Michael Harris marks the 30th birthday of HIV/AIDS. He describes a moment a few years ago when a former lover, Charles, found out he was positive:
The intense relief I felt when my own test came back negative was mingled with guilt. Why Charles and not me? (By his own account, he had always used condoms.) I suppose it’s nothing compared with the survivor’s guilt the older generation underwent during the ’80s and ’90s; in British Columbia, the epidemic became so severe that, on average, a person died every day of AIDS. Daily funerals, concentrated in so specific a demographic, had a crippling (if galvanizing) effect on gay culture, and it’s no wonder that my generation has so often inspired a war vet’s exasperation in gay guys even five years older than we are.
The Dish 