“It was a tsunami. In April of ’82 there was an article in the New York Times about a new gay cancer, and everyone thought ‘oh well.’ I was in my twenties. I wasn’t worried about a thing. But then every week you started to hear about somebody becoming ill. My boss was one of the first. He was a famous florist. He went into the hospital on Thanksgiving and was dead by Easter. I lost most of my friends. A lot of the first men to die were privileged. They were closeted, corporate white men. During the day they were bankers but at night they’d hit the leather clubs and bars. But they learned their privilege didn’t matter after they got sick. They were just ‘gay.’ We had to fight for AIDS to be recognized by the government. We joined together with people of color, and junkies, and prostitutes. It was a beautiful thing, really. Our feminist lesbian sisters taught us how to protest because they’d been doing it for decades. They showed us how to organize meetings, and bring people together, and force the government to the table—things we’d never had to think about as white men.”
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