This AIDS survivor’s post came to me by way of a friend of my generation. We all lived through some pretty dark times…

Back in the day, gay men like me became masters of emotional origami. We folded grief into smaller and smaller shapes until it fit neatly behind a joke, a cocktail, or a color-coded pill organizer. It was survival, not strategy.

We lived through a pandemic that killed nearly everyone we loved, then got up the next morning and went to work, to brunch, to the gym—pretending we weren’t haunted. Pretending we weren’t furious. Pretending we were fine. (Spoiler: we were not fine.)

You see, repressing emotions isn’t free. It’s more like a buy-now-pay-later situation. The debt comes due eventually—usually at 3am, or during a perfectly innocent CVS run when they play that one Whitney Houston song.

So if you’re one of us—one of the walking wounded who made it out of the ‘80s and ‘90s alive but emotionally duct-taped together—this is your reminder: it’s okay to feel stuff. Cry. Scream. Hug someone. Say their names out loud.

And if you’ve never lived through something like that? Hug us harder. Ask us how we’re doing. Mean it.

-Scott Abel, 6-20-2025

The debt comes due eventually.

Just so. I have on my bookshelves, books I was bequeathed in a friend’s will after he had passed away due to complications from AIDS. I cannot look at those books, let alone pick one off its shelf, without thinking of him. And then I begin to remember that time. 

A friend writes about telling younger audiences (I reckon everyone is younger to our generation now) about his experiences during the AIDS crisis and hearing gasps from the audience. I know the feeling, and not only about telling about living through AIDS, but also those pre/post Stonewall times in general.

It’s hard for people nowadays to believe that at one point gay men were rounded up and placed for an indefinite period of time in a locked down mental ward simply for being homosexual and nothing more (see: “Sex Crime Panic” by Neil Miller). That there was an executive order signed by President Eisenhower (executive order 10450, April 27, 1953. I would be born just a few months later that year) that forbade homosexuals from serving in the government or its contractors in any capacity. That every state once had a sodomy law that defined our very existence as criminal, and made it possible to deny us jobs, places to live, and services. While I was growing up Virginia had a law on its books forbidding restaurants and bars from serving known homosexuals. I tell this to people nowadays and the jaws drop. Really?

You grew up back then knowing you were loathed and hated, or at best granted a sort of rancid pity. You saw it every time there was a fight over applying non-discrimination laws to us. But when we started dying in the early 1980s you really saw the depth of how much we were hated.

I volunteered for an HIV vaccine trial, because I am a man of science and I wanted to help stop the dying however I could. In my case it was offering up my scrawny little body to a vaccine toxicity test. After they determined I was in good health and a good fit for their test, I was sat down with several other volunteers and given a four hour lecture on the possible bad outcomes, so there would be no doubt we were giving informed consent. I kid you not, half of the bad outcomes we were warned about were not medical, but political.

You see, the only way of testing for the presence of the virus back then was to look for antibodies to it. There were two tests, ELISA and Western Blot. As I understood it, ELISA just reacts if the antibodies in the range its testing for reach a certain threshold. It needs to be followed up with a Western Blot which detects specific antibodies. It looks almost like a barcode with dark bands representing specific antibody proteins.

Well…what is a vaccine supposed to do to protect you from disease? It generates antibodies to be there in position in case of infection. An invader enters the body and the army is already there to fight it. So if the candidate vaccine works, you get antibodies to HIV. Which means you will look like you have it when anyone gives you the basic ELISA HIV test. Unless someone who knows what they’re doing follows up with a Western Blot which will show that, no, this is a vaccine response, you would get tagged as being infected with HIV. And there was precious little of the kind of interest back then to look deeper into it. Not to people stricken with HIV, and not to homosexuals HIV or not. I’m an out gay man, so of course I’m an AIDS spreader.

So in that room we were told we could lose our jobs, get thrown out of homes, apartments, get denied healthcare…all of it, everything that actual AIDS patients were suffering through back then on top of everything the virus itself was doing to them. I’m proud to say none of the half dozen of us in that room backed out.

But there it was. People were dying, horribly, and instead of sympathy people took it as an excuse to hate us even more.

There were heroic exceptions to that, and we can remember and honor them today. But those were very Very dark times, and you have to appreciate how difficult it is to talk about it because then we have to remember.

It’s been a while since I’ve had that dream about walking among the quilt panels on the Washington Mall that day. But I still have that one from time to time, walking among the panels, terrified of the name I might see.