Over the past month, those of us who lived through the AIDS epidemic have searched for ways in which that experience can inform the COVID-19 crisis. Do we know something that can be useful now? Can this knowledge help us survive? Do we have things to teach people who have not known this grief and anger before? (A meme started circulating in March: “Straights: I can’t believe the government would just ignore an epidemic that threatens thousands of lives. Gays: You don’t say.” It was illustrated with a picture of the AIDS Memorial Quilt.) Writing in BuzzFeed, the journalist Mark Schoofs summoned the grief and fear that was our daily companion during the AIDS crisis, and offered a set of lessons from it: act as if you are infected; the government will not save you; everyone is at risk—and this is our best hope. In the Guardian, the novelist Edmund White enumerated the many differences between AIDS and COVID-19, but also the haunting similarities: the rumor, misinformation, and parascientific folklore surrounding both. White, who is eighty, also wondered if he would survive the coronavirus, after living with H.I.V. since 1985. In LGBTQ Nation, Mark S. King objected to drawing any parallels between the viruses. “No one cared about people dying of AIDS in the early years of the pandemic,” he wrote. “The stock market didn’t budge. The president didn’t hold news conferences. Billions of dollars were not spent. . . . There is no comparison.”

But, of course, we continue to compare, because AIDS was a global pandemic that killed millions of people, and because of that mixture of grief and fear that feels so familiar. “The main feeling I have when I wake up each morning is palpable, physical,” Gregg Gonsalves, who was an AIDS activist before he was an epidemiologist, tweeted. “It’s a weight behind the eyes for tears that never come. I am so fearful and sad right now, because while I think there is a way out of this that minimizes the pain and suffering ahead, the President and his party have no interest in it, no conception of how to move forward. It means all this will go on longer than it should, be more cruel than it needed to be. This is one of the most shameful episodes in American history and it’s happening in real time.”

So I keep searching my memory for lessons of my own that could be useful. One lesson from AIDS was about the power of communities coming together to take care of one another, to touch one another, to act, using bodies—often frail bodies, always endangered bodies, sometimes even dead bodies—to fight. This lesson is difficult to apply in the era of social distancing, though some ACT UP veterans are managing to stage direct actions even now, standing six feet apart. Maybe the most important lesson I learned from the AIDS epidemic was that it would end. The world would reconstitute itself. Now, when I look at pictures of the deserted streets of Paris or empty central Moscow, I think of all the violence, tragedy, and history that those buildings have witnessed. The cities will still be there when this pandemic is over. Many of us will still be there, too. “We will meet again,” as the Queen of England said, in her address to her nation.

There was a time, when I was very young, when everyone in my world was sick and dying. In my early twenties, some weeks, I would go to several funerals. My roommate died. My other roommate died. All my mentors died. I edited a gay magazine that featured a column on living with AIDS. The columnist died; I had to find a replacement, who would also die. I could not imagine that any of this was happening, I could not imagine that the government and so many others didn’t realize that it was happening, and I couldn’t imagine that it would ever end, especially because the science told us that there would never be a cure or a vaccine.

Then, for many people, it ended, as suddenly as it had begun. My younger friends have little idea of what living through the AIDS epidemic was like, and neither do my straight friends, or friends who were straight at the time. Last year, when I was collecting remembrances for the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall, I was struck by how little space AIDS seemed to occupy in the recollections even of people who had lived through it. Writing in the Boston Review, Amy Hoffman suggested that, because AIDS was so traumatic, so outside our understanding of life, it cannot be made a part of any narrative; one is speaking either about AIDS or about other stories that make up a lifetime, but not about both at the same time.

There may be another reason why it would be very hard to carry the memory of the AIDS era wholly intact. Meeting a medical professional of a certain age, one would have to wonder, Were you one of those who refused to enter the room of a person with AIDS? Meeting some nice lady who long ago lost a son to AIDS, one would have to wonder, Were you one of those mothers who refused to let her child come home? Did his friends take care of him as he died, while you stayed away? Reading an obituary or biography of Ronald Reagan or George H. W. Bush, one would have to wonder, Did the people who died of AIDS matter so little that the writer could ignore the inaction of both of these Presidents?

Crises bring out the worst in us, and we forget this at our peril. In 1985, the people of Kokomo, Indiana, blocked Ryan White, a boy living with AIDS, from going to school; now, a co-op building in Manhattan has expelled a doctor who came to the city to help save New Yorkers. In 2015, also in Indiana, Mike Pence, who was then the state’s governor, willfully mishandled an H.I.V. outbreak; now he is the Vice-President, in charge of the coronavirus task force. Nations have closed their borders. States want to close their borders. Cape Cod wants to close bridges (an online petition has accumulated thirteen thousand signatures). Rhode Island, where a golf course has posted “Course open to RI residents only” signs, has arrested three men from Massachusetts for golfing. (No, they should not have been golfing, but neither should Rhode Islanders.) There is just enough overlap between sane and sound policy—such as social distancing and minimizing travel—and xenophobic behavior that we hardly question the absurd assumption that national or state borders are meaningful obstacles to the virus. Trump may not have succeeded in forcing all the world to call COVID-19 the “Chinese virus,” but people everywhere are talking about it as the disease of other people. The fear of the invisible virus is replaced with the fear and blame of people from other places.