AIDS AT 30

QUOTE: The Dawn Of The AIDS Crisis Was “Normal Life And The Most Insane Thing You Could Imagine”

You would go to the symphony or the Castro Theater or the opera and all during the performances you would hear around the room ‘beep beep, beep beep.’ People would have pill timers, because people were taking 20-30 pills a day that had to be taken at regular intervals… It just became so much a part of the audio track of regular life: 30, 40, 50 people in a room with their pill timers going off. I had completely forgotten that but you would just hear it all the time.

It was a terrible thing and yet, you know, we hung out, we had sex, we danced. Life went on. It was an incredible juxtaposition of normal life and the most insane thing you could imagine, just completely coexisting. That’s the thing that I find most perplexing looking back, is how normal it was in so many ways.”

We Were Here director David Weissman discussing the realities of life during the early days of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco.

 

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