08/08/2025
The AIDS crisis was not only a public health disaster but also a psychological rupture that reshaped the emotional landscape of an entire generation.
It took more than lives. It took the men who had begun to model what q***r intimacy could look like outside of secrecy and shame. Men who were navigating how to build relationships rooted in care, in choice, in staying. They were forming new scripts for connection that weren’t inherited from heteronormative culture, but crafted through their wonderful lived experience. And then, suddenly, they were gone.
What gets lost in that kind of absence isn’t always visible. It lives in what wasn’t passed down: how to repair after conflict. How to grow old together. How to stay when things get hard. A whole generation of gay men grew up without elders to show them what love could look like over time,not just in heat or crisis, but in consistency. That void shapes us.
For those who came of age in the aftermath, intimacy often became a site of anxiety. Not necessarily because of personal trauma, but because of something quieter and harder to name like the collective disruption in the transmission of relational knowledge.
As gay men we have internalized this loss. Growing up emotionally requires us not to pathologize it, but to understand how the past continues to affect us in the present. Because you can’t shift a pattern until you can name it. And once you do, it becomes possible to meet our fears with more compassion—and our longings with more care.
