ABSTRACT
By the year 2000, almost 450,000 residents of the United States had died of AIDS. When it first arrived stateside in the early 1980s, the disease primarily hit white men, but by the late 1990s, African Americans and Latinos accounted for 61 percent of those living with HIV, with an increasing number of women among those infected. In October 1998, President Bill Clinton declared AIDS a “severe and ongoing health crisis” in African American and Latino communities.1 And yet it was a largely invisible emergency, one mostly ignored by the mainstream media and often suppressed by the affected communities themselves. Shame and stigma prevented people from acknowledging the cause of their loved ones’ sickness and even death. Obituaries were intentionally vague.
