I didn’t think I could write a book with an HIV-positive main character without knowing about the AIDS crisis, so, while researching more scientific things like U=U and PrEP, I watched documentaries like How to Survive a Plague, about the early years of the AIDS epidemic and the efforts of activist groups like ACT UP and TAG. It was directed by David France, a gay journalist who covered the crisis from the beginning. The film used more than 700 hours of archived footage, including ACT UP protests and meetings, and footage of many activists who are no longer alive.

The film is dedicated to France’s partner, Doug Gould, who died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1992. Someone born in 1992 would be 27 now. The ’90s don’t feel hard to conjure up, but the AIDS crisis is. It’s hard to fathom thousands and thousands of people dying long, scary deaths, their loved ones confused and terrified.

From reading Wikipedia articles about popular figures like Freddie Mercury and Alvin Ailey, I got the sense that the disease targeted people who partied, people who were sexual, larger than life people.

I also watched fictional movies like The Normal Heart. This time, I cried, and could not stop. I couldn’t make it through the entire movie. I knew what was going to happen and I couldn’t take it. I felt like a coward; I had the option to turn off the movie and resume my life, but the characters in the movie, the real life people they were based on, didn’t.

I read everything: articles about HIV and AIDS in the gay community, Larry Kramer, Angels in America. It sounds silly now, but when I was younger and thought about AIDS/HIV, I didn’t think about gay people. I barely thought about it at all. As I began to realize that it was thought of as a “gay” virus, and that it was ignored because it was associated with gay people, I was angry and didn’t know who to talk to. My mom knew I was bi, but she didn’t quite understand; talking to her about queerness was awkward and surprisingly painful. And most of my high school friends didn’t know anything about it.

I find it hard to conceptualize so many people dying, so many young people dying, that I often try not to think about it. When I do, I find myself overcome with how much we’ve lost. How scary it must’ve been for queer people, mostly men, who lived with a constant fear of death and were unable to talk to family about it because they were in the closet. And about the queer people who formed families and took care of each other when no one else would. How you could be friends with people one moment, and have an entire group of friends disappear the next.

I often did huge amounts of research at a time. I didn’t cry, but I felt the sadness, the loss, growing in my chest until it weighed me down, making it hard to breathe. I felt foolish to feel loss, to be past the point of sadness, past the point of tears, for all those who died. I wasn’t there. I didn’t know them. I can’t know what it was like. And still, whenever someone talks about this period in time, I close in on myself. It feels like a personal loss. It feels like trauma. I don’t know how to articulate how big, how heavy, how vast, and wide, and dark the loss is. Sometimes I think of Washington Square Park, empty of all the living, filled with the ghosts of those lost in the ’80s and ’90s. I think of the injustice, the loss of life, of hope, of different futures, and I cry, quietly, in my dorm, unable to explain the heavy sadness.