“These Were People”

Choire Sicha remembers the early AIDS crisis:

I remember that we used to read the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report like it was USA Today. I remember not knowing what to do with the drugs. People used to collect all the drugs and redistribute them to people who couldn't get them first-hand, and I remember drugs in bags, drugs in clean white boxes, drugs under the kitchen table, drugs that were suddenly worthless, drugs that people really wanted, arguments about drugs, arguments about everything. I remember discovering that someone I was dating was going neurologically crazy, and him discovering that he was going neurologically crazy, like his brain and his body were breaking up. I remember casual relationships that ended with people going into the hospital instead of with an awkward conversation. I remember people changing the whole point of their lives.

I remember it too. It is vital the current generation know about this. Because we gays do not reproduce ourselves, we do not have the family networks that inform one generation of the ordeals of the last. The amnesia horrifies and angers me. We owe it to our war-dead to remember them.