An Activist Perspective on the Gay Community Living with HIV, Primary Care, and Clinical Trials

As a communicable disease the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) does not discriminate. Any individual, regardless of race, gender, demographics, or sexuality is at risk. Nonetheless, at the beginning of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) epidemic in 1981, gay men in urban centers-namely, San Francisco and New York-were the first ‘‘community’’ to die of AIDS. HIV had yet to be discovered; it was called GRID (gay-related immunodeficiency disease).