.

My biggest concern now is how a lot of the younger gays now think AIDS is no big deal, that it's treatable. Of course the current treatments are effective and can prolong your life, but it is still a deadly disease. I'm glad to hear the young man at the reading was touched by the poem.

This was at Eastern Michigan, BTW.

I remember watching this in the States - already a huge Queen fan - and feeling just downright BLOWN AWAY!

They really hadn't played together in a while so they got together to practice and prepare their set months before the actual live performance.

I love queen so much.

As a gay man myself born in the late 80s, I wasn't around to see the devastation faced by my gay brothers back in those days. The stories of AIDS taking hold of the gay community and the club nature seems so unreal in today's world. It's a very sad tale but it must be told to keep our community united and more importantly, safe.

Up until VERY recently this was still the case. In fact, it's still the case, but some progress is being made.

These were human beings. To the people who killed them, they were nothing more than weeds.

The amount of prejudice that still goes on today.

Though when I think about what RayGun said at the time, I get a special anger.

a scientist studying spinal cord injury, was one of them. Who remembers him? I do.

This is why Hillary's recent aggressive revision of history around Ronald Reagan and AIDS was so reckless, so thoughtless. Her part of society has yet to so much as acknowledge what they did and now she wants to start glossing it all up to serve the villains, the unmitigated monsters of that time? I am still furious.

See my post below for reasoning behind it.
Now I call her HilLIARy!

wow. what if it's a gay man living with AIDS?

this place lately...

Any attempt to minimize their destructive inactivity and callous disregard is out-and-out BULLSHIT.

He failed to grant funds for early research into AIDS. Many folks who were not homosexuals died too. Many died from blood transfusions that were infected before they screened the donations for the disease.

This bass turd in effect, killed my brother, along with countless others. For that reason alone, I have vowed to never ever vote for a RepubliCON in my life! My brother was 14 months younger than me. It was devastating for our family. It was tough to get him a proper funeral. Oh, when I hear about this, I get so mad, you wouldn't want to be around me. To this day, every time I see a picture of that rat fuck, or hear his name, I want to spit bullets!

So I remember it each and every day.

is unpopular?

were serious contagious diseases people feared, even shunned but treatment and research were still conducted to assist those afflicted and for prevention and a cure. Now, I think I've about seen everything on this board.

It was the 1980s.

PEOPLE were suffering tremendously and dying. It was inhumane what Reagan and his administration did concerning the AIDS crisis. So much more could and should have been done. I don't give a damn that it was an "unpopular" thing to do, they could have done so much regarding research, treatments and education and chose not to.

Perhaps you weren't around in the 80 and 90s. Perhaps you didn't see the devastation this disease/syndrome/whatever wrought. Perhaps you never read the heartbreaking story of Ryan White.

Still, no excuse. The information is out there.

He HAD to make sure that the disease was wiped out, and the best way to do it was with early research, which he rejected.

Talking about the establishment and the mainstream media machine.

You can type a colon, then 'sarcasm', then another colon to produce this:

lost that I'll never forget, but love and remember with honor and respect. Artists, writers, designers, musicians and more that magazines like Variety and ET/Entertainment Weekly paid regular tribute. We lost my dear little brother who was in the music industry in NY and founded one of the first weekly gay publications. Even with excellent care from Dr. Joseph Sonnaben in NYC and treatment in France we learned of later he didn't make it. For this and more I will detest the Reagans, Republicans and any involved for their bigotry and delay of therapies that might have prevented his loss.

And the fucking "religious" assholes all had a good laugh when anyone died of it. I wish there was a God and a hell those bastards could go burn in.

It WAS our holocaust and the assholes made sure it continued.

Sigh.

"Everyone talks about the effect AIDS had on the culture in the sense - I mean, people don't talk about it anymore, but when they did talk about it - they talked about like what artists were lost, but they never talked about this audience that was lost.

"You know, when people talk about why was the New York City Ballet so great? Well I mean it was because Balanchine, Jerry Robbins and people like that, but also that audience was so - I can't even think of the word. I mean, if Suzanne Farrell went like this instead of like this, that was it! Oh she might as well just kill herself! There would be like a billion people who knew exactly every single thing. There was such a high level of connoisseurship of everything that people like this were interested in, of everything, that made the culture better. You know, a very discerning audience, a very - an audience with a high level of connoisseurship is as important to the culture as artists. It's exactly as important.

"Now, we don't have any kind of discerning audience. When that audience died - and that audience died in five minutes. Literally, people didn't die faster in war. And it allowed of course, like the second, third, fourth tier to rise to the front. Because of course, the first people who died of AIDS were the people who, I don't know how to put this, got laid a lot. OK. Now imagine who didn't get AIDS. That's who was then lauded as like, the great artists.

"You know, if the other people hadn't died - if they all came back to life and I said to them, 'Guess who's a big star? Guess! You'll never guess who has a show on Broadway! Guess who's like a famous photographer?' They would fall on the floor! Are you kidding me?! Because everyone else died. Last man standing. The loss of that audience had a terrible effect, and a terrible effect on me - and not just a sad, personal effect on me - but a terrible effect on me because everything has to be broader. I mean, I don't do that. Everything has to be more blatant; on the nose; broader. Because obviously they're not going to pick up little subtleties.

"Things in the culture that had nothing to do with the New York City Ballet - you know, it just got dumbed down dumbed down dumbed down... all the way down."