Jim Burroway marks the date:
[Sunday was] the thirtieth anniversary of the Centers for Disease Control’s publication of a mysterious set of illnesses which took the lives of five gay men in Los Angeles. AIDS had been swirling around unnoticed since the 1930s, and doctors in Europe and Africa began to notice that people were falling victim to a host of diseases which are normally curable in the Congo River basin in the late 1970s. But it took the CDC report of a cluster of cases in southern California to signal that the mysterious deaths were somehow related. The rest, as they say, is history, with a whole lot of stigma thrown in.
Amy Davidson recalls the experience of a gay co-worker in the late '80s:
One day, he said, as I remember, that thirty-six of his friends had died of AIDS, in the space of four or five years. That number was hard to grasp, emotionally; even now, with a better idea of how adult relationships are woven together (and fall apart) I can’t pretend to really know how it would feel to go to that many funerals in that little time—the sheer scale of the mourning. But the math was not so hard to do; one could figure, given the path and relentlessness of the disease, how the number of friends could add up.
I remember the pages and pages and pages of obits, week after week, in the Washington Blade – and the horrible realization that I would probably end up the same way, as friends and acquaintances did. I remember telling a close HIV-positive friend on our almost nightly phone-chats to keep ourselves from total terror, that, if we survived this, we should never forget just how frightened we were. We'd be tempted to gloss it over one day, I suspected.
And yet I have. We humans have a remarkable ability to heal. And an even more striking capacity to forget.
The Dish 