Ive been thinking so much about the early months/years of the HIV/AIDS crisis - How “no contact” was simply untenable as a long term approach.

How everyone had to decide upon what harm reduction and “safer” protocols would be available since prevention and treatment research was unfunded and unsupported.

How we had to fight the federal government to take the staggering loss of life seriously

How “safer” contact took a long time to understand and implement and internalize.

How many people couldn’t take it and just chose to abandon safety for near term happiness.

How many people took risks and how many died that we still mourn.

How hard it was to process and find language for and broker our subjective sense of what felt “safer” and what felt too dangerous.

How suddenly we had to talk about and comprehend a kind of interconnectedness and a new kind of boundary that we didn’t have language for.

How many people laughed at the safety protocols as ridiculous or unnecessary.

How many relationships were impacted by our divergent responses to plague and contagion.

How many people imagined it was “not their problem”

How the oppressive dominant narrative saw the plague as politically expeditious, as moral retribution, or simply as impacting others that they didn’t know, see or care about.

How hard it was to understand that people who “looked fine” could be in danger or could spread the virus.

How many years it took us to make sense of an invisible, delayed danger.

How many people understood too late.

How many people never cared at all about the loved ones I buried, even when I begged them to care.

How only the stories of the death of wealthy white straight folks and children got the powers that be to care.

How we had to learn to live with it. Not by ignoring it or denying it.

But by accepting its terrifying reality and trying to proctect ourselves and still stay connected.

I can’t decide if there is some gain in having watched this cruel incompetent indifference kill thousands of people while others survived, traumatized around and through it -

Or if is only the same traumatic horror, now repackaged.