I take our community history very seriously. I’ve written a book about the dawn of AIDS in Hollywood, have read And the Band Played On more than once, cheered on the activists in the documentary How to Survive a Plague, and inhaled Sean Strub’s historical AIDS memoir, Body Counts. There is enormous value in preserving our history and in recognizing that many of us still carry trauma born of that time.

Community advocates have stepped up work to help us process what we went through a generation ago. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a very real phenomenon for longtime survivors, and excellent community forums have been mounted to explore these areas by The Reunion Project, begun in Chicago, and the Let’s Kick ASS (AIDS Survivor Syndrome) project founded in San Francisco. Hopefully, other cities and LGBTQ organizations will follow suit.

That important work is quite different, however, from allowing our past to blind us to the present.

When we raise our finger and say in a voice filled with foreboding, “people think you only have to take a few pills and that’s it,” we are denying the actual experience of a lot of people with HIV.

For many like me, taking a few pills a day is, in fact, the only impact HIV has on my life.

Research suggests I will live a normal lifespan and am more likely to die from cigarettes than HIV. And I’m not going to deny all that in order to advance a fright-show storyline that isn’t my experience.

The 1980s are history. They are not a prevention strategy. The war as we once knew it to be, the one Lesley and so many others fought so valiantly, is over.

May they rest in peace.

I try to practice a generosity of spirit toward those who came of age after the worst of the plague years, but online commentors when this appeared November 21, 2013, on my blog and in HIV Plus magazine were not having it, not one bit. They were deeply offended I appeared to be discounting our shared history. I feel no differently today.