And The Band Played On by Randy Shilts

"It was the end of 1982, a year in which a movie about a lovable space alien, E.T., had topped all box office records, and two movies about people dressing in drag, Tootsie and Victor/Victoria, had been surprise smashes. The class movie of the year was a film about Mahatma Gandhi, exploring issues of prejudice and brotherhood, the power of love and the allure of hatred. Paul McCartney had topped the record charts with a perky duet with Stevie Wonder, "Ebony and Ivory," a song about racial bias. Despite the cultural obsession with androgyny, homosexuality, and prejudice, 1982 marked the beginning of a time, commentators would later note, when America started feeling good about itself again. Old-fashioned red-white-and-blue patriotism was coming back into vogue. Certainly, nobody was paying much attention to an epidemic among people like homosexuals and Haitians, even though by the end of the year, the Centers for Disease Control reported that the number of documented AIDS cases in the United States had risen to nearly 900."

"The truth was that, at the end of 1982, there were 1,000 or 2,000 people, at most, in the United States who truly understood the dimensions of the crisis that was unfolding. For these people, it would be a restless New Year's."

1982
the year life began for me
the year life ended for the world

my boyfriend the future doctor
the HIV lab tech
the genius
inspires me daily to start thinking about this disease in a different way

books
pamphlets
stories
films
he really had his work cut out for him
trying to get me to understand
to not be terrifying
by the l.e.t.t.e.r.s. alone

all i knew for years was fear
nothing worse than AIDS
in my mind
no more horrific end

but
knowledge
love
this is what is needed for those living with disease
this is all it takes

40 million infected
and counting
minority women and adolescents now showing the highest growing numbers
this is not something that can be whispered about
and fear is not the cure

being healthy is a possibility
it can happen with knowledge, with information, with truth
medicine has come so far
AIDS is not HIV
and vice versa
love is god

break the stigma
if i can
then you can't be far behind