Excerpt from Judy, assistant editor of SexIs Magazine, “Boogeyman Logic — A Requiem for Matthew”

Mine is the last generation to come of age in a world that did not know AIDS. We were not quite hippies, but not quite whatever came next. We grew up with free love and casual sex. We weren’t as likely to judge our peers for their conquests as to congratulate them, or feel a pang of jealousy in the face of those grown-up pastimes in which they joyfully indulged, that some of us could only aspire to. But even as we ran heedless, headlong and helter-skelter toward the dangling carrot of a bright, promising future, the rag-tag specter of death, unbeknownst to our more youthful incarnations, was nipping at our callow heels.

While my heart aches, my head knows better. In the early ’80s, Patient 0, himself unaware of the repercussions, penned and posted those poison chain letters—HIV and AIDS—and, like any other tragedy that defines a generation, tolled a bell that cannot be un-rung.

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