Your life could be taken from you at any moment. Between AIDS and the violence against gay people that was so prevalent back then, you really didn't feel like you were living in the United States of America, in a first world country. You had a sense that life was a precious commodity you had to fight to keep.

Most people who are HIV positive are on drugs and that gets their viral load so low that it's harder to transmit it. Most new infections come from people who don't know they're infected.

I came out after safe sex was invented and I always practiced safe sex. Except for when I lost my virginity.

Writing fiction is fundamentally an irrational act.

Who cares what the state thinks about your relationship? They're giving you tax breaks and this and that - it's just nonsense. You want to live with somebody, then live with somebody. All that other stuff is just a way for the state monitoring and codifying certain activities and ostracizing others.

Because gay people were so much more visible, violence against gays was more common and reported on. But they were definitely related to each other. In the wake of AIDS, gay people felt like they had to organize, become much more active and visible. AIDS fostered a gay rights movement that made gay people more powerful and more vulnerable at the same time.

AIDS was one of those diseases that a lot of people tried to claim ownership over, and especially as someone who was, fortunately never HIV positive, I wanted to avoid any appearance of doing that.