It's hard to fathom the devastation the queer community faced during the 1980s AIDS epidemic unless you witnessed it firsthand. In a conversation with HuffPost Live earlier this week -- in honor of October's lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) history month -- activist David Drake laid it out clearly: "It really is like living in a war."
Drake, who moved to New York in 1984, discussed with host Alex Miranda the fear queer people lived in as they struggled to make sense of what was happening to the people "vanishing" around them. But he said the structures of political and community organizations in place at the time strengthened the movement.
"If it could happen, thank goodness it happened when that was in place. There was something in place in order to move an activist spirit forward," he said, and that's why he got involved.
"I just wanted to save my friend's life," Drake said. "I wanted to save this free life that I had in New York as an openly gay person with friends and boyfriends and work. I had these things and I wanted to keep that world, and that was just disappearing."
The activist, who was involved in ACT UP, gave a chilling comparison of what the epidemic itself felt like:
9/11 felt like the entire AIDS epidemic wrapped into one 24 hour period. Outside it was a beautiful Sept. 11 day, and then there was this billowing smoke and we knew suddenly, these building were coming down and people were jumping out of them. People were dying, and there was sort of a scent of smoke, but the day looked so beautiful, and everyone on the streets was in kind of a sense of chaos and yet they were still going to their next place. The subways were still working some places. It was very strange to walk through a beautiful day like that knowing what a catastrophe, and we were stuck in a kind of war zone like we were roped off from the rest of the world.
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