Like every gay man paying attention at the time, I heard about the "new disease" afflicting gay men not long after it was first reported in 1981.
I was 22 at the time, living in Boston, barely out of the closet, and newly sexually active. The AIDS epidemic became personal for me in early 1985, when two of my friends — one of them 26, the other 30 — died from the illness.
By then I was living in the Boystown neighborhood of downtown Chicago, working on a master's degree in journalism at Northwestern University.
In those pre-internet years, I gorged on multiple daily newspapers and magazines. I was very aware of the fear and stigma that HIV/AIDS was raising across the country and the world.