Comment by hn_throwaway_99

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").