Dan Savage on the AIDS Epidemic | Generation X

People didn't believe that our love was the equivalent of heterosexual love. Uh, not even people who considered themselves down with the gays believed that. I think it was Harvey Milk in "Torse Trilogy" who said that it would be great one day if we all grew – if all gay people, I think, grew a little purple horn in the middle of their foreheads, because then they would know who we were.

In a bitter irony, that was in a way what happened with Carosi Sarom. Suddenly, gay people were growing not purple horns but purple lesions and spots, and people suddenly were finding out who was gay 'cause gay people were getting sick and going home to die, and not always being welcomed home. And that outed a lot of people.

And then AIDS became, you know, this ongoing public spectacle tragedy. Gay people fought back, and the people saw a different sort of gay person in the streets. They saw gay warriors in the streets fighting, um, taking on the American Medical Association, the Center for Disease Control, the Reagan Administration, uh, and fighting doggedly.

They also saw gay people doing something that they had said we were incapable of, which was loving each other. What a lot of people saw in hospitals and on the news was gay people, uh, taking care of each other and gay couples loving each other through something extremely traumatic.

And they said, uh, and you know, a lot of us believed – um, not me, thank God – but a lot of gay people internalized this and believed it. That whatever it was that two men were doing in a relationship, it wasn't love; it was something else. It was some sick codependence.

And AIDS, the reaction to it, uh, disproved that lie pretty quickly and pretty publicly.