If you've ever wondered why there's a dearth of radical older gay men, mostly in the range of 50+, it's at least in part because of that. Puritanical anti-sex assholes like Larry Kramer managed to survive for obvious reasons, and then got to revise history and sound like an unheard Cassandra, when the reality was that a lot of the damage had already been done by the time he started his own activism.
In my view, this led to a rightward shift in the activism of the gay community, which ended up hijacking a lot of the hard work that lesbian and trans activists had built up, and moved towards respectability rather than queer liberation.
All the more reason to say fuck Reagan for ignoring it for nearly a decade. Even Thatcher did something about it and that's saying something.
This isn't even my take, it's something that an AIDS activist in the late '80s said, that AIDS killed off the interesting gays. But thought it would be
Yeah, one of my older friends was an Opera Singer in the later part of his career during the AIDS crisis. He has stories (I'm a big fan of the one about the gourmet Cocaine tasting party/orgy at a major secretly gay Peer's house. Alternate drugs were available for different dietary needs.)
But all, and I do mean all his male friends are dead. He only survived because he got thrown out of the company in the aftermath of a bad breakup, and found someone to settle down with.
That's amazing and horrid all at the same time.
Oh yeah, it was apparently quite a time. Decadent and a bit awful and utterly unsustainable ("High art" actors are basically lumpens although proletisation was in full swing.) But you get this idea of a small, brief area and moment where people weren't alienated from themselves and each other, and that sounded great.