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“The thing is," Teddy said, "the disease itself feels like a judgment. We've all got a little Jesse Helms on our shoulder, right? If you got it from sleeping with a thousand guys, then it's a judgment on your promiscuity. If you got it from sleeping with one guy once, that's almost worse, it's like a judgment on all of us, like the act itself is the problem and not the number of times you did it. And if you got it because you thought you couldn't, it's a judgment on your hubris. And if you got it because you knew you could and you didn't care, it's a judgment on how much you hate yourself. Isn't that why the world loves Ryan White so much? How could God have it out for some poor kid with a blood disorder? But then people are still being terrible. They're judging him for just being sick, not even for the way he got it.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“This disease has magnified all our mistakes. Some stupid thing you did when you were nineteen, the one time you weren't careful. And it turns out that was the most important day of your life.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“[...] Everyone that spring just wandered. You'd find a friend in a cafe, and even if you'd hardly known them you'd run and kiss them, and you'd exchange news about who was dead. I don't know how you could compare it to anything else. I don't know how you could."

Yale had missed a step. "Compare what?"

"Well, you! Your friends! I don't know how it's like anything other than war!”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“It's been a long time since I had a day that just cuts your life in two. Like, this hangnail on my thumb, I had it yesterday. It's the same hangnail, and I'm a completely different person.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“Most importantly, the epidemic was only news when it was not killing homosexuals. In this sense, AIDS remained a fundamentally gay disease, newsworthy only by the virtue of the fact that it sometimes hit people who weren't gay,”
― Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic

“We have reached a veredict, your honor. This man's heart is deficient. He loves, but his love is worth nothing.”
― Tony Kushner, Millennium Approaches

“What happened to all those leading men of the great bacchanalia? They either died of AIDS or accepted roles as supporting actors in the middlebrow drama series of hetero culture-you know, if they're to kiss, we must have sunsets in the background. Once they were proud to explore every crevice of life in the margins, now their ambition is just to get along. Color me unimpressed.”
― Rabih Alameddine, The Angel of History

“Muzil passa une matinée à l'hôpital pour faire des examens, il me raconta à quel point le corps, il l'avait oublié, lancé dans les circuits médicaux, perd toute identité, ne reste plus qu'un paquet de chair involontaire, brinquebalé par-ci par-là, à peine un matricule, un nom passé dans la moulinette administrative, exsangue de son histoire et de sa dignité.”
― Hervé Guibert, À l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauvé la vie

“It wasn't just the people who died of AIDS. Even many who did not have the virus ended up committing suicide. They lived through the depths of the epidemic only to take their own lives. But I knew the memories they were living with, and why it might be too much to bear.”
― Ruth Coker Burks, All The Young Men

“Je n'ai jamais si peu souffert que depuis que je sais que j'ai le sida, je suis très attentig aux manifestations de la progression du virus, il me semble connaître la cartographie de ses colonisations, de ses assauts et de ses replis, je crois savoir là où il couve et là où il attaque, sentir les zones encore intouchées, mais cette lutte à l'intérieur e moi, qui est celle-ci organiquement bien réelle, des analyses scientifiques en témoignent, n'est pour l'instant rien, sois patient mon bonhomme, en regard des maux certainement fictifs qui me torpillaient.”
― Hervé Guibert, À l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauvé la vie

“The deaths [from AIDS] of these 81,542 New Yorkers, who were despised and abandoned, who did not have rights or representation, who died because of the neglect of their government and families, has been ignored. This gaping hole of silence has been filled by the deaths of 2,752 people murdered by outside forces. The disallowed grief of 20 years of AIDS deaths was replaced by ritualized and institutionalized mourning of the acceptable dead. In this way, 9/11 is the gentrification of AIDS. The replacement of deaths that don't matter with deaths that do. It is the centerpiece of supremacy ideology, the idea that one person's life is more important than another's. That one person deserves rights that another does not deserve. That one person deserves representation that the other cannot be allowed to access. That one person's death is negligible if he or she was poor, a person of color, a homosexual living in a state of oppositional sexual disobedience, while another death matters because that person was a trader, cop, or office worker presumed to be performing the job of Capital.”
― Sarah Schulman

“She gazed over her oxygen mask at the small, smiling Christmas tree that sat on the table behind her.  Tonight, the whirling sound of the disk in the drive was a song that was sweeter than any lullaby.”
― Circa24, Thomas Hardy was an Optimist: A Collection of Short Stories From the Plague Years.

