Joe Zee, stylist
Honestly, it’s still a part of me now. For a long time, I equated having gay sex with meaning you’re going to die. I assumed every person I hooked up with had AIDS.
Marc Jacobs, designer
I had one partner, Robert, and he was diagnosed. He went home to Mobile, Alabama, to a very loving part of his family…and I went to visit. The family’s neighbors were like, “Oh, your gay son has AIDS. We’re not going to socialize with you.” When people went to visit Robert, of course they were taking precautions, but it was funny how the people closest to him would still kiss him and touch him and I, of course, felt the same way. We were being cautious, but we were still loving, and touching, and caring, and feeling, and sensitive. But the world at large wasn’t. Doctors didn’t want to treat him or talk to him. There was such a stigma and a prejudice against gay people. It was like, “Don’t touch a gay person, you’ll get AIDS.”
Hal Rubenstein
I heard about it early on when it was called GRID, gay-related immune deficiency. A friend of mine wound up actually becoming diagnosed, and he was the first person I knew to die of it. I went to visit him in New York Hospital, and he handed me this sheath of mimeographed papers and said, “Read this. You won’t understand all of it, but it’s going to change your life.” Well I read it, and I immediately thought, Okay, this is me.
James Scully
To get an HIV test, you had to wait three weeks to a month, so your whole life just went on hold because you’re like, “Oh, my God, I don’t want to know. But now what do I do for three weeks?” Because also if you found out, you were probably dead in six months. The way the information was put out was that this was all our fault and we were the only ones that could get it. At that point, it hadn’t infiltrated the straight community yet.
Avram Finkelstein, artist and activist
All of those years leading up to the activist moment in New York, people in the fashion world had euphemisms surrounding the ways in which they would talk about HIV. They would use words like, “Oh, I hear he’s sick.” They would never say, “I hear he might have AIDS.”
