ABSTRACT
Populations such as African Americans and Latinos, who may be a few years behind epicenter gay communities in the caseload curve, and who currently are experiencing rising numbers of new infections, may be appalled at the suggestion that AIDS is over. For many gay men throughout America, the acronym AIDS resonates powerfully with fatality, sexual repression, and cataclysmic loss. AIDS has become the leading cause of death in the United States for males aged twenty-five to forty-four years and the third leading cause of death for women in this age group. Middle-aged and old gay men who have found ways to come to terms with the decimation AIDS has wreaked on their lives find the continuing rhetoric and constructions of AIDS as a crisis to be debilitating and inauthentic. HIV-positive men on combination therapies are among those who remain anxious and may be vulnerable to powerful emotions as they face uncertainty and occasional side effects of the new treatments.
