It’s a Sin.
Ben Blackall/HBO Max
AIDS will kill you. I was taught this in grade school as part of a curriculum that used extreme fear as sex education. I grew up terrified, thinking gay sex meant death. And as a teen who knew he was flagrantly gay, I remember rationalizing the ways I could still lead a happy life (“just mouth stuff and porn”) without dying from having sex with men.
Teenage me was a fantastic idiot.
But the infuriating thing about this educational approach, and something I became angrier and angrier about as I got older, is that I eventually realized the people I was supposed to trust whose advice I was supposed to listen to as a malleable youth always talked about the death and terror of the AIDS crisis but never once discussed the lives of the gay men who were dying. Several hours spent on death, and not even one second about who they were. I wasn’t supposed to even be curious about the intricacies of those lives as their obituaries, riddled with jar