I would be remiss if I did not write something about the AIDS crisis during Pride Month. After all, preserving our history and telling our stories has become one of my greatest passions.

For those of us who lived through those terrible years as adults and as members of the LGBTQ+ community, the experience left scars in ways that are almost indescribable. Even now, decades later, there are memories that can still take my breath away. But I am going to try and provide a sense of the world our community lived in at that time.

I was twenty-five years old. I was leaving the world of dance and entering what I thought would be a more ordinary life. The year was 1979. As I was stepping away from dance, one of the dancers in our company was often ill. Like others, I assumed he was exaggerating or simply looking for excuses not to come into the studio.

Around that same time, articles about a mysterious illness affecting gay men began appearing in our community newspapers and periodicals. I did not make the connection immediately.

Soon after leaving the dance world, a friend told me that the dancer who had been so sick was hospitalized with that mysterious illness. The doctors did not know what it was, how to treat it, or even what they were fighting. They did not believe he would survive.

I wanted to visit him, but he was refusing visitors. He did not want anyone to see what the disease had done to him physically. He had been such a beautiful man, vibrant and full of life. A short time later, I learned that he had passed away. Not long after, his partner died as well.

The timeline of the AIDS epidemic has been well documented. What I have seen written about far less often is what it was actually like to live through it.

In those early years, I was in a committed relationship and not physically active outside of it, so I was somewhat insulated from the immediate dangers. But being shielded from the disease did not mean I was shielded from its effects. None of us were.

What I witnessed from some people who considered themselves good and decent human beings was appalling.

In one case, which I have written about before, a coworker became ill and eventually could no longer come to work. The company assigned his desk to another employee, but she refused to sit at his desk, use his chair, or touch the phone he had once used.

Keep in mind that he had not been in the office for months.

Still, she refused.

Over a weekend, the company removed his desk, chair, and telephone from the building entirely.

This is only one story, but it represents countless others that played out in offices, hospitals, churches, neighborhoods, and families all across America.

At the same time, it became painfully clear to many of us in the LGBTQ+ community that our government and seemingly our society, did not care. It did not seem willing to do what was necessary to stop the spread of the disease or aggressively pursue treatments. That realization was a crushing blow. I can still remember feeling it physically, like a weight pressing against my chest. Our society was okay with us dying. 

Then our friends began to die.

And they did not simply die. This disease often stripped them of their humanity before it took their lives.

In our community, appearance has always held significance. We present ourselves to the world with care and pride. We celebrate beauty, individuality, and self-expression. AIDS robbed so many people of those things before they left this world. It was devastating and profoundly demoralizing.

I saw it happen again and again.

I watched one of my closest friends in the world go through it. He was a joyful soul, the life of every gathering, the person who could make everyone laugh. Then one day I noticed something different. There was a sadness in his eyes, and by then I had learned to recognize what it meant.

Like so many others, he did not want his world to change, so he kept his secret. He was not ready for the sympathetic looks, the whispered conversations, along with carrying the burden of this terrible diagnosis.

Over the next few years, I watched him slowly fade away. The vibrant man I knew became a shadow of himself.

Like so many at this time, he never surrendered.

He wanted to live on his terms for as long as he possibly could.

I, along with a few of our closest friends, or perhaps we had become family by then, remained by his side until the very end. When he left this world, a true hero left with him. One of many heroes whom an often unkind world allowed to suffer in unimaginably cruel ways.

The layers of sadness and cruelty seemed endless, and I was only in my twenties.

How did we do it?

How did we find happiness? How did we keep going?

The answer is surprisingly simple: we had hope.

We held onto the belief that change was somewhere on the horizon. We hoped that science would catch up to the disease, that treatments would be found, and that understanding would replace fear. We hoped that our fellow citizens would begin to see our suffering not as someone else’s tragedy, but as a profoundly human one.

Hope did not erase the pain, lessen the grief, or stop the funerals. But it gave us a reason to get up each morning, to care for one another, to keep fighting, and to believe that someday compassion would triumph over indifference.

In many ways, hope became our act of resistance. It was the one thing this terrible disease could not take from us.

Stories are supposed to have happy endings. They are supposed to offer that hope and provide light at the end of the tunnel. But when I was in my late twenties and early thirties, none of that existed. Despair could easily have taken over completely, and no one would have questioned why.

This article was intended to convey how dark those days truly were.

But I can’t leave it there, I have to add where we found hope in this story.

In the midst of unimaginable darkness, our community rose to the challenge.

One of my favorite sayings is, “Thank you will never be enough.” And when it comes to our lesbian sisters, those words absolutely apply. They stepped forward without hesitation. They became caregivers, advocates, nurses, and family to so many of us. They put themselves in harm’s way at a time when no one fully understood the disease and when many feared that simple contact might put them at risk.

They showed us what courage and compassion look like.

I also witnessed our community create grassroots networks to care for one another when governments and institutions failed us. We organized. We educated ourselves. We shared information. We fought for treatments and demanded dignity. We held fundraisers to help friends pay medical bills and survive impossible circumstances. Some of those grassroots efforts eventually grew into organizations and businesses that are still serving our communities today.

We should be proud of that.

We earned the right to pat ourselves on the back.

One final thought, at least for now.

For those of us who are still here, when so many of our generation are not, there is both a blessing and a responsibility in surviving. We have the privilege of bearing witness. We remember the names, the faces, the laughter, and the heartbreak.

The sense of loss will never completely fade. The scars will always remain.

But as long as I have a voice, I will continue telling this story, because those we lost deserve to be remembered, and those who come after us deserve to know not only how we suffered, but also how we loved, how we fought, and how, even in our darkest hour, we refused to abandon one another.