Bully, Coward, Victim.

Explosion of gay sex in the 1970s, it was how they fought back, it was what they had.
AIDS surfaces in the mid 1980s forcing people to talk about sex in ways they never wanted to before.

As a society, there was no way of knowing at the time that we were endangering ourselves and our futures by having so much sex. There is nowhere for the blame to lie. Crimp and Shilts and Kramer can quarrel until the cows come home, and being the least extreme Crimp is probably closer to the truth, but that doesn’t change the fact that there was no way of knowing. Now we can blame homophobia, or lack of support for safe sex education.

Anonymity less of an option.

We briefly touched on in class media that has captured, and in some people’s views, glorified AIDS in the 1980s. After some writers block, that really amounted more to an inability to feel like I had the whole picture, I decided I should watch Angels in America before writing this post. By reputation I knew it was not a movie to watch unless I was prepared to cry for the rest of the night, but mid-term break seemed like as good a time as ever.
One of Roy Conn’s catchphrases is “only in America,” generally referring to some outrageous social phenomenon, that is in fact, not at all outrageous, because we are in America. Well Roy, only in America could a medical disease become so ingrained in our culture and history. The words under his name in the AIDS quilt are "Bully, Coward, Victim." And you can bet Al Pacino knew that when playing the role in the movie.

Douglas Crimp mentions that the reason AIDS was noticed was because of gay middle-class men. If it had only infected the people our society tries to ignore it would not have been noticed as quickly. As it is, the fact that gay men, despite being a minority, had maneuvered their way into middle class jobs where they appeared no different, that AIDS became visible. I am also very impressed with the development of AIDSpeak, that a cooping mechanism developed in an attempt to bridge this understanding/communication gap between the gay community and dominant society. According to Shilts AIDSpeak is a "new syntax that allows gay political leaders to address and largely determine and largely determine public health policy." Of all the things the gay community did during the 80s to deal with the AIDS epidemic and gain footing, AIDSpeak, while not necessarily steming from the people, certainly seems to have done wonders to help them.

The shit that hits the fan with AIDS is anonymity. Those who got by by leading two lives had a much harder time when pegged with defining and incriminating markings.

If it weren’t for AIDS, could heterodomanant society have succeded in simultaneously ignoring and shunning homosexual practices for the rest of eternity? Perhaps. Roy Conn’s scene at the end of Chapter 1 in Angels in America speaks to this issue in many ways.