ABSTRACT
This chapter provides alternative ways to understand the shifting involvement of gay men in AIDS work. It argues that most men who are involved in gay community life do not personally understand or emotionally experience AIDS as a simple, discrete crisis, except in the narrowest intellectual sense. The chapter intends to encourage all gay men to think about the position HIV currently holds in our lives and the lives of men with whom people share community, and to reconsider strategies utilized in our work on the epidemic. Three key factors are responsible for marginalizing gay men's experience of AIDS in today's worlds: death, diversification of community membership and the departure of many of these 1980s men from the spaces in which gay men continue to forge collective meanings. The category young gay men that people developed included very diverse populations: homeless, runaway, and throwaway youth from twelve to nineteen years old who found themselves on the streets of large cities.
