re: #493 prairiefire

The thing is, AIDS was an absolute scourge to the gay community of the 70’s and 80’s. Out of all the chorus boys in Mel Brooks, Al Fosse works, etc. all are gone except maybe 2 people.
The East Village in NYC was wiped out. Gone. Awful

I was in elementary school in San Francisco when the AIDS epidemic hit for real.

I had this daycare center teacher I adored. He was just a ‘grown up’—you know, older than dirt. Only way later did I realize that he was fresh out of college, and his friends and lovers were dropping like flies around him, as he taught a bunch of little kids at the Jewish Community Center how to make chanukiahs out of modeling clay.

I do remember my father telling me—I must have been seven or eight—that he and some friends had had to lay out a friend for burial because the chevra kadisha was afraid to handle the body.

Around the same time, my best friend’s parents bought a house (up in Seacliff, her dad was a surgeon), and they found out the former owners had died of AIDS-related illness. The whole family had to be tested—because they’d been in the house that had been lived in by the guys with AIDS. Remember, this kids’ father was an MD.

I remember saying “Are you OK?” after hearing about this, and she shrugged and said “Yeah, we don’t have it.” At the time, that was just good news, now I think of the ignorance, and my head goes sproing.

Bad, bad times.