A few. You knew some people who died of AIDS - related causes? I knew hundreds.

I spent
years watching my acquaintances, my friends, my lovers - the one true family of my world, ​my
world ​- die one by one.

And no one in the rest of this country gave a damn. They were happy, in fact - either that
homosexuals were dying, ​per se​, or that the disease seemed thankfully to be confined to a
single, disenfranchised group.

Then I got to watch as the rest of America discovered HIV case by heterosexual case - from
Ryan White, to Alison Gertz, to you, to Magic Johnson, to Arthur Ashe.

I got to watch tributes to the courage of these brave, suffering human beings. Outpourings of
affection from people they would never meet, whose thoughts were with them every day, that
these lives - which were so precious - had been mutilated by a virus that was clearly meant for
someone else.

Then I got to die. In oblivion. Because no matter how many thousands of us die,

we will never be visible to you.