'The past is never dead. It's not even past.'

...so writes William Faulkner in one of the great lines, ever.

Some fantastic journalism from the Chattanooga Times-Free Press on how a Baptist minister loved his gay son who died from AIDS.
    

When he and Frances walked into the hospital room, Stephen was lying in the bed in a thin gown. His body white and weak. The same blue eyes, but hollow underneath. 

Stephen looked at his father. The room felt tight with fear and embarrassment. Matt knew his son was waiting to hear his voice, listening for reassurance.

And Matt began to cry in front of his son. Frances held her hands over her mouth and cried, too.

"Son, it's OK," Matt said. "We are going to love you the way you are."

Stephen sobbed. He crawled out of bed and into Matt's lap and Matt held him like he did when he was just a boy. Stephen put his arms around his father's neck and kissed him on the cheek.

"Son, don't worry," Matt said softly. "Nothing between us is going to change."

Andrew Sullivan writes about surviving AIDS.

People forget that HIV decimated the immune system - but people actually died from the opportunistic infections. These "OI"s were something out of Dante's Hell. So many drowned to death from pneumocystis. Or they would develop hideous KS lesions, or extremely painful neuropathy (my "buddy" screamed once when I brushed a bedsheet against the tip of his toes), or CMV where a friend of mine had to inject himself in the eyeball to prevent going blind, or toxoplasmosis, a brain degenerative disease where people wake up one day to find they can't tie their shoe-laces, and their memories are falling apart. Within the gay community, 300,000 deaths amounted to a plague of medieval dimensions. Once you knew your T-cells were below a certain level, it was like being in a dark forest where, at any moment, some hideous viral or bacterial creature could emerge and kill you. And for fifteen years there was nothing to take that worked, just the agonizing helplessness of waiting to die, and watching others get assaulted by one terrifying disease after another.

I was alive during the plague years, but barely aware of its extent. As with the Holocaust, this is a topic we must study and revisit because we can't let anything like it ever happen again.