Gay life had even begun to invade mainstream culture. There was the bisexual Steven Carrington on TV’s top-rated Dynasty and gay-themed Hollywood movies like Making Love, Personal Best, and Victor Victoria. In 1983, Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy—the play about gay life, love, and family that Michael sees with Becky—won the Tony Award, while the hottest ticket on Broadway that fall was the musical La Cage Aux Folles, about a “married” gay couple—the owner and the headline performer of an “exotic” drag nightclub—meeting their straight son’s girlfriend and conservative family, complete with a cross-dressing chorus and the gay anthem, “I Am What I Am.”

But this didn’t mean it was safe to walk down the street holding your lover’s hand.

Gay bashings were a regular occurrence, particularly in those neighborhoods we called our own. Often, it was just a bunch of teenagers “out for fun.” Sometimes, they brought bats or metal pipes. Sometimes it was worse. Just two weeks before I moved into the city, a man with an Uzi shot up the crowd outside two gay bars in the West Village. The cops, who were largely unsympathetic, refused to keep statistics on anti-gay violence. Meanwhile, we couldn’t even get the city council to pass a simple gay rights bill.

The truth was, whatever our gains in the fourteen years since the Stonewall riots, gay rights remained debatable, and gay lives expendable.

As if to prove the point, Ronald Reagan, who had been elected president in 1980, brought with him a collection of homophobic archconservatives and right-wing religious figures, who would come to embrace the epidemic as God’s punishment for our “immoral” lifestyle.

But for the first few years of the AIDS crisis, politicians, like everyone else, simply ignored the disease and its victims. After a quick flurry of articles in the summer of 1981, there was barely any mention of this new “gay cancer” outside of the gay press. It would take nine months and more than three hundred new cases in twenty states before the Times published its next story, in May 1982, about the disease now called gay-related immune deficiency, or GRID. By the time the paper’s fifth story appeared in August of that year, there were 550 cases, and the disease had a different name, AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome), to avoid stigmatizing a caseload that now included IV-drug users, Haitians, and hemophiliacs.

The Times wouldn’t publish another story about AIDS until January 1983, eight months later.

The lack of interest by the Times had a ripple effect—if a story wasn’t covered in the “paper of record,” it wasn’t worth reporting elsewhere. As a result, there was no information available about this deadly new epidemic. We didn’t have computers or smartphones. We couldn’t google “AIDS” or look it up on Wikipedia. Instead, we were forced to rely on rumor and word of mouth and whatever was published every other week in the New York Native, our local gay newspaper.

But in 1983, there wasn’t much to know.