“The Lottery by Stewart Stafford

It was New York, 1984,
The AIDS tsunami roared in,
Friends, old overnight, no more,
Breathless, I went for a check-up.

A freezing winter's dawn,
A solitary figure before me,
What we called a drag queen,
White heels trembled in the cold.

"Hi, are you here to get tested?"
Gum chewed, brown eyes stared.
This was not my type of person,
I turned heel and walked away.

At month's end, a crippling flu,
The grey testing centre called,
Two hundred people ahead of me;
A waking nightmare all too real.

I gave up and turned to leave,
But a familiar voice called out:
"Hey, you there, come back!"
I stopped and turned around.

The drag queen stood there in furs,
But sicker, I didn't recognise them,
"Stand with me in the line, honey."
"Nah, I'm fine, I'll come back again."

"Support an old broad before she faints?"
A voice no longer frail but pin-sharp.
I got in line to impatient murmurs:
"If anyone has a problem, see me!"

Sylvester on boombox, graveyard choir.
My pal's stage name was Carol DaRaunch,
(After the Ted Bundy female survivor)
Their real name was Ernesto Rodriguez.

After seeing the doctor, Carol hugged me,
Writing down their number on some paper,
With their alias not their real name on it:
"Is this the number of where you work?"

"THAT is my home number to call me on.
THAT'S my autograph, for when I'm famous!"
"I was wrong about you, Carol," I said.
"Baby, it takes time to get to know me!"

A hug, shimmy, the threadbare blonde left.
A silent chorus of shuffling dead men walking,
Spartan results, a young man's death sentence.
Real words faded rehearsal, my eyes watered.

Two weeks on, I cautiously phoned up Carol.
The receiver was picked up, dragging sounds,
Like furniture being moved: "Is Carol there?"
"That person is dead." They hung up on me.

All my life's harsh judgements, dumped on Carol,
Who was I to win life's lottery over a guardian angel?
I still keep that old phone number forty years on,
Crumpled, faded, portable guilt lives on in my wallet.

© Stewart Stafford, 2024. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“One day he and Sutcliffe were walking down Madison Avenue when a man they knew came up and told them a mutual friend had just died in San Francisco. “Of it?â€� they gasped. “No,â€� the man said, “he was run over by a taxicab.â€� “Oh, thank God!â€� They both said in unison. That was where AIDS stood in the hierarchy of misfortune, somehow; in a class by itself—so grim its aura extended to the fact, he thinks as he enters the nursing home, that people who don’t have AIDS imagine somehow they’re not going to die.”
― Andrew Holleran, The Beauty of Men

“I wasn’t just punishing myself; I was erasing myself—one choice, one wound, one lie at a time.”
― Alek Martin, THIS IS WHAT GOD WILL DO TO YOU IF YOU ARE GAY! A STORY OF SELF-INFLICTED HIV: IF YOU REFUSE TO FACE YOUR LIFE, YOUR UPBRINGING, AND YOUR TRAUMAS, YOU ... FEARS

“SONG 18: SCHEHERAZADE (TELL A STORY)
Tell my story, break the shame,
Why do you need someone to blame,
I wasn't evil or bad.
Tell the tale, save my life,
The life I should have had,
Sing for me, Scheherazade.

We were boys who loved our bodies,
Playing hard and fast,
We thought we would live forever;
Who knew - we were playing for keeps.

Tell my story, sing my song,
Ask yourself what's right or wrong,
Change the songs which went bad.
Tell my tale, take a chance,
The chance I should have had,
Sing for me, Scheherazade.

Tell the story of a story,
From zero hour to 12 am,
From the good to the bad;
Tell the tale, save my life,
The life I want to have,
Sing for me, Scheherazade.

We've been told a thousand stories,
None of them seems right;
It's time we told each other's stories,
A thousand nights.”
― John Greyson