I want to run my fingers over him, feel his skin under my hands.

I want to ask if he’s found a way to go back to school and how his mother and sister are.

I want to tell him I’ve moved out and moved on.

I want to know that he’s healthy.

Mostly, I want to tell him I still think about him all the time.

He steps toward me. I step toward him. He says my name just as I’m saying his, and suddenly, the world contracts so that our lips meet. Magnetic. Hungry. Holding on to everything we have. Everything that makes us human.

Time is a circle surrounded by a growing storm. And we’re in the eye of it.

James says that things will get worse before they get better, and it’s James so I believe him.

I don’t know how I’m going to keep everyone I care about safe. Or if I can. Or what safe even means.

But I’m going to own my fear.

Own my voice.

Own my love.

Own my life.

And I’m not giving any of them up without a fight.

Afterword by Ron Goldberg

The New York City of 1983—the world of We Are Lost and Found—was exciting, if dangerous around the edges. Stocks were high, rents were relatively cheap, and gay life was thriving, at least in certain neighborhoods. AIDS was a matter of concern, but not yet a crisis. In hindsight, I suppose we should have seen the darkening shadows, but at the time, it all seemed so unimaginable, and there was so much we didn’t know about this newly named disease or how our city, country, and fellow citizens would respond to it. Or to us.

I was a twenty-four-year old gay man sharing a one-bedroom apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, several blocks north of where James and his roommates live. The neighborhood was dicey, its safety judged on a block-by-block basis. I lived on a “good” block, with a couple of upscale apartment buildings and restaurants. James—not so much.

I can’t say for sure whether I saw the infamous article, “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals,” when it was first published in the New York Times in July 1981—but I certainly heard about it. It was unusual enough for the Times to write anything about gay life—the paper refused to even use the term gay unless it was part of a quote or the name of an organization until 1987. But whatever concerns I may have had about this outbreak, it didn’t translate into worry.

Besides, there was so much to enjoy about gay life in New York in the early eighties. There were fabulous gay dance clubs like The Saint, Twelve West, and the Paradise Garage. There were gay neighborhoods, like the West Village, where hot men cruised the streets in flannel, denim, and leather; the East Village, with its pierced punks and edgy artists, drag queens, and performance art; and the Upper West Side, where a strip of preppy gay restaurants and bars had turned Columbus Avenue into “the Swish Alps.” And in the summer, you needed only to hop a ferry to be whisked away to the glamorous gay beaches of Fire Island.