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[felis_ultharus]

Today is the 25th anniversary of the day the North American medical community noticed that gay men were suddenly contracting strange and rare diseases. AIDS didn't have a name then, and wouldn't be isolated for another 2 years.

I count myself lucky that I've only lost one friend to the virus. I have several more who are living with it. Gay men born a generation or two before me sometimes watched every friend they had in the world disappear.

The damage done to the community is something we haven't even begun to try and understand. Two generations of elders wiped out of existence. With that broken link, we lost two generations of wisdom and knowledge, history and culture.

A loss like that leaves deep scars. It's probably why the community is fragmented, apolitical, and purposeless now.

Nothing leads to self-destruction faster than losing one's history.

And in Africa, it's beginnning to look like entire nations will be wiped off the map -- cities reduced to ghost towns, vast emptinesses where once human beings lived and loved and laughed, created and imagined, touched and spoke kind words to one another.

I can't even imagine a loss so great. I can't imagine surviving a loss like that.

Comments

[yumemisama.livejournal.com]

When I was much, much younger, my family took a trip across the country to "visit your father's parents". I was rather confused at the time, being already aware that my mother hated her mother in law with a burning passion, and that nobody at all liked my father's sister.

It was not until many years later that I was told that the fellow we had dinner with one night, the tugboat captain down on the Cape, my father's best friend all through childhood, had died of the usual complications of AIDS about a month after we met him. I wish I had been old enough (and well-enough informed) at the time to understand that we flew from Arizona to New England so that he could meet my father's wife and kids before he passed away. I wish I'd talked to him more, even though I was young at the time and still in that stage where you get tongue-tied around new adults that aren't your family.

It still makes me cry, even though I don't even really know who he was.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

Sorry to hear that :(

[yumemisama.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the sympathy. I try to be philosophical when people pass away, especially if I really didn't know them all that well and I think -- again -- that I'm upset about things that aren't rightly mine to deal with. But I thought that one might be a story I ought to share, on the off-chance that the example might help someone make a point someday.

It doesn't help that I don't remember much else from that trip, other than my mother being a bitchy wreck, and thinking that Provincetown was a nice little place to walk around even in December.