what young gay men don't know about AIDS

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/11/what-gay-men-have-forgotten-about-aids.html



I used to keep a picture on my desk, taken on Castro Street, in 1983, at the moment when it seemed as if gay life in San Francisco was ending forever. There were two men in the photograph: the first, tall and gaunt, was leaning over the other, who was in a wheelchair, tucking a blanket around what little was left of the wasted man. A friend had given me the picture just before I began covering the AIDS epidemic for the Washington Post, along with a message. “Don’t forget these people when you write this story,” he told me. “This is not about policies. It’s about being human.” My friend died a few months later—nearly three decades ago. I must have spent a thousand hours staring at that photograph during the years since then, enough time to memorize the deep sadness in the hollow black eyes of both men.

I have covered wars, before the epidemic began and since. They are all ugly and painful and unjust, but for me, nothing has matched the dread I felt while walking through the Castro, the Village, or Dupont Circle at the height of the AIDS epidemic. It could seem as if a neutron bomb had exploded: the buildings stood; cars were parked along the roadside; there were newsstands and shops and planes flying overhead. But the people on the street were dying. The Castro was lined with thirty-year-old men who walked, when they could, with canes or by leaning on the arms of their slightly healthier lovers and friends. Wheelchairs filled the sidewalks. San Francisco had become a city of cadavers.

In 2002, while writing a Profile of Larry Kramer, the dark prophet of the American AIDS epidemic, I spoke to Tony Kushner, who received a Pulitzer Prize for his brilliant play about that time, “Angels in America.” He told me what those days did to him. “I had just started coming out of the closet, and gay life had seemed so exciting,’’ he said. But by the time he had finished reading Kramer’s shocking article “1,112 and Counting,’’ which appeared in 1983 in the New York Native and demanded that gay men start to take notice of the catastrophe they faced, Kushner realized that “we were confronted with a genuine plague. People were beginning to drop dead all around us, and we were pretending it was nothing too serious.”

Kramer and many other activists changed all that. Outrage and new medicines largely overcame denial and hatred. In the years that followed, the epidemic seemed to go away—though of course it never did, here or anywhere else. (By the end of this year, AIDS will have killed nearly forty million people—most of them in Africa.) And this week, in a powerful story in the Times, Donald McNeil pointed out that those most wretched days could return. “Federal health officials are reporting a sharp increase in unprotected sex among gay Americans,’’ he wrote, “a development that makes it harder to fight the AIDS epidemic.”