Comment by hn_throwaway_99
2 days ago
> Compare that with hearing stories of a vast and utterly mysterious dying sweeping towards all that you know, only to suddenly hear one day of inhabitants in the outermost parts of your city falling like flies in the most disgusting of ways, and then being forced to watch the same thing you'd feared from rumor unfold before your very eyes to those you love, taking each of them in turn so terribly that you can barely bring yourself to even approach (let alone try help) these same people that you'e cherished since birth.
My partner did his medical internship at UCSF in 1994. Your quote pretty perfectly describes what happened in gay communities in cities like NY and SF in the 80s and early 90s due to the AIDS epidemic.
I can imagine, though in the context you describe, the entire terrifying process would have been much slower-moving. Months maybe? I'm honestly curious.
My partner's internship was in a hospital, so by the time he saw people they were mostly already acutely ill, so in many cases the decline was pretty quick (though obviously much longer than something like plague).
I was more referring to the intense fear and constant undercurrent of death that permeated urban communities of young gay men at the time. As it did mostly affect young men, these were folks who were otherwise in the prime of their lives physically, and then when they got sick the physical wasting in the end was often pretty extreme. And it was made all the more difficult by the fact that society just kinda went on as normal (or worse, argued that AIDS was "killing all the right people").