ABSTRACT
I never met or heard Raymond Williams speak: I know him only through his published writing. His importance for me is probably quite different than it is for those of you who knew and worked with him. His greatest gifts to me were his convictions that culture is the lived experience of all of us, constantly and actively produced, and that scholarship that ignored this fact, that didn’t acknowledge and explore the seamless interplay between culture and society, was bloodless. My paper today is partly an homage to Williams, partly a description of work on AIDS that I have undertaken—I hope in the spirit of his good scholarship—and partly an application of Williams’s criticism of British cultural studies to an American situation. To get to these, I must begin with my own experience.
