Or was it the next day, when the Dow Jones industrial average plunged more than 2000 points?

Maybe it was last Wednesday night, when President Trump delivered a wooden speech, condemning the “foreign virus”? (Even when he’s talking about disease, he has to sneak a little racism in.) Or two days later, when in response to a question about the lack of widespread access to testing, the leader of the free world said, “I don’t take responsibility at all.”

Each of these events captured a moment when it became clear the crisis — both pandemical and political — was getting worse, day by day.

But the moment that will always remain in my mind is Monday, March 9, as I rode the subway north. The doors opened and closed at Chambers Street. Then a deranged man started yelling about the coronavirus, and the gay men he claimed were spreading it. He shouted profanities. And no, the phrase he used was not “gay men.”

At the next stop, almost everyone in the car fled. Then it was just two of us, the crazy man and me. He looked me up, he looked me down. I don’t know what he saw when he looked at me. A frightened older woman? Something else?

I remembered riding the subway in the early ’80s, and the panic over AIDS, my terror as friends got sick. I remembered how President Ronald Reagan had been unable to bring himself to even say “AIDS” until four years after the disease had been identified. I remembered the news conference when a reporter first asked about the condition, and the president’s press secretary, Larry Speakes, responded with a gay joke. Journalists laughed. Because it was so funny! Gay people dying! What a hoot!