Covid-19 is my second pandemic – third, if you also count polio, which was conquered just before I was born but whose victims were all around in my early years, their injuries haunting my dreams. HIV is my first and most formative pandemic. That viral thug hit the streets of New York the same year I did, 1981, which was also the year I came out, putting us on a collision course. The disease stole away friends and lovers but somehow I outmaneuvered it. Yet I was fully engaged with AIDS –not as a frontline activist but as an investigative journalist looking for answers, looking for hope. It is scarcely possible to convey what it was like over the 15 years between 1981 and 1996 – 15 years!– when there was not one effective medication against HIV. Then, finally, pharmaceutical breakthroughs stopped the dying. But not for everybody. Horribly, it took another decade for those drugs to reach sub-Saharan Africa, the pandemic’s white-hot epicenter. This is the worst horror of the AIDS pandemic – worse than the virus was the indifference and greed. We allowed tens of millions of people to die of what was suddenly a survivable infection.