MATTHEW
Quote:
You knew some people who died of AIDS? I knew hundreds. I spent years watching my acquaintances, my friends, my lovers - the one true family of my world, my world - die one by one. And no one in the rest of this country gave a damn. They were happy in fact - either that homosexuals were dying, or that the disease seemed thankfully to be confined to a single, disenfranchised group. Then I got to watch as the rest of America discovered HIV case by heterosexual case - from Ryan White, to Alison Gertz, to you, to Magic Johnson to Aruthur Ashe. I got to watch tributes to the courage of these brave, suffering human beings. Outpourings of affection from people they would never meet, whose thoughts were with them every day, whose eyes filled with tears that these lives could be cut short, that these lives - which were so precious that no amount of publicity was too much - had been mutilated by a virus that was clearly meant for someone else. Then I got to die. In oblivion. Because no matter how many thousands of us die, we will never be visible to you.
