We didn’t know what AIDS was—how it worked, how you got it, or how it could be prevented—nor was it a priority for the Reagan administration to help us find out.

Looking back, you’d think it would have been a time of mass panic, but except for the occasional fear-mongering headline, AIDS remained largely under the radar. Unless you knew someone who was sick, the epidemic was something you were vaguely aware of, like background noise—a distant hum, not a siren. As far as we knew, it was happening primarily to a certain subset of gay men, mostly older than me, in their thirties and forties, whose fast-lane lifestyles included a lot of sex and drugs. And while I may have visited—and enjoyed—this world on occasion, I didn’t consider myself a part of it. Nonetheless, I kept my ears open and eagerly read every issue of the Native as soon as it came out.

It was in the Native where, like James and Michael, I first read Larry Kramer’s mind-blowing article, “1,112 and Counting,” in March 1983. In it, Kramer describes a rapidly approaching holocaust, with nothing being done to stop it. Kramer is a central figure in the history of the AIDS crisis—a founder of both Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), the first AIDS organization, and the legendary AIDS activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), and he is the author of countless angry articles and speeches, as well as the landmark play, The Normal Heart.

At the time, however, Kramer’s feverish warnings were waved away by many in the community as the over-the-top ranting of a cranky, anti-sex hysteric. His article, while truly terrifying, was not at all empowering, and I saw little I could do beyond giving money to the cause and cutting back on my already limited number of sexual encounters. And since I didn’t go to the baths or the back rooms and could name most of my sexual partners, I didn’t really think I was at risk. AIDS hadn’t invaded my circle of friends or pool of acquaintances.

Or so I thought.

Now it seems clear that many of my friends were, in fact, infected during this time and over the next few years.

Although initially controversial, the safe sex message in How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach, the pamphlet Michael finds in Connor’s kitchen, would be embraced by a community desperate for some answers. Written by Michael Callen and Richard Berkowitz, two early AIDS activists who themselves were sick, their guidelines gave us our first real clue about protecting ourselves from this deadly plague. It wasn’t the amount of sex you were having, they argued, but rather the exposure to body fluids, like semen and blood, that put you at risk.

But beyond the talk of condoms and the relative dangers of various sexual activities, their most revolutionary suggestion was that perhaps our best protection against this new disease might be love. That if we loved the people we were having sex with—even if it was only for a night or even an hour—we would not want to risk making them sick. It wasn’t just about protecting ourselves, it was about protecting one another.