Yet their extraordinary journeys had rendered them mostly unprepared for an ordinary life. In countless ways, survival, unexpected as it was, proved as hard to adjust to as the plague itself. Many in the at-risk communities shared this paradox, whether or not they’d been infected themselves. Nobody left those years uncorrupted by what they’d witnessed, not only the mass deaths—100,000 lost in New York City alone, snatched from tightly drawn social circles—but also the foul truths that a microscopic virus had revealed about American culture: politicians who welcomed the plague as proof of God’s will, doctors who refused the victims medical care, clergymen and often even parents themselves who withheld all but a shiver of grief. Such betrayal would be impossible to forget in the subsequent years.
-- David France (Prologue paragraph 2)

Importance: This shows that ways in which the AIDS epidemic traumatized the gay community in ways that went beyond the...